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But, after all, if the old lady and Miss Skipwith were both happy in their harmless self-deceptions, why should one pity them? The creature to be pitied is the man or woman who keenly sees and feels the hard realities of life, and cannot take pleasure in phantoms. Vixen ran off to her room to get her hat and gloves, delighted to find herself free.
F. W. Myers prognosticates in his admirable essay on "The Disillusionment of France," all this and much more makes it our interest, if not our duty, to cling to such convictions at all costs. "If these things are not true, it might be said, then life is chaos; and if life be chaos, what does truth matter? Why may not such useful illusions and self-deceptions be fostered?
Since Thyrza's engagement to Gilbert, there was no longer need of subtle self-deceptions, but, though she might now freely think of him, Lydia soon found that Ackroyd was not the same in her eyes. The first rumours of his abandonment to vulgar dissipation she utterly refused to credit, but before long she had to believe them in spite of herself.
Belief had been denied to her; and to dream of consolation from religion was sentimentally womanish; even in her indifference she preferred straightforward, honest damnation to the soft self-deceptions of feminine religiosity. Ah!
She was this toward her child and she was also more than this: by the fiction created by herself, he was become her master; the necessity of recognizing this relation outwardly and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express the recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in practicing these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into habit; it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result followed: deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew practically into self-deceptions as well; the mock reverence became real reverence, the mock homage real homage; the little counterfeit rift of separation between imitation-slave and imitation-master widened and widened, and became an abyss, and a very real one and on one side of it stood Roxy, the dupe of her own deceptions, and on the other stood her child, no longer a usurper to her, but her accepted and recognized master.
Extract from a letter written after her death by a former pupil: "I count Maria Mitchell's services to Vassar and her pupils infinitely valuable, and her character and attainments great beyond anything that has yet been told.... I was one of the pupils upon whom her freedom from all the shams and self-deceptions made an impression that elevated my whole standard, mental and moral.... The influence of her own personal character sustains its supreme test in the evidence constantly accumulating, that it strengthens rather than weakens with the lapse of time.
Dewsbury's how great an impression she produced upon him; and, having taught herself that it was every true woman's duty to avoid the affectations and self-deceptions which the rule of man has begotten in women, she didn't try to conceal from herself the fact that she on her side was by no means without interest in the question how soon he would pay her his promised visit.
The position would doubtless have been acceptable to a man who never amid his many self-deceptions affected to deny that he was ambitious: and who can say what might not have resulted for Greece, had the poet lived to add lustre to her crown?
Life was no jest and no holiday, it was no place for shams and self-deceptions. It was a place where cruel enemies set traps for the unwary; a field where blind and merciless forces ranged, unhindered by man or God. Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to him.
Living with a perfectly conventional family, she adopted not only the forms of their faith in which she had, of course, no choice but at length the habit of their minds; with a profound sense of solace, she avowed her self-deceptions, and became what nature willed her to be a daughter of the Church.
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