"God knows I want a home!" the husband murmured.
"I think I have made a very good one,—other people think so."
"That's the trouble—too good for me!"
"I should think it would be an incentive for a man—"
"God!" Falkner thundered; "that you should say that!"
It had been in her heart a long time, but she had never dared to express it before,—the feeling that other men, no abler than Rob, contrived to give their wives, no more seductive than she, so much more than she had had.
"Other men find the means—"
She was thinking of John Lane, of Purrington,—a lively young broker of their acquaintance,—of Dr. Larned,—all men whose earning power had leaped ahead of Falkner's. Bessie resented the economic dependence of married women on their husbands. She believed in the foreign dot system. "My daughters shall never marry as I did," she would say frankly to her friends. "There can be no perfectly happy marriage unless the woman is independent of her husband in money matters to a certain extent." … For she felt that she had a right to her ideals, so long as they were not bad, vicious; a right to her own life as distinct from her husband's life, or the family life. "The old idea of the woman's complete subordination has gone," she would say. "It is better for the men, too, that women are no longer mere possessions without wills of their own." It was such ideas as this that earned for Bessie among her acquaintances the reputation of being "intelligent" and "modern."
And Falkner, a vision of the mountains and the lonely cabin before his eyes, remarked with ironic calm:—
"And why should I earn more than I do, assuming that I could sell myself at a higher figure?"