New Oregon plaindealer. (New Oregon, Iowa) 1859-1866, 1859-09-03

heroine eliminates. For what are wo-
men born but to be married! Old maids
are excrescences in the social systcm,-
disagreeable utilities, es,--persons who have
failed to fulfill their destiny,-and of
whom it should have been said, rather
than of ghosts, that they are always in
the wrong. But life, with pertinacious
facts, is too apt to transcend custom and
the usage Of noyel-writers; and though
the one brings woman's legal existence
to an end when she merges her independ-
ence in that of woman, and the other
curtails her historic existence at the same
point, because the novelist's catechism
hath for its preface this creed,-sIhe
chief end Of woman is to get married."
still, neither law nor novelists altogether
displace this same persistent fact, and a
woman lives, in all capacities of suffering
and happiness, not only wanted, but
double life, when legally and religiously
she binds herself with bond and VOW to
another soul. :~s1@ %iSH a. ,a"@1am
Happy would it have been for Hitty
Hyde, if with the legal fiction had Chin
ed the actul existent fact!-happy indeed
for Abner Dimock's wife to have laid her
new Joy down at the altar, and been car
ried to sleep by her mother under the
mulleins and golden-rods on Greenfield
Hill! Scarce was the allotted period of
rapture past half its term, scarce had she
learned to praise the tender words aloud
that her heart beat and choked with, be-
fore Abner Dimock began to tire of his
incumbrance, and to event plans and ex-
cuses for absence; for he dared not OPEN
ly declare as yet that he left his patient,
innocent wife for such scenes of vice and
reckless dissipation as she had not even
dreamed could exist. .-.-r. .r.r4 s.......
Yet for week after week he fingered
away from Greenfield; even months roll.
ed by, and, except for rare and brief WIS.,
it's home, Hitty saw no more of her hus-
band than if he were not hers. She laps.
cd into her old solitude, varied only by
the mutterings and grumblings of old
keery, who had liftedup her voice against
Hitty's marriage with more noise and less
effect than Mrs. Perkins, and, though
she still staid by her old home and haunts,
revenged herself on fate in general and
her mistress in particular by continual
course Of sulking, all the time hiding un-
der this general quarrel with life heart
that ached with the purest tenderness and
pity. So some people are made, like
chestnuts; one gets SO scratched and
wounded in the mere attempt to get at
the kernel within, that it becomes matter
of question whether one does not suffer
less from wanting their affection than
from trying to obtain it. Yet Hitty
Dimock had to little love given her to
throw away even Kecry's habit of kind
ness to her, and bore with her snaps and
snarls as meekly as saint, sustained,
it is true, by a hope that now began to
solace and to occupy her, and to raise in
her oppressed soul some glimmer Of a
bright possibility, faint expectation that
she might yet regain her husbands love,
a passion which she began in her secret
heart to fear had found its limit and died
out Still, Hitty, out Of her meek, self
distrusting spirit, never blamed Abner
Dimock for his absence of his coldness;
rather, with the divine unselfshness that
such women manifest, did she blame her.
self for having linked his handsome and
athletic prime with her faded age, and
struggle daily with the morbid conscience
that accused her of having forgotten his
best good in the indulgence of: her own
selfish ends Of happiness. She still
thought, sHe is 50 good to me!'' still ide-
allied the villain to hero, and, like her
kind, predestined to be the prey and the
accusing angel of such men, prayed for
and adored her husband as if he had been
the best and tenderest of gentlemen
Providence has its mysteries; but if there
be one that taxes faith and staggers pa
tience more than another, it is the long
IL. :. 4 = i z- =