A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

This fact, and the compunction in Anna’s heart toward her early foe, had drawn the two girls together, and they became friends. They talked of the interests of the cause of religion, and read biographies together, or rather, Anna read aloud while her friend diligently produced lace work with a small shuttle, or hemstitched linen ruffles; but both cared less for these several occupations than for the sense of mingling their young, unfolding perceptions.

Anna had need of a friend; Lucia, her sister, was many years older, and had long ago married a farmer, and departed deeper into the hills, where she worked with the immoderate industry of New England women, bore many children, and lived a life into which Anna did not enter deeply. The Mallison boys were away from home, studying and working, and the parsonage was a silent place. Anna adored her father with the restrained ardour of her kind, and loved her mother with a great tenderness, but she was actively intimate with neither, and thus greatly alone.

Mally was noticeably pretty, and Anna thought her beauty angelic. She was capable, clever, quick, and impulsive, one of the women who can do anything they see done, strongly imitative and impressionable. She developed rapidly, while Anna matured slowly. Anna had nobleness, Mally had facility. Anna, beside Mally, looked uncomfortably tall, with her angular thinness and her dark, grave face. She had masses of lustreless brown hair, a clear brune skin like her father, and, like him, singularly fine hands. Her eyes were her mother’s, and her only beauty,—golden brown, and of limpid clearness.

To both these girls their religion was a system of prohibition and of an abnormal development of conscience. The negative, not the positive, side was uppermost to them. “Thou shalt not” was written over every device and desire which did not minister directly to the furtherance of the local conception of religion. Both were eager to grasp the positive side, to convert the world, to see Satan chained, and themselves to contribute to this desirable consummation; but they were doubtful how to begin. Both were ardent controversialists after the manner of their day, and Anna read systematic theology with her father with extraordinary relish.

They waited and wondered, each longing for her destiny to disclose itself decisively. But with Anna a hidden life budded beneath the surface, unknown even to Mally. The romantic and poetic impulses of her nature, no longer directly nourished by the poets whom she had put away from her by force, stirred in her heart, and fed themselves, in silence, on the life of nature, and on the delicate, evanescent imaginings of her awakening womanhood.

Below the surface of her conscious thoughts a strange inarticulate passion for power and freedom beat and throbbed, and would not be stilled, despite her quiet, conscientious conformity to the narrow conditions of the world about her. She did not know what freedom was, but she felt that she was not free; neither did she clearly know what the power meant for which she longed, but she felt the absence of it in every one she had ever met. It was mysterious, indefinable—once only had she encountered it, and that was in a dream.

Thus a nature simple and single, with all its forces apparently bent one way, and with few avenues, or none, by which to import conflicting influences, was, in fact, already incipiently subject to the complexities of instinct, of motive, and desire, which weave the bewildering network of human experience.

When Anna was twenty, an event occurred of much importance in its bearing on her life. Under the direction of an old friend of Samuel Mallison, the Rev. Dr. Durham of Boston, a general secretary for Foreign Missions, a series of meetings was held in Haran for the promotion of an interest in this cause. Dr. Durham was entertained, during the time of the convention, at the parsonage; he was a genial and kindly man, and became in his way an especial friend of Anna, in whom he manifested a marked interest.

From the country round about, during the week, men and women thronged to Haran; and at an evening meeting to be addressed by a woman who had been a missionary in India, the white meeting-house was filled. Many in the congregation had never seen a missionary; many more had never heard a woman speak in public. Curiosity ran high.

The speaker was a little sallow woman, in a plain and unbecoming grey gown, who stepped timidly to the edge of the platform, laying a small hand which trembled visibly on the cold mahogany pulpit, as if to conciliate it for her intrusion and to crave its support.