One does not need to be a disciple of Freudianism to understand that no experience leaves a memory so ineradicable as does almost any really moving affair of the heart. The dear friend of girlhood or boyhood may be quite forgotten, the confrontation of death itself, or the missing of some entrance into a greater life may be lost in the closed chambers of the past, but the soul is still haunted so long as life lasts by the memories of the love-affairs of long ago. You, madam, have never told your husband or your children about it; but you still feel a strange thrill when you remember the handsome boy who went away from you leaving you broken-hearted long, long ago, when you wore short dresses, and in the opinions of your friends, had no thought save for your books and music lessons and games.

He never uttered a word of love to you; but the clasp of his hand had something significant about it, and his beautiful eyes looked volumes into yours just before they lowered in that modesty which, when a boy still possesses it, is something more impassible than that of a girl. Save in your dreams, he never kissed you; his arm never stole about your waist; he never pressed you to his bosom. There was nothing between you — nothing but that which will last till the day of your death. You know just how blue his eyes were. You never confuse those skyey orbs with the hazel ones of the other young man, who also went away after he had made love to you — went away and never came back. No woman has better loved her husband — and the children: you can not imagine their having any other father; but neither husband nor children have any idea of these ghosts — beautiful ghosts which haunt the quiet halls of your soul and fill them with a music that is just sad enough to give you a strange pleasure. You have met one or two of these ghosts in the flesh, you remember; and you desire no more meetings of the sort. That beefy business man who was the Harold of the brown hair — he came and succeeded in taking from you one of the dearest ghosts in the castle!

And you, sir, as you sit on the lounge at the club grumbling at the way your putting has gone to pieces, and proud of the wife who has just called up to say that she will stop for you with the car at five-thirty to take you home to dress for the dinner at the Smiths' — you sometimes think, in a way that would astonish that wife, of the girl with the olive complexion and the eyes of oriental mystery at whom, whenever opportunity served, you gazed for a whole year while you were trying to coax on your beard to twenty spear. You never even spoke to her, but you still remember, you old fool! the glance she gave you — the long, long glance — that day when you recited so well. Well, why try to forget even ten seconds of the most hopeless bliss in a lifetime? And that red-haired girl who married the president of the street-railway company — she who kissed you so sweetly when you helped her out of the boat, (what was her name?) — though there were only a few bushes between you and observation in the light of the full moon — and then the railway man took her. The maiden of thirty, too, who laid her head in your lap and talked poetry to you when you were seventeen — the minx! She was just trying an experiment on you, and ought to have been ashamed of herself, and you know it — but when did you throw away that lock of hair — that hair so brown and silky, even if she was thirty to your seventeen? And do you remember how furious you were when members of your family spoke things a little derogatory to her reputation? She anything but an angel in human form? You went wild at the mere whisper of it — but you did not behave wildly. You kept your secret and retained your ghost along with the damsel with the oriental eyes, and the red-haired girl — until you saw her the other day backing out of a car because she was too amplitudinous to alight in any other way. This exorcised her.

Sometime I am going to read that play of Ibsen's to see whether he has not anticipated me in these remarks — to the effect that every mind is haunted by ghosts which are visible to the mind and to no one else; that the ones which last longest are those of the heroes and heroines of abortive romances; and that if some people but knew about these apparitions, they would be astonished, even though possessed by similar ghostly properties themselves.

Herbert Quick, The Invisible Woman
Copyright © 1924 by Herbert Quick. All rights reserved.

Posted 2 June 1999

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