Some of the young women rushed about New England, visiting its towns, and finding each town a reproduction of Stoughton. Some went to the cities a visiting, and returned home dazed and baffled. A few bettered themselves in their quest; but more only increased their discontent, or, marrying, regretted the ills they had fled. Those who married away from home about balanced those who were deprived of opportunities to marry, by the girl visitors from other towns, who caught with their new faces and new man-catching tricks the Stoughton eligible-ineligibles.
At twenty a Stoughton girl began to be anxious. At twenty-five, the sickening doubt shot its anguish into her soul. At thirty came despair; and rarely, indeed, did despair leave. It was fluttered sometimes, or pretended to be; but, after a few feeble flappings, it roosted again. In Stoughton “society” the old maids outnumbered the married women.
Clearly, there was no chance to marry. Emily might have overcome the timidity of such young men as there were, and might have married almost any one of them. But her end would have been more remote than ever. It was not marriage in itself that she sought, but release from Stoughton. And none of these young men was able to make a living away from Stoughton, even should she marry him and succeed in getting him away.
She revolved the idea of visiting her friends in Washington. But there poverty barred the way. She had never had so very many clothes. Now, she could afford only the simplest and cheapest. She looked over what she had brought with her from Washington. Each bit of finery reminded her of pleasures, keen when she enjoyed them, cruelly keen in memory. The gowns were of a kind that would have made Stoughton open its sleepy eyes, but they would not do for Washington again.
The people she knew there were self-absorbed, inclined to snobbishness, to patronising contemptuously those of their own set who were overtaken by misfortunes and could not keep the pace. They tolerated these reminders of the less luxurious and less fortunate phases of life, but—well, toleration was not a virtue which Emily Bromfield cared to have exercised toward herself. She could hear Mrs. Ainslie or Mrs. Chesterton or Mrs. Connors-Smith whispering: “Yes—the poor dear—it’s so sad. I really had to take pity on her. No—not a penny—I even had to send her the railway fares. But I felt it was a duty people in our position owe.”
And so her prison had no door.
Emily kept her thoughts to herself. Her mother was almost as content as she had been in Washington. Did she not still have her diseases? Were there not doctors and drug-shops? Was there not a circulating library, mostly light literature of her favourite innocuous kind? And did not the old women who called listen far more patiently than her Washington friends to tedious recitals of symptoms and of the plots and scenes of novels?
Emily could keep to her room or ride about the country on her bicycle. She at least had the freedom of her prison, and was not disturbed in her companionship with solitude. With the bad weather, she hid in her room more and more. She would sit there hours on hours in the same position, staring out of the window, thinking the same thoughts over and over again, and finding fresh springs of unhappiness in them each time.
Occasionally she gave way to storms of grief.
The day she looked over her dresses under the stimulus of the idea of visiting Washington was one of her worst days. As she stood with her finery about her and a half-hope in her heart, she recalled her Washington life—her school days, her first season, her flirtations, the confident, arrogant way in which she had looked forward on life. Then came the thought that all was over, that she could not go to Washington, that she must stay in Stoughton—on and on and on——