"It's them as doant suffer can talk about sin," she had said, which by no means was Mary's train of thought, though her words had somehow suggested it to Mrs. Peverell's range of comprehension. "I should have called all this sin years ago. Didn't I say 'twas sin when first 'ee told me? Well, it beats me what sin is. 'Tain't what I thought it. We be born with it, they say. Well, if the babes I seen be born with sin, 'tain't what any one thinks it."
It was obvious Mrs. Peverell had not followed her in the flight of her hopes and purposes. The right and the wrong of it, the pain and the joy of it, these were all that her mind grasped. But these she grasped with a clearness of vision that assured Mary's heart of a safe guardianship if ill should befall her. Such a clearness of vision it was as set her high above many of the women she had known.
How was that? What was it about women that so few of them had any vision at all? To how many she knew would she entrust her child? Often she had listened in amazement to Hannah instructing the children at home. She remembered the mistresses where she had been at school herself. She recalled her mother's advice to her when she had left school. Everywhere it was the same.
Only here and there where a woman had suffered at the hands of life did vision seem to be awakened in her. Many were worldly, many were shrewd and clever enough in their dealings with circumstance. But how few there were who knew of any purpose in their souls beyond that of dressing their bodies for honest vanity's sake, or marrying suitably for decent comfort's sake.
Here, was it again the force-made laws, the laws by which men set a paled and barbed fence about the possessions they had won? Were all these women their possessions too, as little capable of freedom of thought as were of action their dogs, their horses, the cattle on their hedged-in fields?
She had heard of votes for women in those days. In Bridnorth as in most places it was a jest. What would they do with the vote when they had it? They laughed with the rest. Women in Parliament! They would only make fools of themselves with their trembling voices raised in a company of men.
She could not herself quite see all that the vote might mean. Little may that be wondered at, seeing that when they obtained it, there would be countless among them who still would be ignorant of its worth and power. Whatever it might mean, she knew in those days that her sex had little of the vision of the ideal; she knew it was little aware of the true values and meanings of life, that thousands of her sisters wasted out their days in ceaseless pandering to the acquisitive passions of men.
"'Ee's thinkin' long and deep, maidy," Mrs. Peverell had said when the silence after her last remarks had closed about them. "Are 'ee wonderin' after all this time what the sin of it might be? Are 'ee thinkin' what the Vicar'll say when 'ee has to explain it all to 'en."
"Why must I tell him?" asked Mary.
"Don't 'ee want the child baptized?"