“I am going to think this matter out to a practical issue, if it takes me all night!” said Mrs. Hiller, positively. “It may be that I am rowing against wind and tide, as you say, but I will hold to the oars until I am hopelessly swamped, or reach land!”
Her husband laughed. Not sneeringly; but as good-natured men always do laugh when women talk of finding their way out of a labyrinth by means of the clue of argument.
“You will accomplish no more than your conventions and women’s rights books”—
“Don’t call them mine!” protested the wife.
“I speak of the sex at large, my love. No more, then, than women’s rights books and conventions have achieved. All their battle for the equality of the sexes; the liberation of women from the necessity of marriage as a means of livelihood; for more avenues of remunerative labor, and the acknowledgment of the dignity of the same—now that the smoke has cleared away, and combatants and spectators can look about them—is seen to have resulted in nothing, or next to nothing. You have encouraged a few more women to paint poor pictures, and spoil blocks and plates in attempts to practise engraving; put some at bookkeepers’ desks where they are half paid; crowded the board-rooms of our public schools with applicants at the rate of a hundred for each vacancy; induced a similar rush upon telegraph offices, and every other place where ‘light, lady-like labor’ can be procured; brought down, rather than raised the salaries in each of these departments of industry—and made marriage more than ever the summum bonum of every thinking workwoman—the shining gate that is to give her liberation from ill-requited toil.”
“Philip! how you exaggerate!”
“Not in the least, my dear, sanguine wife! Who puts on her rose-colored spectacles whenever the subject of ‘woman’s emancipation’ is brought forward. I have studied this matter as closely as you have; hopefully, for a while, but, of late, with the fast-growing conviction that Nature and Society yoked are too strong a team for you to pull against. Combat the assertion as you will,—it is natural for a woman to look forward to matrimony as her happiest destiny; to desire, and to bring it about by every means which seems to her consistent with modesty and self-respect. And to this conclusion Society holds her by the refusal to receive into the ‘best circles’ her who earns her living by her own labor. Mrs. Million treads the charmed arena by virtue of her husband’s wealth. But, when Mrs. Sangpur is envious of her dear friend’s latest turn-out in equipage, dress, or furniture, she recurs, tauntingly, to the time when Mrs. Million was a work-girl in Miss Fitwell’s establishment, and shrugs her patrician shoulders over ‘new people.’ As Miss Fitwell’s assistant, forewoman, and successor, Miss Bias—now Mrs. Million—were she rich, refined, beautiful, could yet never hope for a card even to one of Mrs. Sangpur’s mass parties.”
“But there are distinctions of social degree, Philip, which must be maintained. You don’t bring your bootmaker home to dine with Judge Wright, or Honorable Senator Rider.”
“I am not a reformer, my love. When my bootmaker fits himself for the society of those you name, he will be welcomed by them, and his early history referred to as an honor, not disgrace. The annals of Court and Congress will tell you this. To return to the original question; I insist there is a want of practicalness—I won’t say of common sense—in your reform, as heretofore conducted; that no one woman in five thousand, especially in what are called the higher walks of life, is able to support herself, or would be allowed by popular sentiment to do so, were she able. There is a screw loose somewhere, and very loose at that. I, for one, am never rid of the rattle. Maybe, because I am the father of three daughters. If I had sons, I should be condemned by the entire community; stand convicted at the bar of my own conscience, if I had not trained each of them to some trade or profession. As it is, the case stands thus: I may live long enough to accumulate a fair competency for each of my girls, a sum, the interest of which will support her comfortably; for she, being a woman, will never increase the bulk of the principal. My more reasonable hope is to see her married to an energetic business man, or one who has inherited a fortune and knows how to take care of it. This accomplished, parental responsibility is supposed to end, so far as provision for the life that now is, goes. If her husband should fail, or die a poor man—the Lord help her and her children—if I cannot!”
He was not talking flippantly now. As he knocked the ashes from the tip of his cigar into the grate, his face was grave to sorrowfulness.