"Yes," he said, with a nod, "I think I can."
"Most of the men of our set have something to do! Either they are in the army, or in Parliament, or managing estates, but the women—well, they live a butterfly life. There seems to me no escape for them. Do what they will, unless they become suffragettes and smash windows or smack fat policemen, their life drifts one way. Charity?—it ends in a charity ball. Politics?—it means just garden-parties or stodgy week-ends at country houses, with a little absurd canvassing of rural labourers at election times. Sometimes I used to consider it, and with that bus-driver of Stevenson's who drove to the station and then drove back, cry 'My God is this life!' There was nothing real anywhere. Nobody ever expected a woman in our set to do anything worth doing." She broke off, and gave a little laugh, then continued: "Now I have my chance to prove I'm something better than a doll, and I'm not going to be robbed of it by Gerald Ainley, my uncle, or any one else! This camp depends on me for a time at least, and I'm going to make good; and prove myself for my own satisfaction. Do you understand?"
"Yes," answered Stane, his eyes shining with admiration.
"That is what I meant when I said that if you only knew it, I was thinking of myself. It would strike some people as a little mad. I know some women who in a situation like this would have sat down and just cried themselves to death."
"So do I. Lots of them."
"I don't feel that way. I feel rather like a man I know at home who was brought up on the sheltered life system, nursery governess, private tutor, etc., who when he came of age just ran amok, drank, fought with the colliers on his own estate, and then enlisted in an irregular corps and went to fight the Spaniards in Cuba, just to prove to himself that he wasn't the ninny his father had tried to make him. He shocked his neighbours thoroughly, but he's a man today, listened to when he speaks and just adored by the miners on his estate.... I want to make good, and though Mrs. Grundy would chatter if she knew that I had deliberately chosen to remain and nurse a sick man in such conditions, I don't care a jot."
"You needn't worry about Mrs. Grundy," he laughed. "She died up here about 1898, and was buried on the road to the Klondyke."
Helen Yardely joined in his laughter. "May she never be resurrected—though I am afraid she will be. Where there are half-a-dozen conventional women Mrs. Grundy is always in the midst. But I'm free of her for the time, and I'm just going to live the primitive life whilst I'm here. I feel that I have got it in me to enjoy the life of the woods, and to endure hardships like any daughter of the land, and I'm going to do it. Not that there is much hardship about it now! It is just an extended pic-nic, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything."
Stane smiled. "I am very glad you feel like that," he said. "I myself shall be much happier in mind and I count myself lucky to have fallen in such capable hands!"
"Capable!" she looked at her scratched and rather grimy hands. "A kitchen-maid's are more capable! But I can learn, and I will, however much I bungle. Now, as the universal provider, I am going out to look at my snares."