She drew her hat to one side to keep the sun out of her eyes as she walked. Waldo looked at her so intently that he stumbled over the bushes. Yes, this was his little Lyndall who had worn the check pinafores; he saw it now, and he walked closer beside her. They reached the next camp.
“Let us wait at this camp and watch the birds,” she said, as an ostrich hen came bounding toward them with velvety wings outstretched, while far away over the bushes the head of the cock was visible as he sat brooding on the eggs.
Lyndall folded her arms on the gate bar, and Waldo threw his empty bag on the wall and leaned beside her.
“I like these birds,” she said; “they share each other’s work, and are companions. Do you take an interest in the position of women, Waldo?”
“No.”
“I thought not. No one does, unless they are in need of a subject upon which to show their wit. And as for you, from of old you can see nothing that is not separated from you by a few millions of miles, and strewed over with mystery. If women were the inhabitants of Jupiter, of whom you had happened to hear something, you would pore over us and our condition night and day; but because we are before your eyes you never look at us. You care nothing that this is ragged and ugly,” she said, putting her little finger on his sleeve; “but you strive mightily to make an imaginary leaf on an old stick beautiful. I’m sorry you don’t care for the position of women; I should have liked us to be friends; and it is the only thing about which I think much or feel much—if, indeed, I have any feeling about anything,” she added, flippantly, readjusting her dainty little arms. “When I was a baby, I fancy my parents left me out in the frost one night, and I got nipped internally—it feels so!”
“I have only a few old thoughts,” he said, “and I think them over and over again; always beginning where I left off. I never get any further. I am weary of them.”
“Like an old hen that sits on its eggs month after month and they never come out?” she said quickly. “I am so pressed in upon by new things that, lest they should trip one another up, I have to keep forcing them back. My head swings sometimes. But this one thought stands, never goes—if I might but be one of these born in the future; then, perhaps, to be born a woman will not be to be born branded.”
Waldo looked at her. It was hard to say whether she were in earnest or mocking.
“I know it is foolish. Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can’t bring down,” she said. “But we are cursed. Waldo, born cursed from the time our mothers bring us into the world till the shrouds are put on us. Do not look at me as though I were talking nonsense. Everything has two sides—the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.”