She laughed again, hysterically. "I'm not. I'm not. I'm only tired. Worn out. I'm going to bed. Don't come up, Ronnie. Don't come up." And, kissing him, she ran from the room.
"Poor Alie," thought the man, "it's been too much for her."
6
Alone in the drawing-room, Ronnie sat staring at the thick wad of papers, and at the envelope which topped them. "To my son," read the writing on the envelope; the well-known handwriting with the little loops at the top of the "o's" and the upright triangles of the "m's" and "n's."
He took up and opened the envelope. Inside of it, folded, lay a single sheet of note-paper: "Don't be unhappy, Ronnie. Don't blame yourself. This book is my last effort for you and Aliette. I feel it is your way to freedom. Use it as you and James Wilberforce think best. I have just had news of your great success. It makes me very proud. Your Mother."
Ronnie's eyes blurred, as Julia's eyes had blurred when her weak hands penciled the uneven lines. Puzzled and miserable--his heart choking in his mouth--he turned from the letter to the papers. The papers were in typescript; six pads, each holed and taped.
"'Man's Law,'" read the topmost paper of all; "'The Story of a Wrong,' By Julia Cavendish: and by her dedicated to all those of her own sex who have suffered and are suffering injustice."
Julia's son picked the top pad from the manuscript, turned over the title-page, and began to read his mother's preface.
For a few lines he read aimlessly, as folk obsessed by grief read, their thoughts wandering from the written word. Then, with one paragraph, the words gripped him, so that he forgot even his grief.
"All my life," read the paragraph, "I have believed in the sanctity of the Christian marriage tie. Believing that the oath taken by a man and a woman before their God--'so long as ye both shall live'--might only be set aside by death, I made the safeguarding of that oath a fetish and a shibboleth. The purpose of this book is to undo, so far as in me lies, the teachings of my former works on the marriage question; and I embrace this purpose the more firmly because it has been brought home to me by personal experience that there are and must always be many cases in which the application of a rigid doctrine leads to misery. Therefore I have felt it my duty--a duty not undertaken lightly--to combat that rigid doctrine; and to plead, in substitution for a code which I now believe un-Christian, the doctrine of 'The Right to Married Happiness.'"