THE DARK LADY
377
taste"? Moreover, as if to spare him further trouble, both females
fall in love not with him but with the fanatical reformer Hollings–
worth, who is a mere stick of a character, a travesty as a reformer
and even a worse travesty as a lover. The emotional economy of
this story is throughout one of displacement. It is evident on every
page that the only genuine relationship is that of Coverdale to
Zenobia; the rest is mystification. But the whole point of Cover–
dale's behavior is to avoid involvement. As Zenobia tells him in
one of the final bang-up scenes, his real game is "to
gr~pe
for
human emotions in the dark corners of the heart"-strictly in the
hearts of other people, to be sure. He plays perfectly the role of
the ideal Paul Pry that Hawthorne envisaged for himself in the
earlier passages of his journals.
Though vowing that he adores the ethereal Priscilla, Cover·
dale is nevertheless quite adept at belittling her by means of
invidious comparisons that strike home despite their seemingly
general reference. Some finicky people, he reflects after his first
encounter with Zenobia, might consider her wanting in softness
and delicacy, but the truth is that "we find enough of these attri–
butes everywhere; preferable ... was Zenobia's bloom, health,
and vigor, which she possessed in such overflow that a man might
well have fallen in love with her for their sake only." And again:
"We seldom meet with women nowadays, and in this country, who
impress us as being women at all;-their sex fades away and goes
for nothing . . . a certain warm and rich characteristic seems to
have been refined away out of the feminine system." Finally, in
view of these frequent digs at Prissy, there can be no doubt that
Westervelt, the villain of the piece, is really speaking for Cover–
dale when he describes her as "one of those delicate, young crea–
tures, not uncommon in New England, and whom I suppose to have
become what we find them by the gradual refining away of the
physical system among your women. Some philosophers choose to
glorify this habit of body by terming it spiritual; but in my opin–
ion, it is rather the effect of unwholesome food, bad air, lack of
outdoor exercise, and neglect of bathing, on the part of these dam–
sels and their female progenitors, all resulting in a kind of heredi–
tary
dyspepsia. Zenobia, with her uncomfortable surplus of vital–
ity, is far the better model of womanhood."
