Her face had grown white as she talked, and the color had paled a little even in Esther’s. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve thought of that, too. I’ve hated it when people talked as if there was nothing for girls but to get married.” The color came back with a quick flush as she added: “I’d rather die than be scheming about that myself; but what can you do? Boys always talk about the work they mean to follow. People would think there was something wrong with them, if they didn’t; but if girls say anything—I did try once to talk about what I could do to earn my own living, but father acted as if I was somehow reflecting on him, and mother—though I’m sure she understood me better—seemed worried and troubled.”
“That’s it, that’s it!” said Aunt Katharine, bitterly. “Even those that say a woman’s got a right to choose, say under their breath that she’ll never be happy if it’s anything but getting married. I tell you it’s finding your own work and doing it that makes people happy, and that’s a law for women as much as men.”
“But if you knew your work!” said Esther, piteously. “It seems to me there are very few girls who have anything special they can do.”
“That’s no more true of girls than ’tis of boys,” said Aunt Katharine. “We should find something for one as well as for the other, something they could work at, if we settled it once for all that they had the same right and need. But we’ve got to start with that idea right from the beginning.”
After that, during the time which remained of the visit, the talk came often into the circle of this thought. Sometimes Miss Saxon talked of the wrongs of women, of their inequality before the law, and of the tyranny of men, with a bitterness before which the girl shrank, but the very vehemence of the other’s belief carried her with it, and through it all one thing grew more and more clear to her. It was not hatred of men, but love of her own sex, which lay at the bottom of Katharine Saxon’s defiance of the social order. The longing to help women, to lift them into what seemed to her a larger, freer living, had laid hold of her wholly, and held her in the white heat of its consuming passion.
Once, when she had been speaking of the struggle which lay before any woman confronted with the problem of supporting a family, Esther said softly: “Grandpa told me about you one night, Aunt Katharine; how you gave up everything and worked so hard to help your sister when she came home with her children. I thought that was grand.”
The old woman did not speak for a moment, then she said, with a singular lack of emotion in her voice: “Poor Nancy! Yes, I thought then ’twas my duty to do what I did, and mebbe ’twas; but sometimes I’ve thought—Nancy and her girls were only a han’ful out of the many—sometimes I’ve thought mebbe I might have done more good if I’d been fighting for ’em all. I gave the best fifteen years of my life to that old spinning-wheel, and scarcely looked out of my corner.” And then the lines of her face stiffened as she added: “But I had my reward. I was saved from marrying—marrying Levi Dodge.”
The scorn in her voice as she said the last words was indescribable. For a while neither of them spoke. Then Esther said, leaning toward the other, her heart in her eyes, and her breath coming quick, “Aunt Katharine, wouldn’t you have women marry at all?”
She threw up her head with the quick, impatient movement which Esther had come to know so well. “They might all marry and welcome,” she said,—“it’s the Lord’s way to preserve the race,—if only we could get rid of the notions that folks have joined onto it to spoil it.”
And then the note that was not of defiance, but pleading, came back to her voice, as she added: “But I’d have some of the women that see stay free from it till we’ve worked this thing out, and made a fair chance for those that come after us; I’d have ’em show that the world has some interests for women outside of their own homes, and some work they can do besides waiting on their husbands and children; I’d have ’em show that a woman ain’t afraid nor ashamed to walk without leaning; and I’d have ’em keep their eyes open to see what’s going on. I’d have ’em hold themselves clear of the danger of being blinded even by love to the things that need doing.”