Still intent upon her work, and with her head inclined so that he saw only a softened angle of face beneath the crown of glowing light-hued hair, she made answer, speaking more slowly than was usual with her, and with frequent pauses:
“I don’t think you know all my story, though it is a part of your family’s history on both sides. You remember my father—a sporting, horse-racing man of the world, and you know that my mother died when I was a baby. You knew me here, one summer, as a visiting cousin, and we played and quarrelled as children do. Now you know me again as your brother’s wife—but that is all. You know nothing of the rest—of how my father, proud about me as he was common in other things, kept me mewed up among governesses and housekeepers in one part of the house, while his flash companions rioted in another part; of how my wretched, chafing girlhood was spent among servants and tutors, with not so much as a glimpse of the world outside, like any Turkish girl; of how, when your brother, because he was a cousin, did become the one friend of my father’s who might be invited into the drawing room, and be introduced to me, and took a fancy that he would like to marry me, I welcomed even such a chance for emancipation, and almost cried for joy; and of how I woke up afterward—no, this is what you do not know.” There was a considerable pause here. “And I do not know why I tell this to you now, except that I want you to understand.”
“I do understand, Isabel.”
As a matter of fact he did not understand at all, but he thought he did, which, for present purposes, came to the same thing.
“And you can realize,” she went on, “how I feel at the thought of staying here the rest of my life—or, even if we go elsewhere—of having my life mapped out for me without any regard to my wishes and aspirations, while you are just pluming your wings for soaring, and can fly as high as you like with no one to gainsay you. Oh, what it must be to be a man!” She was looking up at him now, with enthusiasm supplanting the repining in her eyes. “And you love your work, so, too! You are so clever and capable! You can be anything you like in your profession—and it is impossible that I should ever be anything that I want to be.”
A month ago, when he first came to the farm, this calm assumption of his ability to carve whatever part he desired out of the journalistic cake would have fallen upon Seth like cruel and calculated sarcasm. As it was, he winced a little under its exaggeration, but the substance pleased him. He squared his shoulders unconsciously as he answered:
“Well, I am only at the threshold as yet, but if there is any such thing as doing it, I am going to push my way on. It doesn’t seem so easy always, when you are right in the thick of the fight, but now, after my rest here, I feel like an eagle refreshed. I am full of new ideas and ambitions. I owe a good deal of it to Ansdell, I suppose. You never saw such a fellow for making everybody believe as he does, and take an exalted view of things, and long to be doing something great. John prescribed him to me as a doctor would some medicine, and I took him more or less under protest, but I feel immensely better already.”
Isabel took only a languid interest in the inspiring qualities of this prodigy, and reverted to her own grievance:
“Yes, you will go and conquer your position. I will stay here and count those miserable poplars across the road—did you ever see a more monotonous row?—and work anti-macassars for no one to see, and mope my heart out. Why, do you know, I haven’t one single correspondent!”
The full enormity of the situation thus revealed was lost upon Seth, who had never written more than half-a-dozen letters in his life, and did not see why people who did not have to write letters should want to do so. But he said “Indeed!” as compassionately as he could.