“It all sounds rather tame,” she said. “Marriage. Must I marry to be contented?”
“To be so perfectly.”
She laughed shortly. “I shall depend on a steady routine of excitement to make me forget I’m not contented,” she said. “Marriage!” She spoke almost savagely. “Of course marriage is the solution of everything. Women are taught to look forward to it from the cradle as—as their means of support. We’re trained to please men; we’re dressed to attract men; our whole lives are aimed at men. We catch one at twenty or at twenty-five, and our career is over. We’ve succeeded in life. Then we live on till sixty.”
“You’ve read only the introduction to the story,” he said, soberly. “The book doesn’t begin to get interesting until you pass that.”
“Very well, then. I must marry to be contented. But whom? Diversity isn’t swarming with husbands of any sort. Among the few available male inhabitants, how many would you pick out as welcome husbands for a girl with ambitions above turnips and the number of eggs a day? If you were a girl, with reasonable intelligence, reasonable capabilities to appreciate what we consider it cultured to appreciate, what man here would you pick out from Diversity’s young men who wouldn’t be a constant horror to you?”
“You’re not limited to Diversity.”
“But that is exactly what I am.”
There was no obvious answer to this, and Jim drove on in silence. He sensed something of the girl’s position; appreciated, as he had not before appreciated, the feeling almost of despair that came over her as she looked into the future and found it gray, without gleaming lights or frightening shadows. She was a bird imprisoned among frogs.
Presently they came to a little bridge over a stream which added its little flow to the volume of the lake. It was one of those reed-bordered streams which travel with a soothing lilt, winding along leisurely, contentedly.
It was not such a boisterous stream as the speckled trout loves; it was the sort where tiny turtles sun themselves on root or log, to slide off with a startled splash as you approach. Cows would have loved to wade in it of a hot day.