“Wouldn’t the dear old pater have enjoyed G? She’s just the kind of oddity he doted on. Fancy her teaching music of all things. It must be only scales and exercises. I think she’s splendid to see the incongruity herself, and refuse to call it music when she dare be honest. What a grotesque figurehead she looks, chum, doesn’t she? I thoroughly enjoyed talking to her.”
But Ethel could not answer to his cheeriness just yet.
“Basil, why are so many humans just mere letters of the alphabet in the general scheme?”
She had slid into a sitting posture now, and leaned her head against his arm.
“It doesn’t matter so much about the men; they can go out into the world and make friends by the way, and become something more if they wish; but what of the single women, who have to work for their living, and have nothing much to look forward to but a sort of terror as to what will become of them when they can work no more? If you could see some of them at the office, with that drawn, dried-up, joyless look, scraping and saving and starving for dread of the years ahead: it’s so unfair, so grossly, hideously, cruelly unfair.”
“It perhaps won’t be when you see all round it, chum. It is so obvious we only see one side of things here. When we see the other side it will all look so different.”
“Perhaps, but in the meantime they are here, now, in our very midst, all these unwanted women. If you saw as much of them as I do, I think you would feel even the letter had better not have been supplied. A blank would have meant so much less suffering. A penniless woman without attractiveness, and with neither husband, child, nor father wanting her, is such an anomaly. She just drags on, hating her loneliness, dreading and fearing the future or illness, merely existing because she is called upon to do so for no apparent reason.”
“But she can always make friends, chum. If she is kind and cheerful and hopeful she will soon win love of some sort.”
“Yes… yes… but, Basil, to be all that, when one is weighed down with the inequality of chance and a horror of the future calls for a heroine; and Life didn’t bother to make many of them heroines. She doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to them at all. Orphans and widows and sick people she remembers; but the lonely, ageing, hardened, unwanted spinster! It sometimes seems to me it is just sentimentality to be persuaded everything is all right.
“I don’t believe it is all right. There’s too much useless, silent aching, and useless, passionate resentment over circumstances that it seems should either never have been, or should be remedied if any Guiding Hand has power. I have determination and I’m strong, Basil; the future doesn’t frighten me badly yet, but when you are gone, I feel as if the loneliness might half kill me, and as if then I ought to have the right to become a blank if I wish, since I was never consulted about becoming a letter in the great alphabet.”