The matron put in her sentence, sandwiched between sighs.
“You will find the two incompatible. Once married, a woman’s life is merged in that of another. She has no volition, no thought, no name of her own.”
“The married woman does not possess herself!” cried the spinster in shrill volubility. “She effaces her individuality in uttering the promise to ‘serve and obey’—vile words that belong rather to the harem of the sixteenth century than to the home of the nineteenth. Somebody else has reported me in yesterday’s World and Herald, so I may as well tell you that I brought forward a motion in Sorosis last Monday, that the club should wear crape upon the left arm for thirty days, dating from this evening, in affectionate memory of one of our youngest and most brilliant members. Talk of the self-immolation of the Jesuit who changes the name his mother gave him and resigns the right of private judgment and personal desire in joining the Order! He is riotously free by comparison with the model wife. Her assumption of the conventual veil is mournfully symbolical.”
Another wave of newcomers swept her onward, still hortatory and gesticulatory.
She was never spoken of again by the bridal pair until the marriage day was a fortnight old.
They were pacing the wooden esplanade in front of the Hygeia Hotel at Old Point Comfort, basking in the December sunshine. The sea air had set roses in Agnes’ cheeks; her lips were full and red, her eye sparkled with soft content, and her step was elastic. Barton, surveying these changes with the undisguised satisfaction of a man who has secured legally the right to exhibit his prize, took his cigar from his mouth to say carelessly:
“By the way, I have never asked the name of the painted-and-powdered party who gave a parlor lecture upon Jesuits and harems the night we were married.”
“It was Miss Marvel,” said Agnes, laughing. “She is an eccentric woman, and as I need not tell you, indiscreet and flippant in talk, letting her theories and spirits run away with her judgment. But she accomplishes a great deal of good in her way and has many fine traits of character. It is a pity she does herself such injustice.”
“Humph! Does she belong to the sisterhood of letters?”
“In a way—yes. Her articles upon the Working Girls of New York, written for newspaper publication two years ago, attracted so much attention that they were collected into a volume last summer.”