“I read The Other Country a week or two ago,” she began. “I thought it wonderful,” she added after a moment, looking full at Carey.
There was such evident sincerity in her words and gesture that his face lit up with sudden pleasure.
“I’m glad it pleased you,” he said, simply.
There was a pause. Bridget’s face clouded, and saddened.
The man bent slightly towards her.
“May I know what you are thinking?” he asked gently,—“or is the question an impertinent one?”
She started, and blushed a little. “How did you know? I wish I had the sort of face that contradicts what one feels! I was thinking how hard things are for women. I mean, it takes such a lot of struggling and fighting before we can get to the point at which men—or most of them—begin. For instance, I want to write—I shall write some day, I think,” with a determined lift of the head; “but oh, if you only knew!”—she checked herself. “It has been, and will be, for me, one ceaseless fight with circumstances,” she went on in a low tone, as though impelled to speak. “It seems that all one’s best strength is wasted in raising a little platform for oneself—just room to stand on and breathe, but quite bare and empty, when one has at last reached it,” she added bitterly. “Oh, I know there are women who start fair; they can have life, be in the stream, if they wish,—if they want to badly enough, and have the courage to defy a few prejudices which are every day getting fewer and fewer—but it’s maddening to think that even this depends on all sorts of things outside oneself—the accident of birth, social position, money—” she paused. “How egotistical you must think me; and you are bored, of course,” she exclaimed, apologetically, with a quick change of tone. “But—it’s so long, such a long time since I talked to any one!”
“I am not bored,” he said gravely. “I understand.”
She turned her face, and looked up with gratitude that touched him.
“That is nice! I wanted to say—if I may really grumble and not bore you—that it’s hard for other people to realize what the life of a woman who works for a bare living is like—to some one who wants—oh, everything almost! I mean, of course, for one like me, who has no independent social life; and there are hundreds, hundreds like me!” she went on. “One sees them, and they grow old, and faded, and uninteresting. I watch them, and shudder, and think—‘A few years, and you will be like that, past everything,—past sensations, emotions, experience! You won’t ever remember how you once longed for these things; even your work, which interests you now, will have grown stale, because it—’ When these thoughts come, in the night sometimes, I feel that I shall go mad.” She spoke in a low, vibrating tone. The last words were the expression of months of pent-up restlessness and lonely misery.