"And my work?"
Margaret waved a hand ironically:—
"You will be better alone…. My father is getting old and feeble; I must see him."…
When the family sailed, Larry was in the party. Mrs. Demarest had written him the proper thing to write after such an intimacy, and Larry felt that he must "get a job."…
In those months of the coming of the little girl and the summer afterwards, the new Margaret had been born. It was a quiet woman, outwardly calm, inwardly thinking its way slowly to conclusions,—thoughts that would have surprised the good Bishop. For when her heart had begun to grow cold in the process of petrifaction, there had awakened a new faculty,—her mind. She began to digest the world. Those little rules of life, the ones handed down with the prayer-book, having failed, she asked questions,—'What is life? What is a woman's life? What is my life? What is duty? A woman's duty? My duty, married to Larry?'…
And one by one with relentless clarity she stripped bare all those platitudinous precepts that she had inherited, had accepted, as one accepts the physical facts of the world. When the untrained mind of a woman, driven in on itself by some spiritual bruise, begins to reach out for light, the end may be social Anarchy. Margaret read and understood French and German, and she had ample time to read. She saw modern plays that presented facts, naked and raw, and women's lives from the inside, without regard to the moral convention. She perceived that she had a soul, an inner life of her own, apart from her husband, her children, her father, from all the world. That soul had its own rights,—must be respected. What it might compel her to do in the years to come, was not yet clear. She waited,—growing. If it had not been for her father, she would have been content to stay on in Europe as she was, reading, thinking, loving her children.
On the way back to America, Larry, becoming conscious in the monotony of the voyage of his own insufficiency and failure, hinted that he was ready to accept the mountain home, which Margaret still retained, her mother's old house. "We might try living in the country," he suggested. But Margaret, focussing in one rapid image the picture of her husband always before her in the intimacy of a lonely country life, Larry disintegrating in small ways, shook her head firmly, giving as an excuse, "The children must have schools." She would set him at some petty job in the city, anything to keep him from rotting completely. For he was the father of her children!
The good old Bishop met them at the pier in New York. In spite of his hardened convictions about life, the little rule of thumb by which he lived, he knew something of men and women; and he suspected that process of petrifaction in his daughter's heart. So he took occasion to say in their first intimate talk:—
"I am glad that you and Lawrence have decided to come home to live. It is not well for people to remain long away from their own country, to evade the responsibilities of our social brotherhood. The Church preaches the highest communism, … and you must help your husband to find some definite service in life, and do it."
Margaret's lips curved dangerously, and the Bishop, as if answering this sign, continued:—