On the evening of the day Bridget left the Mansfields the Professor sat silent for some time, looking into the fire.
“That child is rather on my mind, Charlotte,” he said at last. “Have I done right, I wonder? One shudders when one realizes the frightful isolation that a life like the one she is bent upon means for a girl.”
His sister looked up from her work placidly.
“That’s so like you, James, with your theories about lives and careers, and so on. How can you possibly know anything about the sort of life that’s in store for Bridget Ruan?”
“One observes, my dear,” returned her brother, mildly. “The High School mistress lives in lodgings—often alone. She is obliged to live in lodgings, because she must be within reasonable distance of the school in which she teaches, and possibly there’s no boarding-house, or ‘family desirous of meeting with an amiable young lady,’ near enough to make any other mode of life practicable. She is often compelled to live alone, either because the other mistresses in the school have already paired off, or, as may very well happen, because she doesn’t care sufficiently for any of them to be willing to share a room or rooms with them.”
“Bridget ought not to be allowed to live alone,” Miss Mansfield said decidedly. “She’s too pretty, too attractive altogether.”
“My dear Charlotte, one does not say to the New Woman, thou shalt not. It’s too late in the day. She holds the reins.”
“And drives a great deal too fast,” observed his sister, dryly, “downhill, too, I’m afraid.”
“That may be; but you and I sit too far back to put on the brake, even if we felt alarmed at the pace. For my own part, I’m not alarmed. I have faith in the driver. In any case, we needn’t shake our heads over the recklessness of the young woman teacher who lives in furnished apartments. Poor soul! she doesn’t impress me with the idea that she knows much of the joie de vivre. Do you remember Alice Evans?”
“But, my dear James, Alice Evans was thirty-five if she was an hour. You can’t compare her case with Bridget Ruan’s.”