_Wherein we are bewildered by the Cooings of Chivalry_
Betty, flung back again upon her own resources, realized that, for a
woman, there were two careers elaborately ordered by the deliberate
plan of the world--marriage or vice. For the rest, to woman had been
flung the slave-callings, the menial ends of professions, the ill-paid
jobs of the commerce of life. This shabby deed of gift was leprously
covered by an hypocrisy of Chivalry--which in practice largely worked
out as the courting, when it did not interfere with other pleasures, of
the young and comely women; the seizing and exploiting of the fortunes
of the middle-aged; and the neglect of the old and the unprepossessing.
For a while Betty was at her wits’ end to know how to earn the wage
of decency, when she again decided to apply to Netherby and ask him
to get her some literary hack-work; and Netherby, entrusting her with
a review or two of books, was delighted with the result, as was also
his editor. Betty felt thankful to be doing work that did not force
upon her the wading in personal humiliations; and this her new means
of breadwinning, small though it was, helped in its very exercise to
give her facility in the craftsmanship of her art--her hand thereby
increased its cunning, and literary expression became a confirmed
habit. She soon passed from the stage of seeking a style--the careful
and laborious picking out of the notes from the music of the instrument
and the placing them in telling harmonies, to the mastery of the whole
range and gamut of the instrument, when the music came resonant and
vivid in answer to the mood of her desire.
And she practised also the inevitable typewriter, taking bouts of work
upon occasion, to win a little bread or to help Julia to the winning.
Click-click-click went the deft fingers, spelling out into print the
ill-shaped grammar of the city.
She saw much of Julia in these days; and to Julia she brought
incalculable good--her cheerfulness and the gaiety and tenderness of
her sweet young womanhood gave to the narrow-shouldered half-starved
city girl a wholesome companionship that filled out her thin life
and enlarged her cockney vision. Julia inhaled the atmosphere of
good-breeding and of uncomplaining cheerful courage which was Betty’s
very breath; and she grew to infinite riches by sharing the golden
gifts that Betty had to give her.
Slave-castes mistake womanishness for womanliness. A true woman is
neither an idiot nor a man.
The girl Julia had lived her girlhood receptively feminine--courageous
in her defensive virtues. She was now roused to the positive virtues of
womanhood.