Her cheeks glowed a deeper pink; her blue eyes glistened; she opened her red mouth to the seductive sun and, with a sweep of her firm hands, flung loose her russet hair to the breeze. Looking out at the distant fields, she sprang to her feet again and walked, swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal.
The fields reminded her of the rural prophets. It was evident, she thought, that they were right: this year's was to be a spring brief and sudden, a summer parching and intense.
II
A DEED OF TRUST
Mary Denbigh could not remember the day when the holy estate of matrimony had not been held up to her by others as the whole destiny of woman and had not presented itself as the natural, the easy, the sole path of escape from filial servitude.
She belonged, as has been intimated, to a race in which motherhood is an instinctive passion and an economic necessity, and she was born into a class in which not to marry is socially shameful and materially precarious. When she was very small, her own dolls were her own children and her playmates' dolls her children-in-law, and, when she grew older, she had always before her the sedulously maintained illusion of emancipation worn by those girls, but a few years her seniors, who had given up the drudgery of childhood, which she hated, for the drudgery of wifehood, which they loftily concealed. A young wife was a superior being, whose condition was not at all to be judged by the known condition of one's mother, and all the other and more intimate relations of marriage remained, to the uninitiate, a charmed mystery. If it seems strange to us that this mystery and this innocence remained to Mary at sixteen, the reflection rests not upon her from whom the secret kept its secrecy, but upon us to whom the innocence appears remarkable.
From a house that exacted everything and forgave nothing, a narrow house, which she could not see as simply an inevitable result of conditions as wide as the world, the girl looked out to that wonderful house next door where her sister had, only three years before, been taken as a bride. This sister was now an elegant person, who said "fore-head," "of-ten," and "a-gain," but Mary could remember Etta, in gingham frock and apron, performing the tasks that were now enforced upon Mary herself. And she could now observe—as, indeed, her sister's wholly conscious pride well intended that she should observe—Etta in clothes that were beyond the reach of an unmarried daughter of Owen Denbigh; Etta going to dances forbidden to a Denbigh maid. When she climbed reluctantly to bed at ten o'clock, Etta's lights blazed always wide awake, and when she rose in the gray of the morning, Etta's shutters were luxuriously closed.
Every dawn Mary must pack her father's dinner-bucket, as Etta used to pack it, before Owen started for the mill. That done, and the hurried breakfast eaten, she must make her own bed and wash the dishes before she set out for school. At noon there were more dishes, and only every other evening, before sitting down to detested study by the kerosene lamp in the dining-room, was she relieved of still more dish-washing by the growing, and apparently too favored, younger sister, Sallie.
The evening that followed Mary's truant walk along the river was one of those when she should have been granted this modicum of relief, but now, after the brief five o'clock supper, tow-headed Sallie set up a wail as the table was cleared.
"What's the matter with you now?" demanded Mrs. Denbigh, her harassed eyes blinking in the lamplight, and her hatchet-face more than commonly sharp.