A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

Mally, dreaming of nothing of the kind, entered upon what she expected to be a somewhat brilliant life socially, into which she saw her husband and herself conducted easily and naturally by the Keith Burgesses.

Anna had received her old friend with most affectionate cordiality, and had spent days of hard work in helping her to order her house, which, as there was a baby and but one servant, was not a small undertaking. Madam Burgess had submitted with patience to the long absences and the preoccupation of her daughter-in-law thus involved, and had even responded without demur to Anna’s timid request that they might have her old friends to dinner.

This dinner closed the Nichols episode from the social point of view. The guests were full of cheerful and unfeigned admiration, eager to please, easy to be pleased, but their good will availed them nothing. Even Anna could not fail now to perceive poor Mally’s inherent provincialness, but had she been apparently to the manner born, it would have made no difference with Madam Burgess. The essential qualifications to entrance into her world being lacking, her punctilious and attentive courtesy for the occasion simply covered the inevitable and absolute finality of it.

The Nicholses themselves, while by no means perceiving that the social career to which they had looked forward in Fulham was ended with this visit instead of begun, departed from the Burgess mansion with a vague sense of chill which all Anna’s efforts could not counteract. They were never invited there again. Madam Burgess had done her duty by her son’s wife’s early friends, and the incident, as far as she was concerned, was closed.

Anna, burning with a desire to make up to Mally for the inevitable disappointment which she foresaw, and hotly, although silently, resenting the social narrowness which excluded all men and women whose lives had not been run in the one fixed mould, devoted herself personally to her old friend with double ardour. More than this she could not do. Mally wondered, as the months passed and they settled down to the undivided intercourse of their own obscure church and neighbourhood, that Anna made no attempt to introduce her into her own aristocratic circle. Over and over she bit back the question which would reach her lips, “Why?” Her heart fermented with bitterness and resentment, and her husband was taxed to the utmost to subdue and sweeten the tumult of her wounded feeling.

Another year brought Mally another baby, greatly to her own dissatisfaction. Poor Anna, the great passion of motherhood within her still baffled and unfulfilled, poured out her soul upon mother and child in vicarious ecstasy, and went home to lie awake for many nights with her ceaseless, thwarted yearning for a child; and thus these two women each longed passionately for what the other, possessing, found a burden rather than a joy.

As time went on, Anna, bound to a certain outward course of life alien to her natural bent, lived her own life just below the surface, a life like a flame burning beneath ice. All the master motives of her nature unapplied; all the initial motives with which life had begun, neutralized and made ineffective, she reached, five years of married life over, the point which in any human development is one of danger,—the point when great personal forces are dammed up by barriers of external circumstance, when the prime powers and passions are without adequate expression.

Meanwhile Keith Burgess, his young enthusiasms having lost their first freshness, the limitations of physical weakness and suffering making themselves more and more felt, settled into a narrow routine of life and thought. As his physique gradually seemed to shrivel and his delicacy of form and feature to increase, a resemblance to his mother, scarcely observable in his younger manhood, became at times striking. His missionary activity passed from its original fresh ardour into a system of petty details, increasingly formal and perfunctory, even to Anna’s reluctant perception.

Perhaps it was due to Keith’s protracted absences from home, perhaps partly to his physical exhaustion, which made him dull and unresponsive when with her, but Anna felt, against her own will, a growing divergence in thought and interest between them. He was delicately sympathetic, chivalrously attentive, to her in all outward ways; but when she longed with eager craving for his participation in the life of thought and purpose which was stirring the depths of her nature in secret, she found scant response.

Driven inward thus at every point, Anna’s essential life centred itself more and more upon the new message of social brotherhood which she had found in the writings of John Gregory; and, unconsciously to herself, the ruling figure in her mind, as the symbol of the human power and freedom for which she longed, was his. The “counterfeit presentment” of this man in her dream had ruled her girlish imagination; and now his actual presence, though but once encountered, exercised an influence over her maturer life no less mysterious and no less profound. To this influence fresh strength was given by the relation, never-so-slight, which existed between them by reason of Gregory’s possession of the picture painted by Everett. How she was represented was still all unknown to her, still unasked; but must it not be that, owning this mysterious image of her face, his thoughts would sometimes turn to her? This thought stirred Anna with a thrill, half of joy, half of fear.