The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

It gave Jane the opportunity she sought, but in the frankness of giving confused her. So had her mind forestalled all the progressions of that conversation, that for a moment she was silent.

What sort of woman was this Mary of theirs who seemed to have no guiltiness of conscience, when from childhood she had been trained to listen to the still, small voice? Did she not realize the enormity of what she was doing? Jane's lips set to their thinnest line.

"Do you think it's wise," she began, and in that tone of voice which, with a sharp edge, cut the plain pattern of her meaning--"Do you think it's wise to go about so much with this man? Even if he weren't married--do you think it's wise?"

The sharp glance which Jane stole at her sister then revealed Mary possessed and unconcerned. So well had she known what Jane was going to say that surprise had no power to disconcert her. But beyond that, there was in some chamber of her mind a certain sureness of herself, a steadying confidence in all she did. This it had also been even in the high torrent of her emotion when she would have no more of his kisses and seemed in that moment to him the substance of unyielding stone his temperature of passion had heated but a moment and no more.

"I think," she replied, after a moment's silence; "I think that this wisdom you talk about--worldly wisdom--is a very over-rated virtue. I think we've lost a lot--all of us--by cultivating it. I find Mr. Liddiard much more interesting than any one or any thing in Bridnorth. Life after all is short enough--dull enough. Why shouldn't I take what interest it offers when I can, while I can? He goes in a few days. What's worldly wisdom to the feeling that your mind is growing instead of stagnating? If you mean you think I ought not to go out with him again, I can't agree with you."

She spoke like a woman addressing a community of women, not as one sister to another. There was a note of detachment in her voice, Jane had never heard before. In all that household, Jane always assumed she had herself the final power of control. She felt it no longer here. So long as Mary was speaking, it appeared to her as though she were one listening to some authority far superior to her own. It was in Mary's voice and yet seemed outside and beyond her as well. There was power behind it. She could not sense the direction or origin of that power, but it dominated her. She felt small beside it, and feeling small and realizing that it was this Mary, their youngest, who was the voice of it, she grew angry. All control of that situation she had intended to conduct left her. It left her fretting with the sensation of her own impotence.

"You can't agree with me, can't you!" retorted Jane hotly. "You wouldn't agree, I suppose, if I said that, beside being unwise, I thought it beastly and sinful and horrible altogether, to see a girl kissing a married man, kissing him in a beastly way too?"

Never, even from the first moment of her discovery, had she ever meant to say this. This was not Jane's method. What flood of emotion had borne her thus far out of her course? Fully it had been her intention to speak of Mary's friendship with Liddiard as though it were a flippant and a passing thing; to belittle it until, in its littleness, she had shown this foolish sister of hers what folly it was.

How had it happened she had thus exaggerated its importance by the heat of her words? Something had pricked and spurred her. Something had driven her beyond her control. Finding herself opposed by a force so infinitely greater than her own, she had struggled and fought. It had been a moment's hysteria in the sudden consciousness of her impotence. Then what power was it? Not merely Mary herself. She could not submit her mind to that admission. It was greater than Mary and yet, becoming the voice of it, she felt that this sister of hers was greater than herself.

To Mary, the shock of realization that Jane had seen them that moment in the bracken was not one that seemed to tremble or emotionalize her at all. If she felt any anger at the thought that she had been spied upon--for swiftly recalling the place of that happening, she knew Jane must have been in hiding,--it was an anger that burnt out, like ignited powder, a flash, no more. It left no trace. All her consciousness assembled in her mind to warn her that the meaning of Life which had come in those last two weeks to her was in jeopardy of being made meaningless. It did not frighten her, but set the beating of her heart to a slow and deliberate measure.