“It may appear to us unjust,” she went on. “It may be unjust. God does not seem in his infinite pleasure to have considered our ideas of justice in making the world. Perhaps if he had there would be no women in the world at all! Ah, Nance, my dear, it’s no use kicking against the pricks. We were made to bear, to endure, to submit, to suffer. Any attempt to escape this great law necessarily ends in misery. Suffering is not the worst evil in the world. Yielding to brutal force is not the worst, either. I sometimes think, from what I’ve observed in my life, that there are depths of horror known to men, depths of horror through which men are driven, compared with which all that we suffer at their hands is paradise!”
Her eyes had so strange and illumined an expression as she uttered these words that Nance could not help shuddering.
“We, too,” she murmured, “fall into depths of horror sometimes and it is men who drive us into them.”
Mrs. Renshaw did not seem to hear her. She went on dreamily.
“We can console ourselves. We have our duties. We have our little things which must be done. God has given to these little things a peculiar consecration. He has touched them with his breath so that they are full of unexpected consolations. There are horizons and vistas in them such as no one who hasn’t experienced what I mean can possibly imagine. They are like tiny ferns or flowers—our ‘little things,’ Nance, growing at the bottom of a precipice.”
The girl could restrain herself no longer.
“I don’t agree with you! I don’t, I don’t!” she cried. “Life is large and infinite and splendid and there are possibilities in it for all of us—for women just as much as men; just, just as much!”
Mrs. Renshaw smiled at her with a look in her face that was half pitiful and half ironical. “You don’t like my talk of ‘little things.’ You want great things. You want Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus! Even your sacrifice—if you do sacrifice yourself—must be striking, stirring, wonderful! Ah, my dear, my dear, wait a little, wait a little. A time will come when you’ll learn what the secret is of a woman’s life on this earth.”
Nance made a desperate gesture of protest. Something treacherous in her own heart seemed to yield to her companion’s words but she struggled vigorously against it.
“What we women have to do,” Mrs. Renshaw continued pitilessly, “is to make some one need us—need us with his whole nature. That is what is meant by loving a man. Everything else is mere passion and tends to misery. The more submissive we are, the more they need us. I tell you, Nance, the deepest instinct in our blood is the instinct to be needed. When a person needs us we love him. Everything else is mere animal instinct and burns itself out.”