future will be able to tell us. But be sure they are quite as
detestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy, as any of the
mistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as _absolute_
wisdom.
Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever
an infinite field for mistakes. You can't know beforehand.
So Alvina refrained from pondering on her mother's life and fate.
Whatever the fate of the mother, the fate of the daughter will be
otherwise. That is organically inevitable. The business of the
daughter is with her own fate, not with her mother's.
Miss Frost however meditated bitterly on the fate of the poor dead
woman. Bitterly she brooded on the lot of woman. Here was Clariss
Houghton, married, and a mother--and dead. What a life! Who was
responsible? James Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have done
differently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebody
else, and not himself. Which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of
idealism. The universe should be something else, and not what it is:
so the nonsense of idealistic conclusion. The cat should not catch
the mouse, the mouse should not nibble holes in the table-cloth, and
so on and so on, in the House that Jack Built.
But Miss Frost sat by the dead in grief and despair. This was the
end of another woman's life: such an end! Poor Clariss: guilty
James.
Yet why? Why was James more guilty than Clariss? Is the only aim and
end of a man's life, to make some woman, or parcel of women, happy?
Why? Why should anybody expect to be _made happy_, and develop
heart-disease if she isn't? Surely Clariss' heart-disease was a more
emphatic sign of obstinate self-importance than ever James'
shop-windows were. She expected to be _made happy_. Every woman in
Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made
unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all
and end-all of life doesn't lie in feminine happiness--or in any
happiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet--he won't be happy
till he gets it, and when he's got it, the precious baby, it'll cost
him his eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a
mankind howling because it isn't happy: like a baby in the bath!
Poor Clariss, however, was dead--and if she had developed
heart-disease because she wasn't happy, well, she had died of her
own heart-disease, poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankind
can wish to draw.
Miss Frost wept in anguish, and saw nothing but another woman
betrayed to sorrow and a slow death. Sorrow and a slow death,
because a man had married her. Miss Frost wept also for herself, for
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