Miss Katharine Saxon had long prided herself on a complete indifference to any blandishments of words or manner on the part of her fellow-creatures. It wasn’t what people said, nor how they said it, but the principles they lived up to, that constituted a claim to her regard, as she often declared; but she fell a victim as easily as scores had done before her to the pretty tactful ways of Esther Northmore and her gift for saying pleasant things. Not in years had she been as warm, as open, and confiding as during that visit. In the entertainment of her niece she made no mistake. She let her help in the housework and watched with pleasure while she darned a tablecloth. She was studying the girl, with genuine liking to guide the study.
And Esther, for her part, was watching her Aunt Katharine with growing regard and sympathy. It was a surprise at first, to note the solicitude with which she inquired after the sick child of Patrick Riley, the Irishman who carried on her farm, and came night and morning to attend to her chores; and the girl was not prepared for the almost maternal interest with which the old woman looked after the dumb creatures on her place.
On the subject which she was known to have most at heart—the wrongs of her sex—she said nothing for a while, and Esther was too mindful of those old griefs in her life to provoke the theme. It came casually, the second day, as they sat seeding raisins in the kitchen. A boy had brought a pail of berries to the door, but she refused them. An hour later a girl came with a similar errand, and without hesitating she made the purchase.
“I hope you didn’t change your mind on my account,” said Esther, when the child was gone, remembering apologetically something she had said in the interval about her own liking for huckleberries. “With all the fruit you have I’m sure we didn’t need them.”
Miss Saxon smiled. “I didn’t change my mind,” she said. “I thought some girl would be along, and so I waited.”
The boy’s face had looked eager, and Esther felt rather sorry for him. “Don’t you suppose he needed the money as much as she did?” she asked rather timidly.
“Mebbe he needed it more,” said Aunt Katharine. “The Billingses are worse off than the Esteys, but that ain’t the p’int. It’s a good thing for a girl to be earning money. It’s worth something to her to make a few cents, and know it’s her own. That’s what the girls need more ’n anything else, and I always help ’em every chance I get.”
Esther pondered for a minute without speaking. The old woman’s eyes had taken on a look of deep seriousness. “That’s the root of all the trouble,” she said almost fiercely, “this notion that the women must be forever dependent on the men, and take what’s given ’em and be thankful, without trying to do for themselves. I tell you it was never meant that one half of the world should hang on the other half, and look to ’em for the shelter over their heads, and the food they eat, and the clothes they wear. It degrades ’em both.”
Esther stopped seeding raisins and looked at her aunt in astonishment. An arraignment of the existing order of things such as she had not heard before was suggested here. Perhaps the very blankness of her expression appealed more than any protest to the old woman. The defiance went out of her voice, and it was almost a pleading tone in which she went on:—
“Don’t you see what comes of it? Don’t you see? It makes the girls think they must get married so ’s to have a home and somebody to support ’em, and then they plan ’n’ contrive—they ’n’ their mothers with ’em—how to catch a husband.” She shut her lips hard, as if her loathing of the thing were too great for utterance, then went on: “But small blame to ’em, I say, if that’s the only thing a woman’s fit for; small blame to ’em if they won’t let her choose her work for herself and live by it, without calling shame on her for doing it. It’s a little better now—thank God and the women that have been brave enough to go ahead in the face of it!—but I’ve seen the day when an old maid was looked on as something almost out of nature. ‘Let a girl dance in the pig’s trough,’ if her younger sister gets married before her. Let her own she’s disgraced, and be done with it. That’s the old saying, and the spirit of it ain’t all dead yet. It never will be till women are as free as men to do whatever thing is in ’em to do, and make the most of it.”