“Quite wrong,” he echoed gravely.
“It was an odd, muddled sort of time for some years after that. I suppose I was resenting my own decision, and yet trying to buoy myself up all the time by thinking of my own self-abnegation and generosity. It had seemed rather a beautiful thing to do at the time—to sacrifice my own life to my widowed father and my motherless brothers and sisters. At first, I remember thinking that there would be something almost sacred about my everyday life at home.”
“When people begin to think that things are sacred to them, it generally means that they’re afraid of facing the truth about them.”
“Exactly. It was a long time before I told myself the truth. But in the end I did, when I saw that no one was likely to want to marry me, and that my life was going to be exactly what I had decided to let it be. And of course from the minute I faced it fair and square—after the first—it all became a great deal easier. Besides, there were compensations, really.”
He made a sound of interrogation.
“Well, it’s really a great thing to have a home. I’ve always felt sorry for women who lived in their boxes, and had nowhere of their own. And being mistress of the house all these years—I’ve liked that, and been fairly interested in it. And I’ve got imagination enough to see that books, and music, and a garden, to anyone brought up as we were especially, are quite important items. You know, women who have a career don’t generally get those other things thrown in as well, unless they’re exceptionally fortunate.”
“You set them against independence and your own freedom?”
“I don’t say that, but they do count,” she said steadily. “If it comes to a question of relative values, of course they take second place. But once I’d admitted to myself, quite honestly, that I’d relinquished my chance of the best things of all, then I could quite see those other things as being intrinsically worth something—a very good second best. They’re really only unsatisfactory when one tries to think of them as substitutes. Taken at their own value—well, I’ve found them helpful, you know.”
There was a silence before she spoke again.
“Most of all, there was Father.”