"Will I! I've always wanted to."
V
During the next weeks Catherine lunched frequently at Amy's club. "You were quite right," she told her one day. "I needed perspective. This place and these women make the whole business of my working seem matter of course. As if I'd be a fool not to. That's a more comforting feeling than my old one, that I might be only an egoistic pig."
"That's the trouble with ordinary married women," declared Amy. "They are all shut up in separate cages, until they don't have an idea what is happening outside."
"Marriage isn't a cage, exactly."
"You just aren't entirely out, yet."
"At least there is comfort in finding that other women want the same thing I want, and get it."
But marriage wasn't a cage, she thought, later. She found herself not so much imprisoned as bewildered. It's more like a labyrinth. There are ways out, if you can find them. Out, not of marriage itself, but out of the thing people have made of it—for women.
Catherine knew, when she approached her mother with her plan, that she had need of perspective and assurance. But Mrs. Spencer's comment was brief.