"You have no right to ask a woman to go there with you—not to stay," she added quickly.
His smile passed.
"You're right again. Unless I could find a woman who loves the wilderness as I do."
"That is out of the question," she replied. "No woman loves the wilderness—as a home. All women love cities and streets and children." She had a young person's readiness to generalize, and pitilessly flung these hopeless truisms at him. He arose, apparently made sadder by them. He sighed.
"But civilization carries such terrible suffering with it."
Rose went to her room and looked at her other letters of introduction. Should she present them? What would be the use. The scene with Dr. Herrick had not been pleasant; true, it had apparently brought her a friend, but it was a rigorous experience, and she hardly felt it worth while at the moment to go through another such scene to win another such friend.
She fell to looking over her manuscripts. They were on lined paper, stitched together at the top. They were imitative, of course, and leaned toward the Elizabethan drama, and toward Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, so far as verse-form went. There were also essays which she had written at college, which inquired mournfully, who will take the place of the fallen giants, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson? She had eloquent studies of Hugo and valiant defences of Dickens. She reflected in her writing (naturally) all the conventional positions in literature. She stood upon the graves of the dead as if she feared they might be desecrated.
She was a pupil, and as a pupil she had considered literature as something necessarily afar off, in England or France, in Boston and Cambridge, though she had come to think Chicago might be a place suitable for a humble beginning, but that it might be the subject of literature had not occurred to her. She had never known a person who had written a book. Professor Ellis and the President had written scientific treatises, but, not being a fool, she knew there was a difference between getting an article into a country weekly and getting into a big daily, to say nothing of the great magazines. She wished for advice. Being out in the world now, something must be done with her writings.
These essays were good and thoughtful, they represented study and toil, but they did not represent her real self, her real emotions, any more than her reading represented her real liking. Her emotions, big, vital, contemporaneous, had no part in this formal and colorless pedantry. Of this she was still ignorant, however.
She was sorting her poems over and dreaming about them when Mary came home.