Generations of Grants and Ferrises living in holy wedlock speaking through her—rash current phrases, fine modern leniencies dropping from her before the facts of furtive illicit love and adultery. The education of modern thought and modern living dashed to the ground by the healthy instinct of race, healthy still in spite of its soaking in strong, acidulous, dangerous ideas. Poor Horatia—so feeble in her humiliation and yet stronger than ever before because there was only one thing that she could do. Living with Grace was not a debatable issue. It was an impossibility.
“Heaven knows that I don’t want to live with you,” said Grace hotly. “But I would like to have you see that wherever you turn you can’t do more than keep your own skirts clean. You can’t guarantee the skirts of others.”
She walked up and down furiously and Horatia, not looking at her, knew nevertheless how she looked. Her strong figure, her neat hair bound about her head, her smart tailored gown did not make a proper figure of passion but of restraint. But the passion was breaking through the physical restraints.
“You were born in West Park,” Grace went on, “and brought up in a quiet orderly way, told nothing ugly, seeing nothing ugly. I wasn’t. I was born in a cheap hotel in a small town. Two years afterward my mother either skipped or died. I suppose she skipped. And my father sent the woman who kept the hotel a little money to keep me. He was a travelling salesman—used to drop in now and then because I and the town were on his route. I lived in that place where people came and went—some of them decent enough—pale, dragged, gossipy women with fat, bloated men or fat, big-breasted, lazy, powdery women, and their men. They were not too attractive nor too delicate in their talk—these respectable ones. And there were others too—not decent and not caring to be. I heard things—saw things. I was well instructed in dirtiness young. And I couldn’t stand it. I broke away and went to work in a woman’s kitchen when I was fourteen. I washed dishes and cooked and made beds for domestic decency. So it was called and rated. I learned how cheap and dishonest a thing decency is. I was with that woman for two years. I helped her when her fourth child was born. And the sordidness—the hideousness of that unwelcomed birth ground some facts about modern decency into me. They rowed over that baby—talked about ‘blame’. The fears—the backbiting—the lack of love or even respect! I used to wonder what those people started on—and then and there I vowed never to marry.
“Well, I saved enough to go to High School. I had been through grammar school. I started High School when I was sixteen years old and I got through in three years. Meantime I was a ‘mother’s helper’. The irony of that phrase! I helped that mother by washing clothes and dishes and slaving way into the night sometimes. It was a hard little town. I wanted to go to college so I moved—with my package—it was a small package—of clothes to the University town—got some work, earned enough to start on and to buy some clothes and then went to the Dean to ask about working my way through. The Dean was the first woman I had ever met who seemed to care what happened to me. It was a queer experience. Funny, wasn’t it, the reputation I made in college. By the time you came on the scene I was quite a celebrity, going home for vacations with girls who were met at the stations by limousines and weaving a hazy fiction about my dead parents and good connections. Then—after college—jobs were easy.
“But I wanted other things by this time. I found myself wanting things I never had. Love—men——” Horatia, watching her now, saw her standing still, looking back at her own life with angry, thwarted eyes.
“I didn’t want marriage. I had no illusions about that. Marriage was quite the ugliest thing I had seen. But I did want a lover. And I found I could love—I can love! I’ve had three lovers in five years, and I believe in marriage less than ever. The men have all wanted me to marry them. But I won’t. People use marriage and then it uses them. It is meaningless. More and more people cheat it and pretend to hang on when they are sick of each other. When my lovers and I are through—we’re through. I tell you that that man who was here last night hates the sight of his wife. She must know it. Yet she rides in his car and takes his money and eats at his table. Isn’t that degradation?”
Horatia did not answer and Grace stopped talking too, for a while. They were aware of the awkwardness of the pared potatoes and the interrupted preparations for supper, which seemed to insist on a continued intimacy.
“Will you have supper?” asked Grace, with bitter casualness.
“I’ll help get it,” answered Horatia gently and turned her attention to details, striving, striving all the time to understand and help. They set the informal table and faced each other over it.