The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

"Don't let's stand here, like this," said he. "Can't we sit down on the grass and talk it out?"

She sat down and, as her body touched the ground, discovered that she was trembling in every limb.

"You're an extraordinary woman, Mary," he began. "The most extraordinary woman I've ever known. You talk with your heart and yet you make me feel all the time as though your heart were unapproachable. I've never touched it. I know that. I never touched it even those two nights in Bridnorth. I thought I had, but your letter afterwards soon proved to me I hadn't. Some man could, I suppose, but as you talk, I can't conceive the type he'd be. You know you frighten me and you'd terrify most men. I don't say it in any uncomplimentary fashion, but most men, hearing what you've said just now, would go to the ends of the earth rather than make love to or marry you."

"You needn't talk about lack of compliment," she said with a wry smile. "I'm quite aware of it. Women like me don't attract men. They say we're not natural. They like natural women and by that they mean they like women who are submissive. But if they think that's the natural woman, their conception of women has stopped with the animals. We aren't passive. We're coming to know that we're a force. Look at the way this talk of the enfranchisement of women is growing. Who'd have listened to it twenty years ago? I don't profess to know what it means. I don't profess to conjecture what it's coming to. But it's growing; you can't deny it."

She must have thought she had won her way. Passing like this to abstract and speculative things, she must have believed he had no more to say; that question no longer existed about her keeping John. It only proved the want of knowledge of facts she admitted and it was inevitable she must have. She had spent all the force of the vital energy of her defense, but she had not subdued the man in him. Right as he knew in his heart she was, there was yet all the reserve of reason in his mind. The generations of years of precedent were all behind him. She had not subdued him merely by victory over his emotions. The force she had was young and ill-tried. She had set it up against convention and triumphed for all these years. She did not realize now what weight of pressing power there was behind it, the overbearing numbers that must tell in the end.

He was only waiting for this moment; this moment when in the flush of seeming victory she was weakest of all; this moment when in confidence her mind relaxed from its purpose and, as was always happening with his sex and hers, he could take her unawares. None of this conscious intent there was in him. He was merely articulating in his mind in obedience to the common instinct which through all the years of habit and custom and use have become the nature of man.

"Yes, that idea about the enfranchisement of women is growing," he admitted generously, "but I quite agree we can none of us know what it'll come to. It can't alter one thing, Mary."

In a moment alert with the unyielding note in his voice, she inquired what that might be.

"It can't alter the fact that each one of us, child, of whatever enfranchisement we may be, stands utterly and completely alone, encouraged or hampered in our fulfillment by the circumstances of birth that are made for us. It happens that men are more equipped for the making of those circumstances than women are. It happens that men are more capable of wrestling with and overcoming the difficulties of environment, well, in other words, of providing the encouragement of circumstance. I don't think you can get away from that. I don't think you can get away from the fact that in this short life we don't want to waste our youth in making a suitable environment whenever it's possible to start so much ahead and conserve our energies for the best that's in us."

He turned quickly as he sat and looked at her.