She nodded and exhibited her embroidery.
“This is all I’m fit for.”
“Don’t say that. It isn’t fair to yourself, and it isn’t true. I wish you would let me take you in hand. I have had boys who have felt just as you do, until I enticed them really to get started at something.”
She agreed that it sounded exciting, but Petruchio might come along; one was never without hope; and then, smash! would go all the toil.
He pondered over that, and questioned why a woman’s occupation should go smash! just because she married.
“Women don’t want any other occupation,” she confessed. “I don’t.”
“I bet a dollar it’s pure use and wont!” he exclaimed. “Nobody can tell what is just custom and what is not, until after we’re dead a thousand years. Women don’t throw themselves into careers with the same daring energy as men, because they have to keep such a terrible look-out for marriage. At any moment, from around the corner, as you once said, their future may assail them. It’s almost as if a young man got up in the morning a barrel-maker and by night found himself a deep-sea diver! That’s disconcerting. I should think the excitement of guessing what might happen would play havoc with that cooperage business.”
They speculated on the uncertainty of a girl’s life; uncertain until some man decided for her.
“You see,” Kate explained. “A boy has his fortune to make and knows it depends upon a lot of acquired qualities; and unless he’s exceptional he can predict pretty well what that fortune is going to be. All that he has to do is to look at his father. Now a girl, no matter what her father or mother may be, has every chance in the world. A prince might choose her—haven’t royal dukes married chorus girls?—or the grocer’s apprentice, or the next governor of the State, or—the head of the division of English.”
He acknowledged the point, but his mind was concentrated on something else.