“No. They don’t have education. I don’t mean out of books. It’s just as Mrs. Locke says. They stand as little chance of knowing about life as kings and queens do. They are still a class apart.”
“Oh, she talks like that—your Mrs. Locke?” said Mar, with an obvious uneasiness.
“Not of herself. Of the rest of us—unless”—she smiled—“unless we’ve been to Nome; or, like mother, to Mecca.”
“To Mecca?”
With a face more serious the girl went on: “I’ve only just begun to notice who among the women I know are the most successful and the most sensible. They’re the ones that have had the most experience, gone about most, or”—her voice sunk—“had some great trouble, known about life somehow by knocking up against it. It looks as if the only way to get judgment is by having to judge. Men, of course—you’re always practising. You’re in things. You aren’t an outsider.”
“Who is an outsider?”
“Every woman, when she comes out of her own front door. Now”—before he could answer she hurried on—“now, there’s mother” (she spoke as if she had only just remembered her). “A clever person like mother—why, if she’d had ten times as much to do, she’d have done it ten times better. And she wouldn’t have had time to think about—a—the cracks in the china. Yes, father, you may depend upon it, it’s the women that haven’t got much in them that fit best into the small places. Mother’s always been crowded.”
When Bella came back from England that September, Mar and his daughter had been already six weeks at home. Although given full credit for having so happily reconstituted the domestic circle, for Hildegarde herself the devouring loneliness that had invaded existence showed its first sign of yielding when Bella’s childish face appeared at the door. None the less for Bella’s friend a shrinking of the heart as she held close the slight figure in its smart French gown. What a butterfly to be broken on the wheel of life!
“But Louis!” Twenty minutes after her arrival, Bella, as she followed Hildegarde up-stairs, put the question for the second time. Why had he stayed behind?
Hildegarde’s only answer was to hold open the door of her room and, when the new-comer had passed through, to shut it softly behind them both. Still in silence she laid down Bella’s hat and gloves, and then came and stood beside her friend, who sat watching her from the old nook of the cushioned window-seat.