"Well then"—she ought to have seen his point before—"if your mother observes the decency that should govern intercourse between different generations, so should you. These things aren't facts to her. They're deeply concerned with her emotional life!"
Rosemary left that. Possibly he was right on a basis of sentiment, though she still felt that social facts were not things you ought to be secret about. But her thoughts had gone back to their earlier occupation. "Tony," she said, "when I'm married will there be things people won't speak the truth to me about?"
He answered her frankly. "Plenty of things—but I don't know if there'll be more of them than there are now!"
Rosemary turned to him as he sat, now on the edge of the table. He looked very handsome and kind, and clever, and young, but she thought too that he looked a shade too sure of his own knowledge, too contented with his supremacy as a man.
"I'm not going to be that sort of wife, then," she warned him. "I'm not going to make a little warm deep hole for our life together, like mice making their nest in the dark. I'm going"—she pressed her hands together—"to have none of these secrecies and loyalties that grow up round people—like laurels in front of basement windows—and shut out the air and the light. I shan't pretend to everyone that you're a little god. I despise women who go on for years pretending they don't know that their husband is a drunkard. I shan't feel that just because I'm married to you I ought to admire things I should hate if I weren't. I'm not going to be loyal to you, Tony, and worship your likes and dislikes. I'm going to be loyal to what is beautiful and brave. I think marriage ought to complete one's life, and make it wider and finer, not narrow it down to mutton and dusters and one little particular set of people. It would, if only most women weren't so lazy, and such cowards. Whenever anything happens to them they make it a reason for slackening their hold and shutting their eyes. They're growing up, or they're marrying, or they're not as young as they used to be, so they leave off doing the things they like, and they leave off being interested in anything that's a trouble. Well, I'm not going to! I love you, Tony, more than I can tell you, and I love, but one's life, one's soul, is the most important!"
Anthony saw that her face showed a slight anxiety. He slipped off his table and knelt beside her, smiling. What a brave fine thing she was, how charmingly pugnacious, and what a child! He would not have dared to marry her if he had not felt sure that he could make her happy. It was when she talked like that he was most pleased with the love he felt for her. He knew then that it was not a young man's greedy passion for a creature that is beautiful and untamed, but the noble enduring love of one human being for another. His confidence showed in his eyes as he looked up at her. "Little Rosemary," he said, "don't give up anything you want to keep! You needn't be loyal to anything but yourself! You're not like your mother, remember. She married without knowing she had a mind, without wanting liberty. Marriage is different now, and if it weren't, you and I would be different."
Rosemary let her hand close on his. "I suppose so," she conceded. But in her heart she wondered whether Laura hadn't told herself the same.
Meanwhile Mary, in her room, Rosemary's books before her, was setting out to conquer an understanding of the social system. It was exciting, this search for knowledge, it was wonderful to think that there was something she desired ardently, and she had but to read a few books, to think a little, and she would find it. All her life she had been ignorant, and content to be ignorant. She had never thought that she might, herself, go seeking after truth. But now in the confusion of received opinion she had resolved, splendidly, that she would form an opinion of her own, form it not by comparing the facts that were brought to her but by thinking based on facts she had discovered for herself. She couldn't pit James against Rosemary, or Rosemary against James. If the responsibility was hers she must use such brains as she had to cope with it. After all, were not wisdom and learning there for her as well as for another?
She sat down to Women's Work and Wages with the enthusiasm of a girl of fifteen who is allowed, at last, to begin learning Greek.