"I don't say I'm not ambitious," cried Kate, really stirred. "But that ought to be a credit to me! It's ridiculous using the word 'ambitious' as a credit to a man, and making it seem like a shame to a woman. Ambition is personal force. Why shouldn't I have force?"
"There are things I can't put into words," said Mrs. Dennison, taking a folded handkerchief from her bead bag and delicately wiping her face, "and one of them is what I think about women. I'm a woman myself, and it doesn't seem becoming to me to say that I think they're sacred."
"No more sacred than men!" interrupted Kate hotly. "Life is sacred--if it's good. I can't say I think it sacred when it's deleterious. It's that pale, twilight sort of a theory which has kept women from doing the things they were capable of doing. Men kept thinking of them as sacred, and then they were miserably disappointed when they found they weren't. They talk about women's dreams, but I think men dream just as much as women, or more, and that they moon around with ideas about angel wives, and then are horribly shocked when they find they've married limited, commonplace, selfish creatures like themselves. I say let us train them both, make them comrades, give them a chance to share the burdens and the rewards, and see if we can't reduce the number of broken hearts in the world."
"There are some burdens," put in Mrs. Dennison, "which men and women cannot share. The burden of child-bearing, which is the most important one there is, has to be borne by women alone. You yourself were talking about that only a little while ago. It's such a strange sort of a thing,--so sweet and so terrible,--and it so often takes a woman to the verge of the grave, or over it, that I suppose it is that which gives a sacredness to women. Then, too, they'll work all their lives long for some one they love with no thought of any return except love. That makes them sacred, too. Most of them believe in God, even when they're bad, and they believe in those they love even when they ought not. Maybe they're right in this and maybe they're not. Perhaps you'll say that shows their lack of sense. But I say it helps the world on, just the same. It may not be sensible--but it makes them sacred."
Mrs. Dennison's face was shining. She had pulled the gloves from her warm hands, and Kate, looking down at them, saw how work-worn they now were, though they were softly rounded and delicate. She knew this woman might have married a second time; but she was toiling that she might keep faith with the man she had laid in his grave. She was expecting a reunion with him. Her hope warmed her and kept her redolent of youth. She was still a bride, though she was a widow. She was of those who understood the things of the spirit. The essence of womanhood was in her--the elusive poetry of womanhood. To such implications of mystic beauty there was no retort. Kate saw in that moment that when women got as far as emancipation they were going to lose something infinitely precious. The real question was, should not these beautiful, these evanishing joys be permitted to depart in the interests of progress? Would not new, more robust satisfactions come to take the place of them?
They rode on in silence, and Kate's mind darted here and there--darted to Lena Vroom, that piteous little sister of Icarus, with her scorched wings; darted to Honora Fulham with her shattered faith; to Mary Morrison with her wanton's wisdom; to Mary Finn, whose womanhood was her undoing; to Marna, who had given fame for love and found the bargain good; to Mrs. Leger, who had turned to God; to her mother, the cringing wife, who could not keep faith with herself and her vows of obedience, and who had perished of the conflict; to Mrs. Dennison, happy in her mid-Victorian creed. Then from these, whom she knew, her mind swept on to the others--to all the restless, disturbed, questioning women the world over, who, clinging to beautiful old myths, yet reached out diffident hands to grasp new guidance. The violence and nurtured hatred of some of them offended her deeply; the egregious selfishness of others seemed to her as a flaming sin. Militant, unrestrained, avid of coarse and obvious things, they presented a shameful contrast to this little, gentle, dreaming keeper of a boarding-house who sat beside her, her dove's eyes filled with the mist of memories.
And yet--and yet--
XX
The next day, as it happened, she was invited to Lake Forest to attend a "suffrage tea." A distinguished English suffragette was to be present, and the more fashionable group of Chicago suffragists were gathering to pay her honor.