“But I never heard of such a thing! Say, don’t you love ’im any more, Lizzie?”
“I—I think I do, ma,” Elizabeth said slowly. “But there’s the very trouble with women. They think they ought to love a man enough to take him without a definite understanding, and then they find that a woman’s love means mostly obedience to a man. Yes, I think I love him. But I’m going to know what he expects, and I’m going to tell him what I expect, and make no mistakes this time. We’ll know before we begin.”
“But he may not take you,” Mrs. Farnshaw said in a frightened whisper.
“I rather think I’m taking him,” Elizabeth said, beginning to unload the box of provisions she had brought. “You forget that I’m making my own living.”
“That does make a difference,” Mrs. Farnshaw admitted.
“That makes all the difference,” Elizabeth replied positively. “The longer I look at it the more convinced I am that the whole thing hinges right on that point. If we live together again I’ll know that it isn’t because he feels that having married me he must keep me in food and clothes, and he’ll know that it’s because I want to and not because I’ve got a child to be supported. I believe I love him; but if I didn’t know I could leave him in a minute if he made me do things that I wasn’t able to do I wouldn’t dare to say yes. Knowing that I don’t have to live with him if he begins to order me around, I think I’ll try it.”
“You’re a queer girl, Lizzie,” the mother said, puzzled and uncertain what to think of the philosophy she propounded. “You don’t seem to be afraid of men at all.”
“I don’t have to be, ma, because no man will ever again pay for my food and clothes. You are not to tell anybody, even the boys. I may not do it yet. I didn’t intend to tell you for a while, but you insisted on telling me what I was thinking about, and it popped right out at you.”
Elizabeth gave her mother a tender look and added: “I told you first when he asked me before,” which was a thing her mother could understand and appreciate. Elizabeth was considerate of the little mother whose life was hard, and who was afraid of a man.
At that point Elizabeth fell into a brown study. She argued for her own rights, knowing that only on that path could peace come to either herself or John, but she did not feel herself wholly worthy, and John wholly unworthy; she knew her weaknesses, and she knew she had wronged John Hunter as well as he had wronged her; she was willing to take him if he would be as willing to correct his faults and confess them as she was willing to do. She did not ask of John Hunter that he be always right in his actions toward her, but that he discuss their grievances and let them look together for better ways of settling what was right for each. She was so deep in her own thoughts that she did not hear Jack, who called to her from the door: