"Why do you go on thinking about insanity? Don't you see you only did what every woman does? After all, every woman who ever bore a child submitted to the preliminaries. Didn't she, now?"
"Preliminaries! My God, mother! How you do talk! You're so high and holy you never know what I mean! Sometimes I feel as if there was a gulf between us—a great wide ocean!"
"Oh, Martha!"
"I do. You can't understand, mammie, you're so good. I don't know how you could have had a child like me!"
That statement explained a good deal of Martha's conduct. She had been acting exactly as if she had been acutely and unhappily conscious of her separation from her mother, and Emily tried to reason her out of it.
"We are infinitely nearer each other than we were last summer, child!"
But that was an unfortunate way of putting it. "Oh, don't say last summer to me, please!" Martha cried.
A day or two later she announced, dryly: "There's no use of my writing away at that novel. I don't know how. But I'm going to learn how. It isn't so easy as I thought. I'm going to start in at the University of Chicago the first of April. I'm going to study English."
She plainly wasn't asking permission; she wasn't going to tolerate advice; she had made up her mind. And Emily, who had been wondering what in the world to suggest for the immediate future, was relieved. It might be a very good thing. It would be so great a change of life; it would supply new food for thought. She had not the vaguest idea that the novel would ever come to completion.
She said, "Well, that's an idea. But you must come home for a few days, child! To get your things, at least."