"
"Listen to me patiently, Lucian, and I will try to explain the
mystery to you, leaving the rest of the world to misunderstand me as
it pleases. First, you will grant me that even a phoenix must marry
some one in order that she may hand on her torch to her children.
Her best course would be to marry another phoenix; but as she--poor
girl!--cannot appreciate even her own phoenixity, much less that of
another, she must perforce be content with a mere mortal. Who is the
mortal to be? Not her cousin Lucian; for rising young politicians
must have helpful wives, with feminine politics and powers of
visiting and entertaining; a description inapplicable to the
phoenix. Not, as you just now suggested, a man of letters. The
phoenix has had her share of playing helpmeet to a man of letters,
and does not care to repeat that experience. She is sick to death of
the morbid introspection and womanish self-consciousness of poets,
novelists, and their like. As to artists, all the good ones are
married; and ever since the rest have been able to read in hundreds
of books that they are the most gifted and godlike of men, they are
become almost as intolerable as their literary flatterers. No,
Lucian, the phoenix has paid her debt to literature and art by the
toil of her childhood.
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