"But Richard will always exalt his wife."
"Yes. He will exalt everything that is his—simply because he possesses self-respect himself, raised to the n-th power. You will be the best-dressed, the best-housed, the best-established woman in your set. And that set will be wherever he chooses to place you. If he rises politically you will have a brilliant course marked out before you; if he does not you will still have a life of luxury, leading the smart set in Charlotteville."
"Don't," I begged, for she had spoken half in earnest about the life in Charlotteville. "You know how I hate just plain society—the kind that Mrs. Chalmers and Evelyn love. It would be the extinction of me. Above everything else on earth I love freedom. But I also love the 'paths of glory.'"
"And, don't you see, dear child, that if you tread these paths with a man as much older than yourself as Richard Chalmers is, and especially a man whose disposition tends toward tyranny, that you will march to the music that he directs?"
"Well, if it's the music of his voice I shall bow my head and face the east whenever I hear it."
"Don't think that I am a croaker, but I am a married woman and older than you," she kept on, ignoring the extravagance of my last sentence, "and I may be able to give you some advice that will help you. You are a girl of an intense nature, very candid, very kind-hearted, but alas, very impractical. Having been reared as you were you are naturally self-centered and visionary, with a capacity for development, but as yet you have not reached any very high degree of serenity or strength, in spite of all the pencil-marks you put in your little volume of Marcus Aurelius. You have never had to practise sacrifice, patience, endurance—any of the virtues which make a woman, and without which life is a vain thing."
"All those things will come with—marriage," I said.
"With marriage where the man recognizes an equal partnership," she amended.
"Cousin Eunice, you have no idea of what Richard thinks of me," I explained, feeling very grave myself by this time, but wishing to set her right in regard to my standing with my lover. "Of course all of you still think of me as being ridiculously young and irresponsible, somehow, just because I have never, as you say, been put to any test. But Richard knows that I am a woman, capable of knowing my own mind—and he adores me—just as I do him."
"Dear," our voices had sunk low, and she came over and laid her hand upon my arm, "an adoring husband is a delightful thing—between the pages of a book. But you will need a man who loves and trusts you."