"That's true of everybody's circle:—mine, yours, everybody's. But you chafe so. You blow the coals with your breath."
"I don't need to blow the coal. It burns without that.... Let me tell you, Hagar. There are two kinds of people in the world. The people who are half or maybe two thirds the way out of the pit and the mire and the slough and the shadow so thick you can cut it! They are rising still, and their garments are getting clean and white, and they can see the wonderful round landscape, and they look at it with calm, wide eyes. They're nearly out; they're more or less spectators. The other kind—they're the poor, dull, infuriated actors. They're still in; they can hardly see even the rim of the pit. The first kind wants to help and does help. It's willing for the others to lay hold of its hands, its skirts, to drag out by. It's willing as an angel, and often the others wouldn't get out at all if it didn't give aid. But it's seen, of course, and it's away beyond.... People like Elizabeth Eden, for instance.... But the other kind—my kind.—It's all personal with us yet—we're fighting and loving and hating, down here in the muck and turmoil—all of us who are yet devils, and those who are half-devils, and those of us who are just getting vision and finding the stepping-stones—the animal and the half-animal, and those who've only got pointed ears—all resenting and striking out and trampling one another, knowing, some of us, that there are better things and yet not knowing how to get the shining garments; others not caring—Oh, I tell you, life's a bubbling cauldron!"
"I know it is—deep above and deep below. But—"
Rachel rose, went to the window, and stood, brow against the pane, looking out. The rain dashed against the glass; all the street lights were blurred; the gusty wind shook the bare boughs of the one tree upon the block, "You don't know anything about my married life. Well, I'm going to tell you."
She came back to the fire, pushed a footstool upon the hearth, and sat down, crouching close to the flame. "I'm not yet twenty-six. I was married to Julian Bolt when I was eighteen. I'd known him—or I thought I'd known him—for years. His mother and sisters went in summer to the place in the mountains where we always went. They had money, though less than people supposed. Julian spent two weeks with them each summer. He was older than I, of course,—years older. But he used to row us girls upon the lake, and to play tennis with us, and we thought him wonderful. We called him 'The Prince.' As I got older, he rowed me sometimes alone on the lake, and now and then we went for a walk together. He was good-looking, and he dressed and talked well, and he spent money. I had heard somebody call him 'a man-about-town'—but I didn't know what 'a man-about-town' meant. There were two or three families in the place with daughters out or about to come out, and they made Julian Bolt very welcome. I never heard a father or mother there say a word against him. Mine didn't.
"Well, I came out very early, and the summer after, when I went to Virginia, to the White with my aunt, and that winter when I stayed with some army people at Old Point, he came to both places, and I knew that he came to see me. He told me so.... Of course, though I would have died rather than say it, even to myself, of course, I was expecting men to fall in love with me and ask me to marry them—and expecting to choose one, having first, of course, fallen in love with him, and be married in white satin and old lace, and be romantically happy and provided for ever after! Isn't that the thinking rôle for every properly brought-up girl? The funny thing is that I'd rather die than see Betty come upon that treadmill they've built for a girl's mind!... Well, I was on it all right....
"Julian had money, and he spent it recklessly. I didn't see how recklessly; I didn't see anything except that he liked me; for he sent me the most beautiful flowers, the most expensive bon-bons and books and magazines. It was a gay winter. Looking back, it seems to me that everybody was eating and drinking, for to-morrow we die. I knew I must fall in love—that had been suggested to me, suggested for years, just as regularly and powerfully as any hypnotist could do it. The whole world was bent on suggesting it to every young girl. You see, the world's selfish. It wants to live, and it can't live unless the young girl says Yea. And it can't leave it, or it thinks it can't, to Nature working in a certain number in her own good time. It must cheat and beguile and train the girl—every girl—every girl! I tell you, I didn't know any more about marriage than I did about life on the planet Mars! I was packing my trunks for a voyage—and I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know anything about it. No one offered me a Baedeker.... It was orange blossoms and a veil and a ring—and I didn't know what either meant—and felicitations and presents and 'Hear the golden wedding-bells!' and 'They lived happily ever after.' Julian was handsome and lavish and popular, and his family were all right, and if he had been gay he would now settle down; and father and mother were satisfied, and people said I was to be envied.... I married at eighteen. I hadn't read much. I didn't know anything. No one told me anything. Maybe the world thinks that if it tells, the young girl would say No.
"We went on a wedding-trip. I suppose sometimes a wedding-trip isn't a mockery. I'm not so bitter as not to know that often it isn't so—that often it is all right. I'm not denying love, and clean men and considerate. I'm not denying hosts of marriages that without any very high ideal are fit and decent enough. I'm not denying noble lovers—men and women—and noble marriages. I'm only saying that the other kind, the kind that's not fit nor clean nor decent and anything but noble, is so frequent and commonplace that it is rather laughable and altogether sardonic and devilish to kneel down and worship as we do the Institution of Staying Together—Staying Together at any price, even when evidently the only clean thing to do would be to Stay Apart.... My wedding-trip lasted four months. I went eighteen, and I came back old as I am now—older than I am now; for I have grown younger these last two years. My marriage wasn't the noble kind. It was the kind you couldn't make noble. It wasn't even the decent, low-order type. It was a sink and a pit and a horror."
She bent and stirred the fire. Outside the gusty wind went by and the rain beat upon the windows. "I know that there are marriages where woman is the ruiner. There are women who are wreckers. They fasten themselves on a man's life and drain it dry. They are devil-fish. They hold him in their arms and break his bones. They're among the worst of us struggling here in the pit. They're wicked women. They may be fewer than wicked men, or they may be equal in number, I don't know. I'm not talking of wicked men or wicked women in that sense. I'm talking of men whom the world does not call wicked, and of a great army of women like myself, an army that stretches round the world and through hundreds of years.... An army? It isn't an army. We never had any weapons. We were never taught to fight. We were never allowed to ask questions. We were told there were no questions to ask. We were young girls, dreaming, dropped into the wolf pack ... and it goes on all the time. It is going on now. It may be going on when Betty grows up—though I'll tell her! You needn't be afraid. I'll tell her....