“But if they are your interests too?”
“A woman wouldn’t sacrifice herself to get her ends in that way. Now we have this house, I must try to be something of a ‘leader,’ so John thinks, and go in for reading papers, or at least for music and art, because the others do. I must entertain, become a ‘patroness’ if I can, and all the rest of it.”
“I should think it great fun to have a swell house and loads of people about, and put my name down for all the nice charities. I’d have a beautiful time and fill that big temple of yours full of interesting people.”
Mrs. Wilbur smiled indulgently. “Interesting people—I mean people interesting for more than a few minutes to any one but themselves—aren’t so easy to find, my dear, anywhere in this wide world.”
Molly Parker did not answer. That had not been her experience. Every object that she could remember from the puppy dogs and the babies in the streets to the self-conscious New England professors at Aunt Dexter’s, had always amused her.
“Then there are other facts a woman doesn’t reckon with before she is married,—her children,” Mrs. Wilbur continued abruptly. “Molly, do you think a woman is horrid because she doesn’t want children?”
“Yes,” the younger woman answered promptly. “Perhaps not at first while she is kind of honeymooning it, but afterwards—why, of course.”
“I suppose that is the proper way to look at it,” Mrs. Wilbur assented regretfully. “If a woman doesn’t love her husband, children are interests, and if she does love him, she wants his children. But it isn’t true necessarily. Like so many other proper conceptions, it may be a commonplace lie.”
Miss Parker opened her eyes in consternation, wider and wider. “Well, your husband wants children; every man who is good and nice does.”
“I don’t,” Mrs. Wilbur answered passionately.