“Your offence? But you never——”
“I did. I ceased to be myself. I put myself behind myself and allowed myself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter—the slaughter of that womanhood which I should have upheld—my womanhood, which meant the right to think for myself—the right to be a woman to love a man, and help him in his life and be loved by him and to give him children. That is how love is immortal—our children live after us, and our children’s children!... No more obedience for me, thanks; I mean to live my life. That’s all!”
“I’ll tell you what I think, Priscilla——” Rosa allowed a considerable interval to elapse before she spoke. “I’ll tell you what I think, and that is, that the awfulness of the past year has made a woman of you in this way.”
Priscilla seemed a little startled by the enunciation of this theory. She looked quickly at her companion, and then laughed queerly.
“God is too busy making worlds, universes and that, to have a moment to spare to a woman,” said she. “No, it is the man who makes the woman; and be sure that if the woman is made by the man, the man is made by the woman—by the woman and by the children that she gives him. And yet—here we are.”
“Yes,” said Rosa, “here we are. Oh, there is one thing certain: God made primroses.”
CHAPTER IV
They had been walking along the narrow hilly road that branched off from the broad highway between the little town of Framsby and the villages of Dean Grange, Beastlington, and Elfrisleigh, and now they were standing on the ridge of the Down that overlooked the lovely valley of the Wadron. The day was one toward the end of April, when everything in nature, including men and women and healthy girls, feels stirred with the impulses of the Spring, and while all fancy they are living only in the joy of the present, they are yet giving their thoughts to the future. Everything in nature was showing signs of thinking of the future. The early flowers were looking after themselves, doing their best to offer allurements to the insects which they trusted to carry their love tokens for them from stamen to pistil; and the pale butterflies became messenger Cupids all unconsciously. But the birds were doing their own love-making. Every bough was vocal, every brake quivered in harmony. In that green lane there was the furtive flutter of wings. Some nests had been built and padded for the eggs, and here and there a stranger looking carefully through the interspaces among the glossy leaves could see the glitter of the beady eye of a hiding blackbird, and, with greater pains, the mottling of a thrush’s throat. Love-making and home-making on all sides—this is what the Spring meant, and it was probably because she was so closely in touch with the season and its instincts that one of the girls had spoken out some of the thoughts that made her warm as though her thoughts were infants of the Spring, to be cherished very close to her body.