“Little girl,” she said, and all her motherhood rushed 116 forward to seize, as it had ever done, those “scraps” of others’ lives, “suppose the time should come when there would be in your life another––someone besides Larry? Why has all this come so sudden to you?”
Northrup seemed to loom in the room, just beyond the fire’s glow. Her fear was taking shape.
“Oh! dearie, I might then ask Larry to release me from my promise. My doctor used to say one could do that, but if he would not, why, then––I’d keep my bargain as far as I could. But–––” and here Mary-Clare rose and flung her arms above her head. The action was jubilant, majestic. “Oh! the wonder of it all; to be free to be myself and prove what I think is right without having to take another’s idea of it. I’ll listen; I’ll try to understand and be patient––but it cannot be wrong, Aunt Polly, the thing I’ve done––since this great feeling of wings has come to me instead of heavy feet! Why, dear, I want something more than––than the things women think are theirs. We don’t know what is ours until we try.”
“And fail, my child?” Aunt Polly was crying.
“Yes; and fail sometimes and be hurt––but paying and going on.”
“And leaving your man behind you?”
“Aunt Polly”––Mary-Clare looked down upon the kind, quivering face––“a woman’s man cannot be left behind. He’ll be beside her somehow. If she stays back, as I’ve tried to do, she wouldn’t be his woman! That’s the dreadful trouble with Larry and me. But, dearie, it isn’t always a man in a woman’s life.”
“But the long, lonely way, child!” Polly was retracing her own denied womanhood.
“It need not be lonely, dear, when we women find––other things. They will count. They must.”
“What other things, Mary-Clare?”