IN the third night Emily had ten hours of the sleep of exhausted youth. She awoke in the mood of the brilliant July morning which was sending sunshine and song and the odour of honeysuckles through the rifts in the lattices of her shutters. She was restored to her normal self. She was able to examine her affairs calmly in the light of her keen and courageous mind.
Ever since she had been old enough to be of active use, she had had the training of responsibility—responsibility not only for herself, but also for her mother and the household. She had had the duties of both woman and man forced upon her and so had developed capacity and self-reliance. She had read and experienced and thought perhaps beyond the average for girls of her age and breeding. Undoubtedly she had read and thought more than most girls who are, or fancy they are, physically attractive. Her father’s caustic contempt for shallow culture, for ignorance thinly disguised by good manners, had been his one strong influence on her.
“All my own fault,” she was saying to herself now, as she lay propped on her elbow among her pillows. “It was a base plan, unworthy of me. I ought to be glad that the punishment was not worse. The only creditable thing about it is that I played the game so badly that I lost.” And then she smiled, wondering how much of her new virtue was real and how much was mere making the best of a disastrous defeat.
Why had she lost? What was the false move? She could not answer, but she felt that it was through ignorance of some trick which a worse woman would have known.
“Never again, never again,” she thought, “will I take that road. What I get I must get by direct means. Either I’m not crafty enough or not mean enough to win in the other way.”
She was singing as she went downstairs to join her aunt. The old woman, her father’s sister who had never married, was knitting in the shady corner of the front porch, screened from the sun by a great overhanging tree, and from the drive and the road beyond, by the curtain of honeysuckles and climbing roses. As Emily came into view, she dropped the knitting and looked at her with disapproval upon her thin old face.
“But why, auntie?” said the girl, answering the look. “I feel like singing. I feel so young and well and—hopeful. You don’t wish me to play the hypocrite and look glum and sad? Besides, the battle must begin soon, and good spirits may be half of it.”
Her aunt sighed and looked at her with the unoffending pity of sympathy. “Perhaps you’re right, Emmy,” she said. “God knows, life is cruel enough without our fighting to prolong its miseries. And it does seem as if you’d had more than your share of them thus far.” She was admiring her beautiful niece and thinking how ill that fragile fineness seemed fitted for the struggle which there seemed no way of averting. “You’re almost twenty-one,” she said aloud. “You ought to have had a good husband and everything you wanted by this time.”
Emily winced at this unconscious stab into the unhealed wound. “Isn’t there anything in life for a woman on her own account?” she asked impatiently. “Is her only hope through some man? Isn’t it possible for her to make her own happiness, work out her own salvation? Must she wait until a man condescends to ask her to marry him?”
“I’d like to say no,” replied her aunt, “but I can’t. As the world is made now, a woman’s happiness comes through home and children. And that means a husband. Even if her idea of happiness were not home and children, still she’s got to have a husband.”
“But why? Why do you say ‘as the world is made now?’ Aren’t there thousands, tens of thousands of women who make their own lives, working in all sorts of ways—from teaching school to practising medicine or law or writing or acting?”
“Yes—but they’re still only women. They may lie about it. But with a few exceptions, abnormal women, who are hardly women at all, they’re simply filling a gap in their lives—perhaps trying to find husbands in unusual ways. Everybody must have an object, to be in the least happy. And children is the object the world has fixed for us women. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we pursue it. And if we’re thwarted in it, we’re—well, we’re not happy.”
The old woman was staring out sadly into space. The cheerfulness had faded from the girl’s face. But presently she shook her head defiantly and broke the silence.
“I refuse to believe it,” she said with energy. “Oh, I don’t deny that I feel just as you describe. And why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we all? Aren’t we brought up that way? Are we ever taught anything else? It’s the way women have been trained from the beginning. But—that doesn’t make it so.”
“No, it doesn’t,” replied her aunt. “And probably it isn’t so. But don’t make the mistake, child, of thinking that the world is run on a basis of what’s so. It isn’t. It’s run on a basis of think-so and believe-so and hope-so.”
Emily stood up beside her aunt and looked out absently through the leaves. “I don’t care what any one says or what every one says,” she said. “I don’t say that I don’t want love and home and all that. I do want it. But I think I want it as a man wants it. I want it as my very own, not as the property of some man which he graciously or grudgingly permits me to share. And I purpose to try to make my own life. If I marry, it will be as a man marries—when I’m pleased and not before. No, don’t look frightened, auntie. I’m not going to do anything shocking. I understand that the game must be played according to the rules, or one is likely to be excluded.”
“Well, you’ve got to make your living—at least for the present,” replied her aunt. “And it doesn’t matter much what your theory is. The question is, what can you do; and if you can do something, how are you to get the chance to do it. I can’t advise you. I’m only a useless old maid—waiting in a corner for death, already forgotten.”
Emily put on an expression of amused disbelief that was more flattering than true, and full of vague but potent consolation. “I don’t think I need advice,” she said, “so much as I need courage. And there you can help me, auntie dear—can, and will.”
“I?” The old woman was pleased and touched. “What can I say or do? I can only tell you what you already know—though I must say I didn’t when I was your age—can only tell you that there’s nothing to be afraid of in all this wide world except false pride.”
She looked thoughtfully at her knitting, then anxiously at the resolute face of her niece. “In our country,” she went on, “it’s been certain from the start, it seems to me, that what you’ve been saying would be the gospel of the women as well as of the men. But it takes women a long time to get over false pride. You are going to be a working-woman. If only you can see that all honest work is honourable! If only you can remember that your life must be made by yourself, that to look timidly at others and dread what they will say about you is cowardly and contemptible! How I wish I had your chance! How I wish I’d had the courage to take my own chance!”