And drops from labour’s brow
Like pearls shall deck the heart.
Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays, all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties, to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own, supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery.
I urged her to follow their example!
“You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not care to go out?”
“With you? With Dilette?”
“No, alone.”
She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees.
“Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her out.
“It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently.