It was wine to her. She felt herself growing ever more confident, established, secure.
§ 4
“Now, Janny,—what are you going to do about a house or an apartment or something where we can begin housekeeping? Gee, I hate the idea of boarding! We ought to have a place we can call our home. April second is only two weeks off, and I don’t suppose it’s possible to find anything now. We’ll have to go to a hotel or a boarding-house for a while until we can look ’round.... Do you realize, Miss Sturgis, you’re going to be Mrs. Roy Beardsley inside of a fortnight!”
“Roy—dear!” she exclaimed helplessly.
“But, my darling,—you’ve got to make up your mind.”
Make up her mind? She could not. She listened dumbly, miserably while her mother and sister discussed, with the man she had promised to marry, the details of the wedding, and what the young couple had better do until they could find a suitable place in which to start housekeeping.
“We’ll go over to the church on Eighty-ninth Street about six o’clock, and Doctor Fitzgibbons will perform the ceremony and then we’ll come back here for a happy wedding supper,” planned Mrs. Sturgis confidently.
On what was she expected to live? asked Jeannette, mutinously, of herself. Twenty-five dollars a week for both of them? It had seemed ample when they first discussed it. Her mother’s income for herself and two daughters had rarely been more and frequently less. Mrs. Sturgis paid thirty dollars a month rent for the apartment, and Alice was supposed to have ten dollars a week on which to run the table; in reality she provided the food that sustained the three of them at an expenditure of one dollar a day. But at forty dollars a month for food and twenty or twenty-five a month for rent and at least five dollars a week for Roy’s lunches and carfare, what was she, Jeannette, to have left to spend on clothes or amusement? She would be a prisoner in that dismal little Flatbush house, bound hand and foot to it for the lack of carfare across the river to indulge in a harmless inspection of shop windows! Now she was free,—now she could get herself a gay petticoat if she wanted one, or a new spring hat in time for Easter, or take Alice and herself to a Saturday matinée and nibble chocolates with her, hanging excitedly over the rail of the gallery from front row seats! And she was to relinquish all this liberty, which now was actually hers, actually her own to enjoy and delight in rightfully and lawfully, and manacle her hands, rivet chains about her ankles and enter this prison, whose door her mother, her sister and Roy held open for her, and where they expected her to remain contentedly and happily for the rest of her life!
It was too much! It was preposterous! It was inhuman! She didn’t love any man enough to make a sacrifice so great. She was self-supporting, independent,—beholden to no one,—she could take care of herself for life if necessary, and after her room and board were paid for, she would always have fifteen dollars a week—sixty dollars a month!—to spend as foolishly or as wisely as she chose with no one to call her to account. She hugged her little Saturday envelopes to her breast; they were hers, she had earned them, she would never give them up,—never—never—never!