"You think you can manage him?" repeated Madam Bowker.
She had been simply listening, her thoughts not showing at the surface. Her tone was neither discouraging nor encouraging, merely interrogative. But Margaret scented a doubt. "Don't you think so?" she said a little less confidently.
"I don't know.... I don't know.... It will do no harm to try."
Margaret's expression was suddenly like a real face from which a mask has dropped. "I must do it, Grandma. If I don't I shall—I shall HATE him! I will not be his servant! When I think of the humiliations he has put upon me I—I almost hate him now!"
Madam Bowker was alarmed, but was too wise to show it. She laughed. "How seriously you take yourself, child," said she. "All that is very young and very theatrical. What do birth and breeding mean if not that one has the high courage to bear what is, after all, the lot of most women, and the high intelligence to use one's circumstances, whatever they may be, to accomplish one's ambitions? A lady cannot afford to despise her husband. A lady is, first of all, serene. You talk like a Craig rather than like a Severance. If he can taint you this soon how long will it be before you are at his level? How can you hope to bring him up to yours?"
Margaret's head was hanging.
"Never again let me hear you speak disrespectfully of your husband, my child," the old lady went on impressively. "And if you are wise you will no more permit yourself to harbor a disrespectful thought of him than you would permit yourself to wear unclean underclothes."
Margaret dropped down at her grandmother's knee, buried her face in her lap. "I don't believe I can ever love him," she murmured.
"So long as you believe that, you never can," said Madam Bowker; "and your married life will be a failure—as great a failure as mine was—as your mother's was. If I had only known what I know now—what I am telling you—" Madam Bowker paused, and there was a long silence in the room. "Your married life, my dear," she went on, "will be what you choose to make of it. You have a husband. Never let yourself indulge in silly repinings or ruinous longings. Make the best of what you have. Study your husband, not ungenerously and superciliously, but with eyes determined to see the virtues that can be developed, the faults that can be cured, and with eyes that will not linger on the faults that can't be cured. Make him your constant thought and care. Never forget that you belong to the superior sex."
"I don't feel that I do," said Margaret. "I can't help feeling women are inferior and wishing I'd been a man."