The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

"I have never thought about forgiveness, not once. I can scarcely believe you wrote these two letters which I have received. Do you remember once we talked about women wasting their lives beneath the burden of prejudice? You were the one man I had ever met, you were the one man, I thought, in all the world, who understood the truth about women. But I suppose there is something in the very nature of men that makes it impossible for them to realize the simple forces that make us what we are. All they see are the thousand conventionalities they have set about us to complicate us. We are not complicated. It is only the laws that make us appear so.

"That first of our two nights on the cliffs, did you find me complicated or difficult of understanding? I showed, as well as gave you myself and this is how you have treated that revelation. I will not let it make me unhappy. It could so deeply if I allowed it to get the upper hand. If I need anything now, now that I know I am going to have a child--don't be frightened yet, I only feel it in my heart--do you think it is help or advice for concealment? Do you think it is any assistance to me to know that all the world will be ashamed of me, but only you are not?

"Why do you even hint about shame to me? Did you think I shared what you call your weakness? Did you think for those moments that, as you say of yourself, I forgot or lost restraint?

"Never write to me again. Unfortunately for me, it is you most of all who could succeed in making me feel ashamed and I will not be ashamed. What lies before me is not to be endured but to be made wonderful. Will shame help me to do that?

"Perhaps you think I am an extraordinary woman. You say to yourself, 'Well, if that's her nature, it can't be helped, we've got to go through with it.' You would not believe me if I told you that all women in their essence are the same. It is only with so many that the prize of self-advancement, the hollow dignity of social position, the chimera--I don't know if I've spelt it right--of good repute, all of which you offer them if they obey the laws you have made to protect your property, are more attractive and alluring than the pain and discomfort and difficulty of bringing children into a competitive world. But you call this the line of least resistance.

"Because you find the majority of women so ready to be slaves to your laws do you imagine that they are not in essence the same as me? But starve one of those women as I and my sisters have been starved by circumstance, deny to her the first function which justifies her existence by the side of men with their work, as thousands and thousands are denied, taking in the end any husband who will fulfill their needs of life, and you will find her behave as I behaved.

"I have to thank you for one thing. Since I met you, my mind has opened out and in a lot of things, such as these which I am writing, I can think in words what a lot of women only feel but cannot express. I have to thank you too, that for those moments I loved. So many women don't even do that, not as they understand love.

"All that time together, playing golf, walking and talking on the cliffs, I felt our minds were at one. That with a woman is the beginning of love. All unities follow inevitably after that. It is not so with men. Your letters prove it to me. Perhaps this is why the formality of marriage is so necessary to make a screen for shame. I wonder if you realize in how many married women it is a screen and no more. I know now that to my own mother it was no more than that.

"I had no shame then. I loved. Loving no longer, I still now have no shame because, and believe me it is not in anger, we have no cause to meet again. I know I am going to have a child. I know he is going to be wonderful if I can make him so. I shall get my love from him as he grows in years and I am sure there is only one love. Passion is only an expression of it. My life will be fuller than yours with all the possessions you have. Bringing him up into the world will absorb the whole heart of me.

"Oh, my dear--I feel a great moment of pain to think what we have lost and truly I do not forget my gratitude for what I have gained. Never worry yourself in your thoughts by what you imagine I shall have to face. I know what my sisters will say, but what they will say will be no expression of the envy they will feel. I am quite human enough to find much courage in that.