“I can get a construction set for six dollars,” Luke was saying. “That will make the bridge models I told you about last week. I’m going to get one.”
“Yes, dear, I would,” she punctuated the conversation recklessly, and then another crowd swept about them and more elegant little cabs with more Gorgeous Girls and their cavaliers whirled by. Mary hated her stupid sophistry about commercial nuns, novitiates and all, her plain gray-eyed spinster self doomed to a Persian cat and a bonus at sixty. Empty, colourless––damnable!
She realized that she had merely given herself an anæsthetic, just as Steve had done, one of unreality and indifference, and that no one stays dormant under its power for all time. That all so-called commercial nuns try hard to convince themselves that watching the procession pass by is quite the best way of all. Yet there is scant truth or satisfaction in the statement. At some time or other the hunger for being loved crashes through the spinster’s brave little platform, the hunger for becoming necessary to someone in other ways than writing letters or adding figures––to be home, beside the hearth, keeping the fires burning, with woes and cares and monotonous incidents of such a narrowed horizon. It was for this we were created, Mary Faithful told herself––to be the dreamers and the ballast and the inspiration of the race. And if commercial nuns have managed to tell themselves otherwise––well, who shall be brutal enough to cry “I spy” on their little secret? She understood now the abnormal restlessness that she had seen in others of her friends––the marriages with men beneath them in class who earned but half what 276 they did; unwise flirtations, even the sordid things that occasionally creep into the horizon. And she blamed none of them for any of it.
She knew now that should the chance come she would want to be a Gorgeous Girl. Gorgeous Girls have the faculty of being loved, even if they do not merit the emotion. Tailor-made nuns only love, and finally set their consciences to work to convince themselves that a new firm and more severe collars will be the best way to forget.
Luke was still talking about the construction set and the new invention and patent rights and heavy wool sweater with a bean cap for the summer vacation. Mary was saying: “Yes, of course,” and “How interesting!” at intervals; and so they reached home, where Mary could plead a headache and go to her room to battle it out alone.
She felt, too, that the town crier could truthfully announce that milady was returning to tea gowns for an indefinite period. And she felt a passionate hunger to be one of them. That women were going to rejoice, the majority of them, to take off their lady-major uniforms, stop driving tractors and wearing overalls, and with the precious knowledge of the experience they would evolve quite a new-old standard, as charming as lavender and lace and as old as Time––the gentlewoman! They would no longer accentuate their ugliness with that unlovely honesty of the feminist which has been quite as distressing as the impossible Victorian lack of honesty and everlasting concealment of vital things. They would no longer be feminists or ladies, but gentlewomen who sew their own seam, who neither struggle unseen nor flaunt their emotions in the face of sex psychologists.
And that both commercial nuns and Gorgeous Girls must be on the wane. Yet it was too late for Mary Faithful.