"It is the real, the true thing—my gift! I will do beautiful work. Oh, dearest, I have more to bring you than I dared to believe!"
So her impetuous mind had run onward to meet happy possibilities when Ted arrested it with the comment, "I don't care for that sort of woman myself—at least for that sort of married woman!" And at the words, Sheila's dreams had fallen, like broken-winged birds, to the ground.
For a moment—nay, through all the conversation that followed, a conversation that revealed to her with cruel clarity a phase of her husband's mind that she had not hitherto encountered—she was wondering if those dreams would ever rise again. Rude and stupid blows from the hand she loved best had struck them down. How could they recover themselves? How could they sing and soar—those fragile, shattered things?
But even as she glimpsed them thus, broken, defeated, there surged up within her the strength of resistance. Sweetly compliant in all the common affairs of her and Ted's joint life, she had, for this issue so vital to her, an amazing obstinacy. Defeated? She and her dreams? No! Her dreams were her own, born of her as surely as the children of her body would be. They were hers to save—hers to realize. And she was strong enough to do it!
That had been her thought when she withdrew herself from Ted's knee. His whisper—"The greatest thing that can happen to a woman is motherhood!"—had inspired no tenderness in her. For at that moment there was astir within her, violent and dominant, the impulse that is mightier than motherhood itself—the impulse of creation. And it was none the less imperative because it demanded to mould with written words rather than living flesh.
Ted's last gentle speech, his hurt expression when she turned coldly from him, moved her not at all. For the time, he was not Ted, her beloved, but Man, her enemy. True, she had not regarded man as an enemy before. Peter, for instance, had been an ally without whom she could not even have fared thus far. But Peter was not a husband; his masculinity had not been appealed to—nor threatened. She saw now that men would always fight for the mastery of their own women, would always seek to impose sex upon them as a yoke.
Ah, that black, bitter gulf of sex!
Sheila, looking into it for the first time, shuddered with revolt and rage. So this was life; this the end of such moments as her exquisite awakening to love. To this the high and heavenly raptures lured one at last! A bird in the wrong cage, impotently beating its breast against the bars—Sheila was like enough to such an one in that furious, unconsciously helpless hour.
By the next day, however, the fierce whirlwind of her astounded resentment had passed. She began to see that Ted might be the victim of his sex as she was the victim of hers; that the real tyranny was not that of Ted over her, but of Nature over them both; of Nature who would use them each with equal ruthlessness for her own purposes. But this perception did not daunt her. Unhesitatingly, she arrayed herself against Nature now; she would save her dreams even from that! And as Ted was a part of Nature's plan, she said nothing to him of her determination to fulfill herself in spite of it.
In the afternoon she set out resolutely for Charlotte's. It was summer, and Shadyville was at its fairest. As Sheila trod the wide, tree-canopied streets, with their old-fashioned houses in fragrant garden closes on either side, a hundred tiny voices whispered to her messages of peace; of life that goes on from summer to summer; of growth, in the dark and choking earth, that springs at last upward to the sun. But she did not hear. For her there was neither comfort nor peace nor any joy in the processes and victories of mere life.