“I am loafing my life away”
“The devil might have me,” she mused, “if he came in some guises.”
“You think you’re joking, but you’re not,” he came back in his characteristic bluntness. “Beatrice jested in exactly the same tone. ‘I may sit in a corner,’ she sighed, ‘and cry heigh-ho for a husband!’—but gave herself mightily away then. And do you remember Margaret’s reply? ‘Methinks you look with your eyes as other women do,’ said she. Now you, Miss Levering, you want to marry; of course, you do. It’s as natural a desire as hunger. ‘You look with your eyes as other women do.’ Millions of women feel exactly as you do; and, alack, millions for some confounded civilized reason don’t get the chance; or they won’t take a chance when they get one. If I were you I’d learn to do something—fill your mind with an absorbing occupation, basket weaving, rug making, study, writing—something; act as if you were never to catch the infection, or whatever it is.... That’s what I’m doing.... Why don’t you be a librarian?”
“You are the frankest man I know,” she spoke after a moment’s contemplation of his earnest face. “I believe you are right.... I am loafing my life away. And I’m useless as—” she shut her lips together firmly. Tears glistened in the lamp-light.
He leaned forward with great brotherly sympathy.
“I did not mean to hurt—”
“Oh, no! no! no! You? You hurt? My dear, dear man! You haven’t the power to hurt—you are so transparent and sincere. It’s—it’s the devil in me, I suppose,” she laughed nervously, “that did the stabbing.... But what is a woman to do? Sit and wait for some accidental man to give her the only thing she has been made fit for? I wish I did have a job. But, lordy! wouldn’t there be a roar if I hired out! Father Levering would have a stroke!”
She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Let’s go out in the air,” she suggested.