A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West

by Hamlin Garland

That evening he dressed himself with as much care as if he were to call upon her alone, and he dressed very well now. His clothes were substantial and fitted him well. His year's immunity from hard work had left his large hands supple and delicate of touch, and his face had attained refinement and mobility. His eyes had become more introspective and had lost entirely the ox-like roll of the country-born man. He was a handsome and dignified young man. His bearing on the street was noticeably manly and unaffected.

The lecture was in the church and the seats were all filled. It gratified him, at the same time that it hopelessly abased him to observe all this evidence of her power. As he waited for her to appear that tremor came into his hands again, and that breathlessness, and curiously enough he felt that horrible familiar sinking of the heart which he always felt just before he himself rose to speak.

Somebody started to clap hands, and the rest joined in, as two or three ladies entered the back part of the church and passed up the aisle. He looked up as they went by him, and caught a glimpse of a stately head of brown hair, modestly bent in acknowledgment of the applause, and he caught a whiff of the delicate odor of violets. His eyes followed the strong, firm steps of the young woman who walked between the two older women. There was something fine and dignified in her walk, and the odor of her dress as she passed lingered with him, but he did not feel that this was the same woman, till she turned and faced him on the platform.

He sat impassively, but his pulse leaped when her clear brown eyes running calmly over the audience seemed to fall upon him. She was the same woman, his ideal and more. She was fuller of form and the poise of her head was more womanly, but she was the same spirit that had come to be such a power and inspiration in his life.

As a matter of fact she had grown also. If she had not, she would have seemed girlish to him now; growing as he grew, she seemed the same distance beyond him. Her self-possession in the face of the audience appealed to him strongly. Something in her manner of dress pleased him, it was so individual, so like her simple, dignified, beautiful self in every line.

She spoke more quietly, more conversationally than when he heard her before, but her voice made him shudder with associated emotions. Its cadences reached deep, and the words she spoke opened long vistas in his mind. She was defending the right of women to live as human beings, to act as human beings, and to develop as freely as men.

"I claim the right to be an individual human being first and a woman afterward. Why should the accident of my sex surround me with conventional and arbitrary limitations? I claim the same right to find out what I can do and can't do that a man has. Who is to determine what my sphere is—men and men's laws or my own nature? These are vital questions. I deny the right of any man to mark out the path in which I shall walk. I claim the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that men are demanding.

"It is not a question of suffrage merely—suffrage is the smaller part of the woman-question—it is a question of equal rights. It is a question of whether the law of liberty applies to humanity or to men only. Absolute liberty bounded only by the equal liberties of the rest of humanity is the real goal of the race—not of man only, but woman too."

The ladies dimly feeling that liberty was a safe thing to cheer, clapped their hands softly under the cover of the nosier clapping of a few radicals who knew what the speaker was really saying. Bradley did not cheer—he was thinking too deeply.

"The woman question is not a political one merely, it is an economic one. The real problem is the wage problem, the industrial problem. The real question is woman's dependence upon man as the bread-winner. So long as that dependence exists there will be weakness. No individual can stand at their strongest and best while leaning upon some other. I believe with Browning and Ruskin that the development of personality is the goal of the race."