"If she wants him in the right way, she'll have him."
"I don't like that way of speaking of men," said Madeleine, dipping her white fingers into the flour and beginning to chip the butter through it. "Don't you think it's horrid how girls speak of men nowadays? I do."
"Of course I do," said Jane. "But one drops into the habit just because everybody does it. I'll never be married myself, and it's partly because I think it's all being so dragged down. Instead of two people's knowing one another and liking one another better till finally a big, beautiful, holy secret sort of dawns on them and makes the world all over new, girls just go on and act as if men were wild animals to be hunted and caught and talked about, or married and made fun of. I don't think all these new ideas and new ways for women have made women a bit more womanly. When I had to earn my living, I picked out work that a man couldn't do, and that I wouldn't be hurting any man by doing. I'm sorry for men nowadays. And I think women lose a lot the way some of them go on."
"After all, there can't be anything nicer than to be a woman, can there?" said Madeleine, stirring as the other poured in ingredients. "I've always been glad that I was a woman. I think that a woman's life is so sweet, and it's beautiful to be protected and cared for." The pink flew over her cheeks at the words.
Jane's lashes swept downward for a minute, then rose resolutely. "Or to protect and care for others. It always seems to me as if a woman was the sort of blessed way through which a man's love and strength and care go to his children. Men are so helpless with children, but they do such a lot for wives, and then the mothers pass it on to the little ones."
"Life's lovely when you think of it rightly, isn't it?" Madeleine said thoughtfully. "I'm so pleased over having come here. You see Father and Mother wanted me to spend a few weeks quietly where I could rest and pick myself up a little, and so they sent me here. I didn't care much about coming, but I'm glad now. You're doing me lots of good, Jane; you seem to help me to unlock the doors to everything that's just best in me."
"It isn't that I do it," said Jane; "it's that it's been done to me, and after it got through me, it's bound to shine on. It's like light; every window you clean lets it through into another place, where maybe there's something else to clean and let it through again."
"I suppose we just live to keep clean and let light through," laughed Madeleine, cutting out the biscuits.
"That's all."
"I think that you'd make a good preacher, Jane; you've such nice, plain, homely, understandable ways of putting things."