Miss Louisa, at home in the dingy vicarage, had suffered a great deal
over her sister’s wedding. Having once begun to cry out against it,
during the engagement, she had been silenced by Mary’s quiet: “I don’t
agree with you about him, Louisa, I _want_ to marry him.” Then Miss
Louisa had been angry deep in her heart, and therefore silent. This
dangerous state started the change in her. Her own revulsion made her
recoil from the hitherto undoubted Mary.
“I’d beg the streets barefoot first,” said Miss Louisa, thinking of Mr
Massy.
But evidently Mary could perform a different heroism. So she, Louisa
the practical, suddenly felt that Mary, her ideal, was questionable
after all. How could she be pure—one cannot be dirty in act and
spiritual in being. Louisa distrusted Mary’s high spirituality. It was
no longer genuine for her. And if Mary were spiritual and misguided,
why did not her father protect her? Because of the money. He disliked
the whole affair, but he backed away, because of the money. And the
mother frankly did not care: her daughters could do as they liked. Her
mother’s pronouncement:
“Whatever happens to _him_, Mary is safe for life,”—so evidently and
shallowly a calculation, incensed Louisa.
“I’d rather be safe in the workhouse,” she cried.
“Your father will see to that,” replied her mother brutally. This
speech, in its indirectness, so injured Miss Louisa that she hated her
mother deep, deep in her heart, and almost hated herself. It was a long
time resolving itself out, this hate. But it worked and worked, and at
last the young woman said:
“They are wrong—they are all wrong. They have ground out their souls
for what isn’t worth anything, and there isn’t a grain of love in them
anywhere. And I _will_ have love. They want us to deny it. They’ve
never found it, so they want to say it doesn’t exist. But I _will_ have
it. I _will_ love—it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry—that
is all I care about.”
So Miss Louisa stood isolated from everybody. She and Mary had parted
over Mr Massy. In Louisa’s eyes, Mary was degraded, married to Mr
Massy. She could not bear to think of her lofty, spiritual sister
degraded in the body like this. Mary was wrong, wrong, wrong: she was
not superior, she was flawed, incomplete. The two sisters stood apart.
They still loved each other, they would love each other as long as they
lived. But they had parted ways. A new solitariness came over the
obstinate Louisa, and her heavy jaw set stubbornly. She was going on
her own way. But which way? She was quite alone, with a blank world
before her. How could she be said to have any way? Yet she had her
fixed will to love, to have the man she loved.