I went into my room and blew out my candle. The warm summer air came in between the white curtains. I knelt down beside my bed; an old habit, long discontinued. I was too much moved to pray, but I continued to kneel there a long time listening to the soft shouldering of the maples against the wall outside the window. Far within me there was something which inarticulately knew that whatever the world might think of me, in spite of what I had confessed to Pauline, I was a good woman; I had loved Helmeth Garrett with the kind of love by which the world is saved. Past all loss and forsaking, past loneliness and longing, there was something which had stirred in me which would never waken to a lighter occasion; and whether great love like that is the best thing that can happen to us or the most unusual, it had placed me forever beyond the reach of futility and cheapness.
All this was several years ago. Jerry and I are the best of friends and I am far too busy a woman to miss out of my life anything Pauline Mills could have contributed to it. Besides, I am very much taken up with my nieces and nephews. Forester's oldest boy shows a creditable talent for the stage, and I have him at school here where I can watch him. I shall try him out on the road next summer. Effie's husband is in the legislature now, and Effie looks to see him governor. I am very fond of my sister; we grow together. I owe it to her to have found ways of making things easier for women who must tread my path of work and loneliness. It is partly at her suggestion that I have written this book, for Effie is very much of the opinion that the world would like to go right if somebody would only show it how. Sarah also added her word.
"It is the fact of your telling, whether they believe you or not, of your not being ashamed to tell, that is going to help them," she insists. "At any rate it will help other women to speak out what they think, unashamed. Most women are not thinking at all what they are very willing to be thought of as thinking."
I am the more disposed to take their word for it, since as they are both happy, they cannot be supposed to have the fillip of discontent. Sarah left the stage a year after Mr. Lawrence's death, to marry a banker from Troy, and she has never regretted it. She calls her oldest girl Olivia. It is the sane and sympathetic contact with the common destiny, which I get at her house and my sister's that keeps me from the resort of successive and inconsequent passions, such as fill the void in the lives of too many women who are under the necessity of producing daily the materials of fire. But you must not understand me to blame women for taking that path when so many are closed to them. Haven't they been told immemorially that loving is their proper function, their only one?
Last year I walked in a suffrage parade because Effie wrote me that it was my duty, and the swing of it, the banners flying, the proud music, set gates wide for me on fields of new, inspiring experience ... all the paths that lead to the Shining Destiny ... why shouldn't women walk in them? I should think some of them might lead less frequently to bramble and morass.
"And after all," said Jerry, a day or two ago when I had read him some pages of my book, "you have only told your own story, you haven't found out why all the rest of us run so afoul of personal disaster. We, I mean, who as you say, nourish the world toward the larger expectation."
"And after all," said I, "what is an artist but a specialist in human experience, and how can we find out how the world is made except by falling afoul of it?"
"If when we fall we didn't pull the others down with us! I'm willing to learn, but why should others have to pay so heavily for my schooling? Where's the justice in making us so that we can't do without loving and then not let us be happy in it?"