A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

The three women stood for a little looking down at him while the nurse talked in a whisper of his strength, his beauty, and his accomplishments. "I'm certain he knows his mother already," she said, and Mary answered, "And you too, nurse, I expect he knows you, too!"

The nurse saw fit to confirm this expectation. "There have been times when I've thought so," she assured them. "I've never seen a more intelligent baby, and a boy too, girls are generally sharper than boys!"

"Yes," said Miss Percival, "one of life's false beginnings, a tragedy we don't mind because it's always there."

Mary and the nurse both looked at her, Mary with surprise and the nurse with disapproval. There was something, to the nurse's mind, very betwixt and between about a secretary.

Mary, as there was nothing else that she wished to say, asked carelessly what Miss Percival had meant. The nurse looked down at her cloak. She would not, in Mary's place, have encouraged any future expression of what might well turn out a deplorable opinion.

Miss Percival put her hands on the table behind her and leaned back on them a little before she spoke. "Oh, I don't know," she said then, "but most young women seem to me such spoiled thwarted things. Girls, if they've had any sort of chance, are fine creatures. I think they may seem hard from the outside, but in their hearts they long to be noble and pure and spiritual, only, poor things, they don't know what nobility and purity are."

She paused, but Mary, holding Giles a little closer, gave her a smile that encouraged her to go on. "Well, we don't exactly tell them, do we?" There was a freedom, a recklessness, about Miss Percival's choice of words that struck Mary as unusual. "Because after all, they're here in the world to please men, and most men wouldn't know what to do with a really noble wife. So we lie to them, and tell them to mind their manners, and our clear bright eager little girls learn to chatter at tea-parties. I've watched it again and again. As they grow up something seems to go out of them. The pressure is too strong I suppose. They can't stand up against what's wanted of them." She stopped suddenly, though the pitch of her voice had not suggested an ending.

This time Mary did not look up. Miss Percival's words had taken Mary back, to the youth of her own daughters. Surely Rosemary had not been spoiled! To-day Rosemary was Tony's wife—She stared at the baby without seeing him.

Meanwhile the nurse too was considering the problem of girls. It was one of the wise arrangements of Providence, the nurse felt, that most girls did want to be good, else who'd help their mothers look after the house and mind the younger children? If they turned, later on, into giggling gawks whose thoughts ran on nothing but the men, Providence had surely designed that too, or no girl with a good place and her self-respect would be fool enough to marry. Still, in one way, now that it was put to her, the muse could see that it was a pity. Life was very different when you came to it from what you had thought it would be. The nurse could have married where she pleased herself, for she was a kindly, good-looking woman and she had saved. But she had not wished to run the risk—a man might seem steady enough while he was courting, and when you were married he'd take to drink or waste your money, or run after other women. There wasn't, if you looked at it squarely, much good to be got out of men, forever misbehaving themselves or pestering you for something.

Then her thoughts went back to the great day of her life, the day on which she had been confirmed. She had come home and knelt down by the bed she shared with her sister in a passion of gratitude and devotion to God. And when her mother had called her for tea, she had found that the boys had drawn a vulgar picture on the back of the beautiful card she had been given by the lady from the Church. Her mother had given the boys a clout on the head, but they had called her a sneak and a dirty mean beast and her day had been spoiled, and after that she had gone into service.