This all looks promising, to my romantic mind; for the beginning of all
kinds of affection, physical, mental, and spiritual, that are huddled
together in varying proportions as component parts of love, has its
origin in dependence. Father declares independence, selfishness, and
aloofness to be the trinity of hell. Now Martin Cortright has come to
depend upon Lavinia Dorman's opinion, and she is beginning not only to
realize and enjoy his dependence, but to aid and abet it. Is not this
symptomatic?
When I approach father upon the Latham affair, he says that he thinks the
rupture was inevitable from the point of view and conditions that
existed. He feels, from the evidence that long experience with the inner
life of households has given him, that though a thoughtless woman may be
brought to realize, and a woman with really bad inherited instincts
reclaimed, through love, the wholly selfish woman of Mrs. Latham's type
remains immovable to word of God or man, and is unreachable, save through
the social code of the class that forms her world, and this code
sanctions both the marriage and the divorce of convenience, and receives
the results equally with open arms.
As to the effect upon Sylvia, father exhibits much concern, and no
little anxiety, for he has read her as a nature in some respects old for
her twenty-one years, and in others, the side of the feminine, wholly
young and unawakened, so that this jar, he thinks, comes at a most
critical moment.
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