“Oh, personally, I’ll always prefer the streets. I’m a natural born gutter-pup.”
“You’re naturally the most wonderful woman in the world and you’re meant for the truest and best things.”
“Don’t praise me, please, Anthony. I hate it.”
“Then don’t say such silly things.”
He walked up and down and then returned to her, still trying to plead impersonally.
“I’m not a bully or a reactionary—I don’t want to run anybody’s life. I don’t believe in this male superiority stuff either. And I’ve been with you and Marjorie enough to have an enormous respect for women. She’s not tied down. She’s the freest woman I know.”
“Yes, because she is doing what she wants to do.”
Gradually in this way a choice was placed before Horatia, a choice of lives. She evaded the main issue, the issue which would ultimately make choice for her—that must be which man drew her most. She compared lives as if it were a problem in sociology she had before her. Anthony had respected her desire to have him keep from definite questions but she knew that he was laying his life before her. And she reviewed it. She saw that she and Anthony together and others like them, mental aristocrats, secure in material things, could take their places in a society of flux and uncertainty, and be beacon lights of strength and security, she as a woman, raising woman’s functions to fine dignity, strong in love and content and purpose. She saw herself taking up the burdens which other cheaper women laid down, dignifying a home and wifehood and maternity.
And on the other side stretched life with Jim, a life of puzzles, inquiries, unsolved problems, a life among the problems of the world, solving them not by keeping unsullied but by enduring with them, by growing weary and impatient and often arriving at no solution. And the domestic side of life with Jim would be a life without great regularity or great certainty of ease—how could she fit Jim into domestic routine and how could she fit in these strange friends of Jim’s whom he refused to give up, into a life of dignity and order? Even against his protests, the work would call her back to it and she would have to adjust her wifehood and child-bearing to all this—and there would never be enough money so that they could live in the careless ease which took money for granted. Jim’s side seemed to suffer in comparison with the other life and yet why was it that she did not make a decision against it and put it out of her mind?
Maud came out into the open a little more. She talked Anthony. And once she became rather fundamental in her talk—for Maud.