“Of course you put it unkindly.”
“I will not make promises for the future. The future is quite enough hampered with the past, without setting anticipatory traps and springes for unwary feet. But I refuse this promise merely on general principles. I am not about to distress you in that particular way, though I think you would only have yourselves to blame if I were.”
Miss Temperley drew another deep breath, and the colour began to return to her face.
“So far, so good,” she said. “Now tell me—Is there nothing that would make you accept your duties?”
“Even if I were to accept what you call my duties, it would not be in the spirit that you would desire to see. It would be in cold acknowledgment of the force of existing facts—facts which I regard as preposterous, but admit to be coercive.” Henriette sank wearily into her chair.
“Do you then hold it justifiable for a woman to inflict pain on those near to her, by a conduct that she may think justifiable in itself?”
Hadria hesitated for a moment.
“A woman is so desperately entangled, and restricted, and betrayed, by common consent, in our society, that I hold her justified in using desperate means, as one who fights for dear life. She may harden her heart—if she can.”
“I am thankful to think that she very seldom can!” cried Henriette.
“Ah! that is our weak point! For a long time to come, we shall be overpowered by our own cage-born instincts, by our feminine conscience that has been trained so cleverly to dog the woman’s footsteps, in man’s interest—his detective in plain clothes!”