A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

“Nor even the boys?” asked Anna smiling.

Mally laughed at this, evidently pleased. In a few moments she was ready and they took their places at the tea-table, Mally quieting herself with an effort, in order to ask a brief blessing upon the meal. It was her turn to-night. The two coöperated in their religious exercises of a general character, as well as in their housekeeping.

Destiny, so eagerly challenged by these two village girls in the eventless isolation of their life in Haran, seemed at last to have declared itself decisively: both were to catch men,—Anna in the apostolic sense, Mally in a different one.

Anna’s journey to Boston, three months earlier, had been successful. She had returned under appointment as a missionary to India; but being still too young to go out, the Board had advised her to spend the following two years in studies especially designed to develop her usefulness in work among the heathen. In January Samuel Mallison had died. The parsonage, where the children had been born and nurtured, could thus no longer be their home. It must be made ready now for a successor.

It had been a sorrowful breaking up, and when the melancholy work was done, and the home effaced forever, the mother, patient and uncomplaining, departed with Lucia to the lonely farmhouse among the hills, to take on again, in her later years of life, the many cares of tending little children. It was then that Anna, accompanied by her friend Mally, had come to Burlington with the purpose of studying at a collegiate institute, which offered opportunity for more advanced study than could be had in Haran. Anna was hard at work every morning on Paley’s “Evidences” and Butler’s “Analogy,” while her afternoons were spent in the small hospital of the town, in an informal nurses’ class, as it was even then considered a useful thing for missionaries to go out with some equipment for healing the bodies of men as well as their souls. Mally, by her own account, was “taking” music, painting, and French.

As they sat at their little table now, with its meagre and humble fare, but its indefinable expression of refinement, Anna and Mally were in striking contrast.

It has been said before that Anna matured slowly. There was still in her face, despite its sadness, the grave wonder, the artless simplicity, and the sweet unconsciousness of a child. Her figure was angular and undeveloped; her black dress, absolutely, harshly plain, and of coarse stuff; her face, far too thin and colourless for beauty. She was, plainly, underfed and overworked; but there was, nevertheless, a dignity and a distinction in her aspect which emphasized Mally’s provincialness, notwithstanding the little fashionable touches about dress and coiffure which the latter had swiftly and instinctively adapted to her own use.

Anna had the repose of a person who is not concerned at all as to the impression she makes, or desirous of making any personal impression whatever. Mally had the restlessness, the vivacity, the eagerness, of a woman who wishes everywhere and at every time to make herself felt, to be the central figure. She was born an egotist, and even “divine grace,” in the devotional phraseology of that time, had not been sufficient to overcome her natural bent. At the present time, in fact, egotism was having comparatively easy work with her, and an indefinite truce with the religious conflicts of earlier days had been tacitly declared. That spiritual experience had been sincere, and it had lasted several years. Fortunately, to Mally’s unspoken thought, she had been favoured during those years to work out her salvation, which was now, according to a prime doctrine of the church, secured to her against all accidents. This being so, no one need be concerned for her; and if she were herself satisfied with a low spiritual attainment, it was nobody’s business but her own.

She had, to her own naïve surprise, met with a marked degree of social success in a certain middle-class stratum of the small town. She was pretty, clever, adaptive; the young men and women of her set said she was “such good company.” This was high praise. In Haran the natural order for a marriageable girl was to be soberly and decorously and protractedly wooed by one young man, to whom, in process of time, she was married. Here Mally found a far more stimulating social condition. Not one man, but many, might be the portion of a popular girl, and Mally found the strength of numbers very great. The sex instinct, the ruling desire to attract men, sprang into vigorous action, and became, for a time at least, predominant. Women of whom this is true are often very good women, with energy and common sense, but it is important for their friends, for various reasons, to hold the master key to their character.

Anna Mallison, at this period of her life as sexless in her conscious life as a star, looked on at this rapid and unlooked-for development of Mally’s nature in infinite perplexity. She had always liked certain men, even outside her own kindred, but it was because they were wise or good or sincere, not because they were men. A thirst for admiration being thus far undeclared in her own life, Mally became inexplicable to her; she did not hold the key to her character, and involuntarily she withdrew more and more into herself, her only friend becoming thus uncomprehended. If she felt this in any degree, Mally, being closely occupied with more tangible consideration, paid small heed to it.