"No!" Courtney had the expression of fire and purpose that makes a small person seem tall. "There's an alternative. I can do for myself."
"Do what?" demanded Helen. She waited for a reply—in vain—then went on: "What could you do that anybody would pay for? Besides—you, a lady, couldn't ask for work. You don't know how I suffered when I thought I was going to have to do it. And you'd suffer even more—having occupied the position you have. What a come down!"
"Don't!" commanded Courtney. "Helen, you are tempting me."
"I'm talking the sense to you that you've so often talked to me," Helen insisted. "Unless we women have got money of our own or a man with an income back of us, we're— I'd hate to confess the truth even to another woman."
Courtney nodded slowly several times, then asked, "Don't you think it ought to be changed?"
"No!" cried Helen vehemently. "It's what God intended. The penalty of being a man is to have to work. The penalty of being a lady, and refined and dainty and untouched by low, vulgar things, is to have to be a dependent. And it's not such a heavy penalty, either. Even if one doesn't care much about the man, one isn't inflicted with him all the time."
At these plain truths wrenched by loving anxiety from the deepest and securest of hiding places, Courtney's eyes danced. She'd have laughed outright, had not Helen been so terribly in earnest—Helen without a sense of humor. However she did venture to say: "The chief equipments of a lady are a stone instead of a heart and a hide instead of a skin—is that it?"
But Helen did not see the ironic comment on her philosophy. "Well," she went on in her serious, stolid way, "I don't want responsibility. And I like to take my ease—and to have to do only things it doesn't much matter if they go undone. We women are different from men. Our self-respect's in a different direction.... Dear, can't I do something to help you?"
Courtney kissed her penitently. She always felt ashamed after poking fun at Helen whose heart was so genuinely good and kind. "Nothing, thanks. The divorce must go on. You don't understand, Helen. Believe me, if I knew that sheer misery was waiting for me, as soon as I was free, I'd still go on."
"Let me talk to Richard. I can do it tactfully."