Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I haven't forgotten it, daughter," she answered. "It's time you were knowing things, I reckon, or you wouldn't be asking."
"Yes, it's time I was knowing things," repeated Dorinda. "You told me once that great-grandfather tried to keep you from marrying. Then why did you do it?"
For a minute or two before she replied the muscles in Mrs. Oakley's face and throat worked convulsively. "I was so set on your father that I moped myself into a decline," she said in a voice that was half strangled. "Those feelings have always gone hard in our family. There was your great-aunt Dorinda, the one you were named after," she continued, passing with obvious relief from her personal history. "When she couldn't get the man she'd set her heart on, she threw herself into the millstream; but after they fished her out and dried her off, she sobered down and married somebody else and was as sensible as anybody until the day of her death. She lived to be upwards of ninety, and your great-grandfather used to say he prized her advice more than that of any man he knew. Then there was another sister, Abigail, who went deranged about some man she hadn't seen but a few times, and they had to put her away in a room with barred windows. They didn't have good asylums then to send anybody to. But she got over it too, and went as a missionary overseas. That all happened in Ireland before your great-grandfather came to this country. I never saw your great-aunt Dorinda, but she corresponded regularly, till the day of her death, with your great-grandfather. I remember his telling me that she used to say anybody could be a fool once, but only a born fool was ever a fool twice."
"I wonder what it was?" said Dorinda wearily.
Mrs. Oakley sighed. "It's nature, I reckon," she replied, without reproach but without sympathy. "Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome. But, being a man, I s'pose he had his own way of looking at it; and if it's woman's nature to take it too hard, it's just as much the nature of man to take it too easy. The way I've worked it out is that with most women, when it seems pure foolishness, it ain't really that. It's just the struggle to get away from things as they are."
To get away from things as they are! Was this all there was in her feeling for Jason; the struggle to escape from the endless captivity of things as they are? In the bleak dawn of reason her dreams withered like flowers that are blighted by frost.
"Whatever it is, you haven't a good word for it," she said, vaguely resentful.
Mrs. Oakley considered the question impartially. "Well, it ain't catching and it ain't chronic," she remarked at last, with the temperate judgment of one who has finished with love. "I've got nothing to say against marriage, of course," she explained. "Marriage is the Lord's own institution, and I s'pose it's a good thing as far as it goes. Only," she added wisely, "it ain't ever going as far as most women try to make it. You'll be all right married, daughter, if you just make up your mind that whatever happens, you ain't going to let any man spoil your life."
The brave words, striking deep under the surface, rang against the vein of iron in Dorinda's nature. Clear and strong as a bell, she heard the reverberations of character beneath the wild bloom of emotion. Yes, whatever happened, she resolved passionately, no man was going to spoil her life! She could live without Jason; she could live without any man. The shadows of her great-aunts, Dorinda and Abigail, demented victims of love, stretched, black and sinister, across the generations. In her recoil from an inherited frailty, she revolted, with characteristic energy, to the opposite extreme of frigid disdain.
"Were all great-grandfather's sisters like that?" she asked hopefully, remembering that he had had six.