Emily held her peace tightly.
Martha went on defiantly: "I've got its name and everything. I'm going to call it 'Blistered Women'—like 'Flaming Youth,' you know, or else, 'Vomiting Love'!"
"Oh, Martha!"
"Yes, you'll say 'Oh, Martha!' all right, when you read it! They used to sit and lecture us about Romance and Realism by the hour! It took them hours! Idiots! Why couldn't they just say: Romance is what men think about 'affairs,' the pigs; and Realism is what women know. Mine's going to be a realistic novel!"
Emily looked at her and repressed her sighs. She had on that racoon coat and that small rosy hat. She strode along with her chin up, defying anyone to stop her.
After that morning Emily was free to do whatever she might fancy. She might sit in the sun on the veranda and knit, or she might sit on the end of the pier and watch the waves. She might walk oyster-shell roads or sandy paths through turpentine groves. No plan of hers could entice Martha away from that writing table. She rose early, and she sat there day after day from nine till one-o'clock lunch. When Emily ventured occasionally to go into her room, she would see her writing away, and often her mouth was screwed up into hatred. Her face seemed to say that if scribbling could kill, there would be wide slaughter—not of innocents. And sometimes she would be writing savagely, with tears running down her cheeks.
Emily might like this novel-writing—and sometimes she thought it would do Martha good to get this resentment all out of her mind, expressed in words—of she might disapprove—for certainly Martha was working as she had never worked before to Emily's knowledge—which couldn't be good for her shattered nerves. But she was helpless. She knew if she commanded Martha to stop it, Martha would refuse. She had a call now; she had a mission in life. Somebody had to tell the truth. And men, of course, didn't even know what truth was, and they wouldn't tell it if they did know. Oh, they did make her sick at her stomach! Emily had to register her protest at times against Martha's description of what she was writing.
"It's NOT a nice novel, I know that. I never intended it should be; but I'll tell you right now, it's a lot nicer than things are in this world, mammie!"
In February Bob began writing of their coming home. He threatened—that was the word Martha used—to come down and see them. Emily would have welcomed him; she was lonely and unhappy. She said miserably to herself more than once that what she needed was some wise and sympathetic person with whom she might talk over Martha's plight. If Bob was neither wise nor sympathetic, he was always solicitous and tender at heart. And Martha was often irritable and unreasonable, and sometimes unconsciously cruel. She seemed at times to look upon her mother as one of the wrongs life had done her. One afternoon they were standing together at the end of the pier, looking at the opalescent sea and the flowery clouds about the sunset.
She had begun, apropos of nothing but her constant musings, "Mother, wasn't there something funny about Grandma Kenworthy?"