"Meg," she said, "I want you never to do that again. I want you to understand once and for all that if things don't come naturally, it's because I believe that they oughtn't to come at all. If Frank cares for me as he says, he will care for me just as much at the end of a year, and I had rather wait and see."
I looked at her open-mouthed.
"I think you're a queer girl," I said at last. "I shouldn't have thought you wanted to punish yourself for the sake of putting a man to a test. But I suppose I don't understand. That's the sort of way mother talks, and I know it's very wise, and all that; but, dear me, I think it's all stuff wanting to sit down and wait till the wave comes over you. I'm sure that if I wanted a thing very badly I should love to fight for it—I should have to fight for it."
Joyce sighed a little sigh, and sat down by the window, looking out into the deepening twilight.
It was close upon midsummer, and the evenings were exquisitely long and luminous, the twilight stretching almost across to the dawn. After the heat of the day, lovely soft gray mists rose in transparent sheets off the marsh below us, and floated upward towards the hill. It was not a thick fog, as it had been the night before, but just a ghostly veil thrown across the land, above which lights twinkled amid dark houses on the distant hill. There was not a breath of wind, and in the silence the lapping of the sea came faintly to our ear. Joyce looked out into the mist.
"Of course," continued I after a while, "I'm not engaged to a man, and so I don't know what I should do if I were."
"I think you would do what you do in other matters," answered Joyce. "I think you would try very hard to get your own way. But then you and I are not alike."
No, we were not alike, I felt that. And I supposed that my sister was right, and that the only difference lay in my being more obstinate.
"I don't think that a woman ought to fight to have her own way," added she, in a low voice.
I considered a moment before I understood what she meant. "Do you mean to say that if any one fights, it ought to be the man?" asked I. "Well, you are an unreasonable girl! Good gracious me! When Frank lifts a finger you are angry with him."