"It doesn't matter where you're going," said Mrs. Brindley. "It's that you are going. I can't bear giving you up. I had hoped that our lives would flow on and on together." She was with difficulty controlling her emotions. "It's these separations that age one, that take one's life. I almost wish I hadn't met you."
Mildred was moved, herself. Not so much as Mrs. Brindley because she had the necessities of her career gripping her and claiming the strongest feelings there were in her. Also, she was much the younger, not merely in years but in experience. And separations have no real poignancy in them for youth.
"Yes, I know you love me," said Cyrilla, "but love doesn't mean to you what it means to me. I'm in that middle period of life where everything has its fullest meaning. In youth we're easily consoled and distracted because life seems so full of possibilities, and we can't believe friendship and love are rare, and still more rarely worth while. In old age, when the arteries harden and the blood flows slow and cold, we become indifferent. But between thirty-five and fifty-five how the heart can ache!" She smiled, with trembling lips. "And how it can rejoice!" she cried bravely. "I must not forget to mention that. Ah, my dear, you must learn to live intensely. If I had had your chance!"
"Ridiculous!" laughed Mildred. "You talk like an old woman. And I never think of you as older than myself."
"I AM an old woman," said Cyrilla. And, with a tightening at the heart Mildred saw, deep in the depths of her eyes, the look of old age. "I've found that I'm too old for love—for man-and-woman love—and that means I'm an old woman."
Mildred felt that there was only a thin barrier of reserve between her and some sad secret of this strange, shy, loving woman's—a barrier so thin that she could almost hear the stifled moan of a broken heart. But the barrier remained; it would have been impossible for Cyrilla Brindley to talk frankly about herself.
When Mildred came out of her room the next morning, Cyrilla had gone, leaving a note:
I can't bear good-bys. Besides, we'll see each other very soon. Forgive me for shrinking, but really I can't.
Before night Mildred was settled in the new place and the new room, with no sense of strangeness. She was reproaching herself for hardness, for not caring about Cyrilla, the best and truest friend she had ever had. But the truth lay in quite a different direction. The house, the surroundings, where she had lived luxuriously, dreaming her foolish and fatuous dreams, was not the place for such a struggle as was now upon her. And for that struggle she preferred, to sensitive, sober, refined, impractical Cyrilla Brindley, the companionship and the sympathy, the practical sympathy, of Agnes Belloc. No one need be ashamed or nervous before Agnes Belloc about being poor or unsuccessful or having to resort to shabby makeshifts or having to endure coarse contacts. Cyrilla represented refinement, appreciation of the finished work—luxurious and sterile appreciation and enjoyment. Agnes represented the workshop—where all the doers of all that is done live and work. Mildred was descending from the heights where live those who have graduated from the lot of the human race and have lost all that superficial or casual resemblance to that race. She was going down to live with the race, to share in its lot. She was glad Agnes Belloc was to be there.
Generalizing about such a haphazard conglomerate as human nature is highly unsatisfactory, but it may be cautiously ventured that in New England, as in old England, there is a curiously contradictory way of dealing with conventionality. Nowhere is conventionality more in reverence; yet when a New-Englander, man or woman, happens to elect to break with it, nowhere is the break so utter and so defiant. If Agnes Belloc, cut loose from the conventions that had bound her from childhood to well into middle life, had remained at home, no doubt she would have spent a large part of her nights in thinking out ways of employing her days in outraging the conventionalities before her horrified and infuriated neighbors. But of what use in New York to cuff and spit upon deities revered by only an insignificant class—and only officially revered by that class? Agnes had soon seen that there was no amusement or interest whatever in an enterprise which in her New England home would have filled her life to the brim with excitement. Also, she saw that she was well into that time of life where the absence of reputation in a woman endangers her comfort, makes her liable to be left alone—not despised and denounced, but simply avoided and ignored. So she was telling Mildred the exact truth. She had laid down the arms she had taken up against the social system, and had come in—and was fighting it from the safer and wiser inside. She still insisted that a woman had the same rights as a man; but she took care to make it clear that she claimed those rights only for others, that she neither exercised them nor cared for them for herself. And to make her propaganda the more effective, she was not only circumspect herself, but was exceedingly careful to be surrounded by circumspect people. No one could cite her case as proof that woman would expand liberty into license. In theory there was nothing lively that she did not look upon at least with tolerance; in practice, more and more she disliked seeing one of her sex do anything that might cause the world to say "woman would abuse liberty if she had it." "Sensible people," she now said, "do as they like. But they don't give fools a chance to titter and chatter."