“Yes, I know,” she answers, gloomily, “but you don’t understand, exactly. I have to battle against all the fifteen years that I was under their influence, besides fighting them. There’s an element within myself that I can’t manage. All sorts of feelings——”
“I know,” sympathetically, “anachronistic ideas of duty, and filial fondness, and so forth. They work on all that. Thank God my mother deserted me when I was a baby. Father’s different.”
“You’re lucky,” she says. “It makes me furious. After all, I’m of age, and a lot more intelligent than they’ll ever be.... Well, we’ve said all that. I’ll just have to let it work itself out.”
“It won’t,” you assure her. “The only way to settle a thing of this sort is to cut it all off. Why don’t you go away?”
“How can I?” she says. “I haven’t the moral courage to hold out against them. I could go down and live with Marya for a week or so, but you know what would happen. First Ellen would walk in and talk to me, pretending to admire me but holding her skirts away from the furniture all the time. She’d tell me that Mother hasn’t been well lately, and then they’d invite me to the house for dinner and they’d act simply angelic and rather pitiful, and then I’d come back. I always do; it’s happened before. I know I’m weak, but it’s stronger than my intelligence.”
“Of course that’s one thing I’ll never be able to understand. How anyone could stand that house for two hours passes my comprehension, and you’ve been living there all your life. How do you do any work?”
“I don’t,” she says, simply. “I haven’t really done anything definite since the last election. You can’t work any conviction into your speeches if there are a lot of materialists around all the time. Oh, I ought to starve! How can I go on pretending like this?”
“Never mind. You’re getting there. There’s nothing wrong with a person that could get away from her environment as completely as you have. But I can see that it’s a struggle.”
“Thank you,” she says, gratefully. You walk on in silence.
“Martha,” you say at last, “I know one way out.”