“Perhaps,” said Celia, “but not just yet, in any case. And yet—as I was going to say—I don’t quite see at present what is right for me to do. If there are many difficulties in the way, if it would cause unhappiness at home, perhaps it would be my duty to wait—to wait even for the testing myself,” and she sighed. “I don’t want to leave home for the sake of leaving home, but I do want to know if I am deceiving myself in thinking I have a gift. And father and mother are so kind and reasonable. I don’t think I need give up the idea.”
“You are very selfish, dreadfully selfish, though perhaps you don’t know it,” said Winifred. “You would make out that what you want is right just because you want it. But I, many years older than you, who have thought over these questions for the last ten years—”
“You are not many years older than I, and ten years ago you were ever so much younger than I am now. You were a child,” interrupted Celia.
”—Who have thought about these questions ever since I could think at all,” Winifred resumed calmly—for, to do her justice, she was by no means bad-tempered, and seldom lost her self-control—“am to give up my deepest and most cherished hopes, because—no, I really can’t say why! Because I want to leave the beaten track, I suppose.”
“You won’t see things any other way,” said Celia, “so it’s no use talking about it. Perhaps it may be best for you to try the experiment, though in a different way from me. Anyway, don’t let us quarrel about it, whatever we do, dearest Winifred. Of course your coming to live in London would make it all infinitely nicer for me, if,” and a troubled expression crossed her face, “if it is really right for us both to leave home.”
“There is Louise at home. She asks nothing better than to jog-trot along for ever in the same monotonous way. She is an anachronism. She would have been perfectly happy a hundred years ago, or even longer ago than that, when it never occurred to any one that a woman could want anything more exciting than her spinning-wheel and her tapestry-frame.”
“Or her napery press and pot-pourri jars,” added Celia, with a smile. “Well, after all, there is to me a wonderful charm about those days; there must have been a great deal of tenderness and delicacy about a lady’s life, which get rubbed off nowadays. And there is a good deal of sense in what Louise says. Monotony is not the worst evil. Why, lots of married women have monotonous lives.”
“If they have, it has been of their own choice,” said Winifred. “What I complain of is the being condemned to narrowness and dullness if you don’t marry. Short of marriage, a girl is allowed no other possibility of outlet.”
“But,” protested Celia, “though that may be the case for some, or many even, when there are duties that you are born into, surely it is different? And even beyond that—is it not possible that what you call dull, narrow lives, filled with stupid little odds and ends of usefulness, that don’t seem usefulness at all, may be the very discipline needed by some—may be meant for them?”
“Oh,” said Winifred impatiently, “if you are going off to the very highest grounds of all, I suppose the being an old maid in an attic may be the best discipline for old maids in attics, but it is the system of narrowing down women’s lives that is wrong. And if in their girlhood some of the old maids had rebelled, and insisted on taking their stand as men do, things would have been better by now. There must be individual resistance. Think what Hertha Norreys’s life would have been if she had simply accepted things!”