Ever since she had been old enough to be of active use, she had had the training of responsibility—responsibility not only for herself, but also for her mother and the household. She had had the duties of both woman and man forced upon her and so had developed capacity and self-reliance. She had read and experienced and thought perhaps beyond the average for girls of her age and breeding. Undoubtedly she had read and thought more than most girls who are, or fancy they are, physically attractive. Her father’s caustic contempt for shallow culture, for ignorance thinly disguised by good manners, had been his one strong influence on her.
“All my own fault,” she was saying to herself now, as she lay propped on her elbow among her pillows. “It was a base plan, unworthy of me. I ought to be glad that the punishment was not worse. The only creditable thing about it is that I played the game so badly that I lost.” And then she smiled, wondering how much of her new virtue was real and how much was mere making the best of a disastrous defeat.
Why had she lost? What was the false move? She could not answer, but she felt that it was through ignorance of some trick which a worse woman would have known.
“Never again, never again,” she thought, “will I take that road. What I get I must get by direct means. Either I’m not crafty enough or not mean enough to win in the other way.”
She was singing as she went downstairs to join her aunt. The old woman, her father’s sister who had never married, was knitting in the shady corner of the front porch, screened from the sun by a great overhanging tree, and from the drive and the road beyond, by the curtain of honeysuckles and climbing roses. As Emily came into view, she dropped the knitting and looked at her with disapproval upon her thin old face.
“But why, auntie?” said the girl, answering the look. “I feel like singing. I feel so young and well and—hopeful. You don’t wish me to play the hypocrite and look glum and sad? Besides, the battle must begin soon, and good spirits may be half of it.”
Her aunt sighed and looked at her with the unoffending pity of sympathy. “Perhaps you’re right, Emmy,” she said. “God knows, life is cruel enough without our fighting to prolong its miseries. And it does seem as if you’d had more than your share of them thus far.” She was admiring her beautiful niece and thinking how ill that fragile fineness seemed fitted for the struggle which there seemed no way of averting. “You’re almost twenty-one,” she said aloud. “You ought to have had a good husband and everything you wanted by this time.”
Emily winced at this unconscious stab into the unhealed wound. “Isn’t there anything in life for a woman on her own account?” she asked impatiently. “Is her only hope through some man? Isn’t it possible for her to make her own happiness, work out her own salvation? Must she wait until a man condescends to ask her to marry him?”
“I’d like to say no,” replied her aunt, “but I can’t. As the world is made now, a woman’s happiness comes through home and children. And that means a husband. Even if her idea of happiness were not home and children, still she’s got to have a husband.”
“But why? Why do you say ‘as the world is made now?’ Aren’t there thousands, tens of thousands of women who make their own lives, working in all sorts of ways—from teaching school to practising medicine or law or writing or acting?”