“Not now, but how can one tell what the result of years and years of monotonous existence may be, or the effect of example? How did it happen that my mother came to feel aggrieved if her daughters claimed some right of choice in the ordering of their lives? I suppose it is because her mother felt aggrieved if she ventured to call her soul her own.”
Valeria laughed.
“But it is true,” said Hadria. “Very few of us, if any, are in the least original as regards our sorrowing. We follow the fashion. We are not so presumptuous as to decide for ourselves what shall afflict us.”
“Or what shall transport us with joy,” added Valeria, with a shrug.
“Still less perhaps. Tradition says ‘Weep, this is the moment,’ or ‘Rejoice, the hour has come,’ and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion for sorrow or for joy.”
Valeria laughed at the notion of Hadria’s being under the dictatorship of tradition, or of anything else, as to her emotions.
But Hadria held that everybody was more or less subject to the thraldom. And the thraldom increased as the mind and the experience narrowed. And as the narrowing process progressed, she said, the exhausting or vampire quality grew and grew.
“I have seen it, I have seen it! Those who have been starved in life, levy a sort of tax on the plenty of others, in the instinctive effort to replenish their own empty treasure-house. Only that is impossible. One can gain no riches in that fashion. One can only reduce one’s victim to a beggary like one’s own.”
Valeria was perturbed.
“The more I see of life, the more bitter a thing it seems to be a woman! And one of the discouraging features of it is, that women are so ready to oppress each other!”