“I have not known you for seven years, but I am going to poke your fire,” said Henriette, when they were established in Hadria’s room.
“I never thought you would wait so long as that,” was Hadria’s ambiguous reply.
Then Henriette opened her batteries. She talked without interruption, her companion listening, agreeing occasionally with her adversary, in a disconcerting manner; then falling into silence.
“It seems to me that you are making a very terrible mistake in your life, Hadria. You have taken up a fixed idea about domestic duties and all that, and are going to throw away your chances of forming a happy home of your own, out of a mere prejudice. You may not admire Mrs. Gordon’s existence; for my part I think she leads a very good, useful life, but there is no reason why all married lives should be like hers.”
“Why are they, then?”
“I don’t see that they are.”
“It is the prevailing type. It shows the way the domestic wind blows. Fancy having to be always resisting such a wind. What an oblique, shorn-looking object one would be after a few years!”
Henriette grew eloquent. She recalled instances of women who had fulfilled all their home duties, and been successful in other walks as well; she drew pictures in attractive colours of Hadria in a home of her own, with far more liberty than was possible under her parents’ roof; and then she drew another picture of Hadria fifteen years hence at Dunaghee.
Hadria covered her face with her hands. “You who uphold all these social arrangements, how do you feel when you find yourself obliged to urge me to marry, not for the sake of the positive joys of domestic existence, but for the merely negative advantage of avoiding a hapless and forlorn state? You propose it as a pis-aller. Does that argue that all is sound in the state of Denmark?”
“If you had not this unreasonable objection to what is really a woman’s natural destiny, the difficulty would not exist.”