A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her child at her breast.
She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope, neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.
"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You might be a man worth something; but a woman!—a thing that has no medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which will you do in the future?"
"What?"
She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.
She had one desire, indeed—a desire vague but yet fierce—the desire for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of hope she knew nothing.
The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He smiled with a certain bitter pity.
"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But yet——"
Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its hand the tender of at least one future—one election, one kingdom, one destiny.
"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"