MARY spent the next day reading _The Shareholder's Guide to Company
Law_. She did not remember much of it when she had finished, but her
aversion to James's proposals had increased. Once she had sold her part
of the business in return for money or shares in the new company she
would not be able to do anything--if she had read the book
aright--without standing up at a General Meeting and delivering a
speech. Of that, she felt, she was incapable. There would be not only
James to fight, but the new shareholders. She pictured them as stout
hard men who would laugh loudly at her. For a few moments she held this
pleasant little nightmare in her mind and it decided her. Well then, she
must not give way to James, she must refuse to sell.
It was easy in her queer, gaily coloured flat to feel capable of such
defiance. It was less easy to think coherently about what James would
say. With the thought of him and his offences her mind became confused.
She could not envisage him calmly, she could not forget how different he
was from the James whom she had loved. She decided that she was not
prepared to consider him, and until the evening she put him, as far as
she was able, out of her mind.
In the evening a large envelope came from the bank. It bore Trent's
writing, and she opened it fearfully to find nothing inside it but some
letters and the post-card from Rosemary. Rosemary, in Italy, was having
lovely weather and getting on splendidly--as Mary put the post-card down
she felt a kindlier feeling towards James. It was generous of him to
have sent on her letters. It occurred to her suddenly that with all his
faults James had always been generous to her, and often sympathetic.
Whatever credit was due to him for that he still deserved--the fact that
one is deceiving a person does not make it easier to sympathise with
them.
Next day when she awoke in her room,--Chinese blue, sea-green, and
indigo, not the colours she would herself have chosen for a bedroom, but
stimulating in the early morning,--she came to the conclusion that she
had been a little unjust to James. She had taken it for granted that
ever since his fall his whole relation with her had been built up of
fraud and hypocrisy. Now she could see that she had certainly been
wrong. For a month or two James must have suffered from a waning
uneasiness, after that he had probably taken his guilt for granted. If
he had been kind to her it had been because he was naturally kind. She
need not feel that she had been insulted by every different instance of
his affection.
She was astonished with herself now for not having understood this
before. She had made the discovery of his fault, she reflected, at an
unfortunate moment. The more she thought of it, the more sure she felt
that James had not let his adventure alter his affection for his wife.
The different planes of James's being were unconnected, his mind was not
logical. She reminded herself that she had not lived with him for
twenty-seven years without getting a glimpse of his attitude towards his
business. The business--she turned over restlessly--the business was a
problem less easy of solution. For James's infidelity she had simply to
forgive him, and within a week he would have forgotten it. But his
business was his life.
She must, she told herself, be more energetic. She must not trust to the
chance thoughts of the moment. She must sit down on the red and orange
sofa, absurd as it might seem, and make herself think, or she would find
herself sliding into some plausible position that had no solid reasoning
to support it. And by and by she would need solid reasoning--when it
came to explaining her conclusions to James. If she could not think yet,
she could read, and read she must.
As she became more intimately acquainted, in the week that followed,
with what the London Library could tell her of our industrial system,
she found her conception of her problem alter. She could laugh now, a
little drearily, at the thought of James heading a band of willing but
ignorant employers. The facts she learned now were not different in kind
from the facts she had known when she invented that pleasing legend, but
her attitude towards them was changed. She had not to fit them into her
ideal notion of James. Not that he, in this new light, appeared any more
a harsh or dishonest man than the majority of the gentlemen who direct
the creation of our country's wealth. In some ways, indeed, he seemed
even better than they. He might treat his employees badly, but he did
not cheat the public. To Mary, that seemed, on the whole, the lesser
virtue, but she recognised that to James it might fairly be a cause for
pride.
James did not consider himself a cruel employer, and he did not consider
himself, either, a hypocrite or a man of loose morals. He seemed to
himself, as he seemed to other men, a generous and honourable person. To
her, and by her standards, on the contrary, he did not seem so, and the
world respected her standards too. She was a good woman, with a good
woman's point of view. The world does not like to see a woman uphold
immorality, or starve her servants in order to make money. Nevertheless,
when James did these things, she was bound, according to the world's
judgment, to forgive him, or give way to him, as the case might be. Men
praised her stricter standard as long as she applied it to nobody but
herself.
For a moment of one darkening winter's afternoon it seemed to Mary that
men stood before her, stripped of all but their wickedness, as they
might have stood before Miss Percival. Men's chief demand of women was
that they should be pleasing when men had time to think of them and
quiet when men had not; to this end then women were to keep themselves
busy practising a morality too exacting for men themselves. It would be
a sad world without virtue, therefore let others be virtuous--from a
business point of view an excellent argument. The poor lady paced her
room in the painful agitation of one who discovers that he has played
the part of a dupe.
But she could not believe, for long, that the whole fabric of her morals
had been raised in obedience to a conspiracy. She was not virtuous,
after all, because men imposed virtue on her. She had never wanted to be
anything else. She could not bear, knowingly, to treat people cruelly,
and as for sex, one husband and one family had occupied her fully. She
was free now, but the life that was left to her could hardly be troubled
by any such adventures. James, on the other hand, had not been so
quietly content with virtue. She remembered now, though she had not
attended to it at the time, a long defence that James had tried to make.
She, he had said, had never attended to what he wanted, had never known
or cared. She had merely assumed that his wants were like her own.
It was growing dark, and the city below her great leaded window showed
black and yellow. She stopped her pacing to turn on the light, for she
needed in her confusion the gay reassurance of the beautiful room. The
light that collected its shining colours seemed to illumine her
distress, making it less formidable, though not yet, alas, more clear.
She sat down in one of the painted chairs and smoothed the habitual grey
silk that covered her knees. She was trying to remember what it was that
James had said. He had said that lies--the lies he had told her--were
the price he had had to pay for her comfort of mind and ignorance of
evil--something to that purpose, at any rate, her memory was not exact.
That, of course, when she thought it over, fitted in very well as part
of the theory. Virtue and innocence are artificial, to be preserved only
by ignorance of the world. Women, therefore, if they remain virtuous,
must sympathise with men's temptations while carefully refusing to
understand them. A man cannot help being tempted--that had been the
burden of James's excuse--and there may come a point, of course, when he
is but human. A woman, on the other hand, presumably can, since no
temptation must be too strong for her. A good woman, obviously, is not
tempted; if she felt the desires of men she would be, at heart, a wicked
woman, not the sort of woman that James would have cared to marry. So he
had married a good woman, and her goodness had gone to make things hard
for him.
Mary, who detested cynicism, was dismayed by these thoughts.
Roughly, though, she told herself, they were true. James had certainly
liked her to be the type of woman she was. He loved her for it, he
preferred her even to his less ignorant though equally virtuous
daughters. Mary wondered what Rosemary thought of it all. Mary, at
Rosemary's age, had thought of nothing--Rosemary had probably reduced
the whole thing to a theory. She had certainly horrified James on one
occasion by saying that our divorce laws are scandalous; probably she
believed in free love, whatever that might be--it was not a thing that
Mary had ever pictured to herself. Fortunately it was not of much
importance what Rosemary believed--she was a dear, good girl under all
her modernity and could be trusted not to act on her convictions.
Mary had hardly had time to take comfort from this reassurance when a
new possibility occurred to her. Supposing--impossible though it
was--that Rosemary could not be trusted! Supposing she behaved exactly
as James had done, that she became the mistress of another man after her
marriage without telling Anthony. From one point of view the cases were
parallel--whatever codes the world might accept for a man, Mary would
never have married James if she had thought that he was free to deceive
her. What would James have said to that?--her lip curled at the thought
of his hypocritical horror; it was only afterwards that she asked
herself what her own attitude would have been. Deceit, of course, is
always terrible, there can be no doubt of it, but she couldn't doubt,
either, that she would have forgiven Rosemary. She would have forgiven
her and she would have thought Anthony a brute if he had not forgiven
her too. She would have advised Rosemary, as a matter of course, to tell
Anthony--well, James had told her. He had told her when he might have
lied to her. She would not have believed him, but she could hardly have
insisted against his denial. Unwillingly she faced a further
question--would she have counselled Rosemary to tell Tony if she knew
beforehand that he would not forgive? Might not she have said, even
though she knew it was wrong, "It's all over my dear, you must think of
the future now, and not of the past?" Tony, of course, might have
divorced Rosemary--and she had run away from James.
She jumped up and went over to the window--"Very well then, very well
then," her thoughts ran, "but where is your standard? Where is the basis
of your judgments? How can you say, in the face of this, that you have
not been cruel? What would you think if Anthony treated your daughter as
you have treated James!"
Mary sat down again on the low window-ledge and looked out into the
darkness. Far below her lights were moving in the cleft of the narrow
street. She did not see them, or London that lay spread out towards the
east. Where was her standard then, how could she decide? It had seemed
easy enough to judge men and women, their virtues and their sins, but in
the narrow circle of her own life justice eluded her. She had been angry
with James; she had only thought of shielding Rosemary from an
irresponsible and cruel world. James, after all, she told herself in
excuse, was a man, a master of life. Men had made the world to please
themselves, James should not have needed her protection from it. But
this argument was not very convincing. James had not created modern
morals: in such a sphere he was decidedly a person who took things as he
found them, and if that was a sin, she, until now, had sinned as well as
James.
She tried, for a short time, to reconcile her opposing points of view by
the discovery of some subtler, loftier moral rule into which they might
be harmoniously absorbed. She could not believe that she, a good woman,
a fair-minded woman, could ultimately treat so differently a husband who
sinned against her and a daughter who sinned against another person. It
was only reasonable, she told herself, to assume that some reconciling
system existed. This is not, after all, the first century of man's
sojourn on the earth, nor his first attempt at building a civilisation.
Somewhere the wisdom of the ages must have evolved a rational and
merciful attitude towards human sin.
Mary searched her experience for this attitude but she did not find it.
Her acquaintances, on the whole, went no nearer to discussion of the
matter than scandal, and Mary was not able, looking back, to find any
ethical system beneath their judgments. They forgave the people they
pitied and the people they feared--anyone, in fact, whom they wanted to
forgive--and they condemned the unfortunates whose affairs were
mentioned when they were in a mood for condemnation. The more she
thought of them, the more sure Mary felt that she could not have exposed
her daughter to their comments. She must find, she decided, some more
stable body of opinion, less tainted by laxity and recklessness of
thought.
She sought in all seriousness, only to be shocked by the perversity and
frivolity of her own mind. She knew very little about the ethics of
mankind, and the first really definite system that occurred to her was
that of the Mahommedans, who believe--she did not really know much about
the Mahommedans--that a man may do as he pleases, but a woman who sins
should be shut up in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. That came
pretty near on the whole, she concluded, thinking it over, to our own
English practice, though perhaps, since it was more drastic, it might be
more effective in securing womanly virtue, but she did find herself able
to accept it on that account. Then there were the Puritans--she could
fairly take them as representing the theory of good people to-day.
Anyone who disobeys the moral precepts of the English churches should,
if not executed at once, be punished and made miserable for the rest of
his life. There was something to be said for such a stringency, if only
it could be enforced--Mary wished she knew more of the state of morals
under the Ironsides and Oliver Cromwell. If we all really believed that,
she wondered, so that all virtuous or cowardly or prudent people acted
upon it, would the world be the richer for the triumph of their hatred
and contempt? Would the groans of its backsliders be truly edifying?
Then she stopped herself. She was being unfair again. The churches were
always ready to rejoice over the sinner who repented--was it repentance,
then, that she must ask alike of James and Rosemary before she forgave
them and hid their wickedness from the eyes of the world?
For a moment she thought that she had found what she was seeking, then
her spirits sank. How could anybody possibly tell whether James had
repented or not? He would say that he had repented--he would even
believe it--but what would he mean more than that he could not bear to
see his Mary unhappy and did not intend, if he could help it, to hurt
her again? James was not a man who ever repented, he merely put
provoking matters out of his mind. And she could not imagine him
comforted, either, by the rejoicings of the Churches.
For the first time she felt fully the deficiencies of her early
education. She did not even know what her parents had learned from their
lives--her mother, of course, had been a really nice woman, but her
father must have held views of some sort upon so important a question.
She had always thought of him as ennobled and distinguished by the
breadth and the abundance of his views.... It was not long before, from
the dim confusion of the past, a memory of her father came back to her.
It had been an accepted fact that Mary never understood any sentences
that she might overhear as she passed the half-open door of Mr. Trent's
study, and since she was a modest and loyal girl she had not understood
them, but now she remembered clearly her father's thin, amiable voice
explaining to some friend whom she could not see that Christian morals
were the invention of astute and envious monks. Monks had no use for a
happy and virtuous people: they needed a race of sinners cowed by the
fear of hell. Otherwise what place was there for the Church's
ministrations?
She did not believe that this could be true, she deplored the accident
that had presented her with such an example of her dear father's
thoughts, but that a good clever man like him could believe such
terrible things seemed to show that the whole question must be in
confusion. She did not suppose, in that case, that she was likely to
solve it. If everyone were alike, to begin with, and everyone could
marry, and marry young, and all marriages turned out happily, then there
would be something to go upon. But as it was she did not find in her own
thoughts the least germ of a solution.
She did find, however, a growing shame at her own harshness, a
realisation of her own ignorance. It was not only Cromwell and the Turks
about whom she knew nothing. She knew nothing of modern men, or modern
life, she did not know the force or the nature of love, or what place
there is left for it in a driven and burdened world. She did not even
know why her own husband had deceived her. And she did not believe that
she would ever know. Now that she was released from the strain of her
wrath against James, from the rigidity of her injured virtue, she
decided, with an immense relief, that she might put the whole matter
from her mind. Rosemary and her friends might study things of this sort,
might draw their conclusions from evidence that to Mary was
unimaginable. Rosemary was a modern woman, fearless of truth. To Mary
truth was less than reticence. She could not, she realised, discuss such
subjects frankly, even with herself. It was her duty, therefore, since
she shrank from the knowledge without which judgment is only prejudice,
to admit her own ignorance and be merciful. She saw now that James, even
while he deceived her, had not been a monster but a human being, acting
as human beings act--because they are kind, because they are afraid,
because the small words and deeds of everyday life have made a chain for
them. There was no need for her to be angry with James. The existing
state of affairs might permit him, though he was her husband, to sin,
but it had also enabled James to give his wife twenty-seven years of
happiness and freedom from care. In all those years she had not bought
her right to be angry with him by a single sacrifice, or a single
protest. To keep her happiness intact James had disabled his clerks from
marrying and driven his girls on to the streets. She had not even cared
to find out that this was so. And when, at last, she had known, she had
not acted. She had argued a little with James, and then given way. When
her ignorance had disappeared she had found another method, wifely
obedience, of shutting out the thought of suffering. In the beginning,
she remembered, she had not wished to follow James's suggestion because
she had been afraid that he and Trent might come to think badly of her.
They had thought badly--and she had been terrified. The girls might be
crippled by standing or die of consumption, but she, whose profits they
made, must keep James's good opinion. Let James deceive her, however,
let him give another woman a little of the love and the money he had
promised her, and virtue gave her strength. She hated him, she was
furious with him, though she tried she could not forgive him--it had
been simple to forgive him his sins against others!
Her thoughts ran easily down the familiar channels of self-reproach.
About James's sin she had not been able to think either justly or
coherently--she had struggled in vain against the repulsion she felt for
such a subject. But now, when she had only to blame herself, the power
of her mind came quickly back to her.
She could not doubt, she decided now, that in the matter of the girls
she was more to blame than James. His attitude, that had seemed to her
so callous, was due she thought now to a fact beyond his control, the
fact of his being a man. For men, after all, are not like women. They
have different ideals and different standards of value. They do not
think as women do in terms of health and happiness, but in terms of
knowledge, of riches, of power. She checked herself and went through
that again--she must build up her argument carefully for she was dealing
now with unfamiliar notions. A clever man is more, she told herself,
than a person, a husband, a father, the centre of various personal
relations. He is the guardian, the vehicle, of an idea. He wants to
impose this idea of his on his environment, to work it out, to see it
take form; and for a man success in his career, in his chosen
enterprise, is justification. If he has no career and no ideas at all he
deceives himself, and makes himself hot and happy playing games.
He does not trouble to think--it is not his business to think whether
what he is doing serves the race or not. He wants to do something, and
do it better than other people, and have his friends congratulate him
and his womenfolk make a fuss about it. No--Mary pulled herself up--no,
that was unjust, she was letting herself lose touch with her real
thought! A man likes success, who doesn't?--and he likes a little
petting, particularly if one allows him to pretend that he despises it.
But in the end it is not petting that sways him. He has a need to
impress himself on the world that he finds outside him, an impulse that
drives him to achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth
of suffering and conflict. She must be very just, she told herself, she
must be serious, and not assume that little air of half-amused
toleration with which middle-aged women are apt to dismiss the
turbulence of men. She had often assumed it, in order perhaps, she
thought now, to save her temper, but this was not an occasion for its
use. For it is just by means of the qualities that are often so
irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their
disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men
have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation.
It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of
them--difficult, touchy creatures--busy with his personal ambitions,
that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art--one
can take men lightly, she told herself solemnly, to protect oneself from
annoyance, but one cannot take lightly the things that men have done.
Women, however--this was the thought that had stirred her to begin her
thinking--women are not divided by all these different aims. Their
single end, poor hampered things, is the service and the care of human
beings. Amid the magnificent confusion of man's conquests, in a world
whose riches and beauties man has turned to plunder, they do what they
can to love people, to feed them, to keep them healthy and happy.
It was exactly plunder that she meant--she told herself after a minute's
consideration--for what are women, after all, but mere camp-followers,
dragged up and down the world, allowed to exist and to carry out their
work in the interstices of man's enterprises, even permitted to enrich
themselves, if they can, by stealing a little here and there from the
vast accumulations of his loot, but without power to influence the
campaign, to choose the enemy, to choose the issue, even to decide the
order of the day's journey? It is no wonder, poor things, she thought,
forgiving them in advance, that with their children to rear and their
men to humour they have not been able to heal the wounds of these
preposterous battles, that in a land littered up with bricks, with iron,
with food, with stuffs, with books, with pictures, with tools and
machinery, with all the wealth that men--brilliant acquisitive
creatures--so love to produce, most of the people who live among these
riches are denied an access to knowledge and lack the simple necessities
of health. It is no wonder, but the point that she wanted--she made very
sure of it--is that this business that has not been done, this task of
distributing and administering, is not men's but women's work. Men care
for things, for their splendid complicated expensive things, women care
for the happiness that can be got from them. There are women, of course,
who don't, women like magpies, who have absorbed men's ideals without
doing the work that makes them honourable--she made the concession
hastily, for it suddenly occurred to her that hers would hardly be a
man's view of women--but after all one can put such people aside. In her
own life Mary had always put them aside, regarding them as the affair of
men and not of decent women. They were spoiled, poor things, and
doubtless not mainly by their own fault. There are men who prey on the
world, one can match the two sets of them against one another. To
protect the poor and the helpless is women's work, and if they neglect
the task there seems no reason--the London Library had not been
reassuring--to suppose that it will ever be properly done.
She turned back to her concrete example. James, for instance, had
conceived his business and brought it into being like a man. It was not
his fault that he had to build it according to the conditions of modern
commerce. It was not his fault that he had not a natural tenderness for
the girls' weak lungs, their flat feet, for the varicose veins
in their legs. A man like James was impatient of weakness and
stupidity,--impatient, therefore, of poverty and helplessness. His
workers were his material--his instruments--his troops; all men's games
have, after all, she supposed, an analogy to their great game of war.
Men enjoy a fight, they had rather get things by fighting, and when one
fights someone is sure to be hurt. No, these poor girls in the
restaurants were not James's charge, but hers, and she had neglected her
charge as idle women neglect it everywhere.
Mary reached this point in her thoughts with a certain satisfaction. The
matter was now quite settled in her mind. She did not so much believe
the conclusions she had come to as feel that this was her way of looking
at things. Others might look at them in a different way, but for her,
henceforth, that part of government that consists in helping the weak
and protecting them from the strong was to seem part of woman's general
task of clearing up after men. She understood now why James had not been
pleased when she tried to undertake her neglected duty. Man never is
pleased by the sight of woman's work. He hates having his study tidied,
he hates meeting the housemaid on the stairs, the primitive routine of
infant life makes no appeal to him. He does not like to think that his
wife could possibly clean a rabbit. It is not logical of him, but there
it is--in future she would not expect from James any glow of enthusiasm
over the details of her work, she would be content with his general pat
of appreciation when he found it properly done. Many a woman has been
content with less.
Nor was she dismayed, as well she might have been, by the inadequacy of
which she convicted her sex. We are all inadequate, and what she needed
was a reason for being inadequate no longer. She had found it, she was
delivered now, once and for all, from her doubt and her cowardice, from
her ridiculous dilemma of a virtuous person helpless in an evil world.
She had been, in her passive way, as evil as the world. She found the
reflection bracing.
It was not until the next afternoon, when she was taking her walk by the
river, that she began to wonder why she had been wicked and what were
her excuses. It was a sunny day, the people on the Embankment walked
cheerfully and the seagulls seemed to be enjoying themselves as they
screamed over her head. The cold bright air made her thoughts--she
imagined--unnaturally clear. She herself, of course, had been trustful
and ignorant, so had her mother been, her grandmother, and in her
grandmother's generation all really nice women. But women had not always
been ignorant--in the days when they gnawed bones and lived in caves
they must have possessed at least a rough practical knowledge of
everyday life. In the Middle Ages, too--that was the next period of
English history that came at all easily to her mind--James, a good
burgher, or perhaps a farmer, would have expected her to look after his
workers, after the maids, in any case, and the apprentices. She would,
she thought a little wistfully, have liked doing that! It would have
pleased her to plan and arrange for the big household, and have all
these girls and boys growing up round her and all their careers and love
affairs to watch over. And she would have liked to be a skilful woman
with half a dozen crafts at her finger-ends, a woman with legitimate
prides, with a reputation for this or that,--spinning, weaving,
preserving, baking,--all the things that James and his friends were
doing in factories. Even if her children had left her there would have
been her trades to carry on. And it would, too, she told herself, have
been very much more amusing for the children to grow up in such a
community than in an elegant and empty modern home. There were now no
interesting domestic crafts to watch, no apprentices to play with, no
population of maids or clerks or journeymen to distract the eye of the
mistress of the house. Instead, a strip of one side of a straight
street, servants one hardly spoke to tucked away in the dark, and dear
mother in the drawing-room never too busy to realise that the children
were not where they ought to be and were making too much noise. Of
course that was an advantage--Mary's loyalty stirred--a busy mother
cannot devote herself all day to her children. But memory was too strong
for loyalty--a busy mother has at least a certain intelligence at her
disposed. Mary's own dear mother had not been intelligent.
She left that part of the subject hastily--she did not wish to think ill
of her mother but she certainly had not succeeded with poor Julius. Mary
was fond of Julius, but nobody could admire his character.
She turned her thoughts, rather, to the reasons for this change. Men, of
course, had wanted to make fortunes out of women's industries, and with
their usual success they had invented machines that would do it. And
women, protesting probably, and being called fools for their pains, had
let them go. The workers had gone into the factories and it was not a
time when ladies could follow them there. Ladies, after all, were people
of no education, and the idea of their responsibility had not occurred
to them. Then, of course, there had been Napoleon. Mary had always
disliked Napoleon and she was pleased to attribute this extra blame to
him. He was a person, as she saw him, who had butchered the sons of a
million mothers without in any way making it up to women as a husband or
as the father of wonderful children. This Napoleon had looked upon women
in the way a man of his nature would--as trifles and possessions, and
the English nation had hastened to copy him. Only being Englishmen they
had grown sentimental and called their wives angels and shut them in
drawing-rooms. From their point of view, one must admit, it was a
pleasant arrangement. A woman with nothing to do all day would naturally
be ingratiating and affectionate in the evenings. And then of course
there had been the French Revolution--it was with both delight and
surprise that Mary recalled these historical facts. A year ago, she
felt, her thoughts would hardly have moved with such an easy boldness.
The French Revolution--ideas of equality were in the air--only in this
country we do not level down but up. The middle classes must have
enjoyed seeing their wives lead the life of a fine lady without, of
course--Mary thought of Lady Hester's mamma--a fine lady's idea of
herself or her challenging eye. It was all very natural. And then there
had been the Queen and her babies and her crinolines--one could not
expect women to be energetic with such a weight of cloth dragging at
their waists. So they had gone on indulging their husbands and making
them bad-tempered until by and by their children had revolted, and
now--she felt a little thrill of excitement--she was revolting too!
Well--she put it to herself--it was perfectly right and proper! They had
had a hundred years of drawing-rooms. And in spite of photographs and
Nottingham lace and new kinds of light and new-coloured dyes and stuffs
the rooms of a hundred years ago were probably prettier. It was no
wonder that they were tired of staying in them. She, at any rate, was
tired of hers. She was not a fine lady, she did not care for a fine
lady's life. She was an ordinary middle-class woman, who preferred doing
practical work to being kept in the house to be beautiful and mysterious
and tender and all the rest of it to any man with half an hour to spare.
She had reached the Vauxhall Bridge Road now, and she turned back. She
was surprised at the resentment that she discovered in herself when she
thought of this aspect of the life she had led. She and her personality
had simply been there to soothe them when they preferred her, as a
comforter, to their pipes! She knew that she had not seen the matter
like this before, and yet this was not, she felt convinced, a new
resentment. She must have disliked her position all along, if only she
had known it.
Well, there was no need to resent anything now, she was not poor Miss
Percival, she had finished with the cause of her anger. In future she
would have a life of her own, work of her own, and importance greater
than the importance of her smiles or of her sympathy. It would not be,
as a matter of fact, a question of smiles! For the first step towards
her new activity would be telling James about what she meant to do.
This thought made her walk a little faster, but walking faster did not
make the thought more pleasant. She would have to face an appalling
scene with James, and probably a great many scenes after that. He would
not give up his own way without a struggle. A fortnight ago, when she
still hated James, she would not very much have minded his scenes, but
now she had forgiven him, she had let herself feel fond of him again,
she had deliberately stirred up her gratitude! She almost wished that
she could take cover, just for the first impending interview, behind the
dislike that had protected her when she ran away. But she could not do
that--even on general grounds it is not right to dislike people if in
any way one can manage to make oneself like them. And she owed it to
James, moreover, to approach him in the kindest mood compatible with
firmness. She had caused him, by her behaviour, quite enough discomfort
and chagrin already. For the same reason she must not keep him waiting.
She must write to him as soon as she got home and tell him that she
meant to come back again.
She walked home without enjoying either the river or the sun.