“Oh, but I do sympathize,” he cried, remorsefully. “I think it is very fine of you.”
She shook her head, her smile fading.
“You don’t—you can’t. You are outside the circle of the material worries of the poor; or, what is worse, the genteel. And nobody but a woman can know the tragic pettiness of the life-struggle for single girls—the stifled aspirations, the abortive longings, the tears in the night. Christ would have understood. But He was not a man.”
He saw the blur of emotion veil her eyes ere she turned her head hastily away. He felt his own sight growing dim; an understratum of his consciousness admired the flow of her language, and divined platform experiences. He had never before thought of her as clever.
She recovered herself in a moment, and resumed, playfully:
“No, if you were a black-and-white artist you would have sketched Mrs. Verder with corkscrew ringlets and crying for trousers. We do want the Franchise and the right to dress as we please, but these are only incidental aspects of the movement for the independence of women, though they lend themselves most readily to caricature. The woman of the future is simply the working woman. All we really want is to make girls economically independent of marriage; able to choose their mates from love instead of selling themselves for a home.”
He could not meet her frank eyes; he was suddenly reminded of his own marriage. What would this stainless soul think of him if she knew he had sold himself, or—worse—if she knew why he had come to her this afternoon? He murmured, surveying the carpet, that he knew life was hard for girls, but that he hoped she at least had not been unhappy.
“I? Oh! I’ve been as happy as the next girl, though I’ve had my trials,” she said, cheerily, between smiles and tears. “But I am grateful to God for them, else I should never have learned to sympathize as I do, and I should not have served the Master. My life might have been wasted in mere happiness.”
Mere happiness! The phrase went through him like a sword.
“But you had no need to work for a living,” he said, dubiously.