"You can resign when you find something better suited to your talents."
Thus at thirty-five Larry was range and a commuter. He dressed well, kept up one of his clubs, talked the condition of the country, and was a kind father to his boys…. 'What more should a woman expect?' Margaret asked herself, thinking of her father's words and enumerating her blessings. Three healthy children, a home and enough to eat and wear, a husband who (in spite of Conny's gossip) neither drank to excess nor was unfaithful nor beat her,—who had none of the obvious vices of the male! Good God! Margaret sighed with a bitter sense of irony.
"I must be a wicked woman," her mother would have said under similar circumstances,—and there lies the change in woman's attitude.
Looking across the table at Larry in his neat evening clothes,—he was growing a trifle stout these days,—listening to his observations on the railroad service, or his suggestion that she should pay more attention to dress, Margaret felt that some day she must shriek maniacally. But instead her heart grew still and cold, and her blue eyes icy.
"What is there in woman that makes trifles so important?" she asked Isabelle in a rare effusion of truth-speaking. "Why do some voices—correct and well-bred ones—exasperate you, and others, no better, fill you with content, comfort? Why do little acts—the way a man holds a book or strokes his mustache—annoy you? Why are you dead and bored when you walk with one person, and are gay when you walk by yourself?"
To all of which Isabelle sagely replied: "You think too much, Margaret dear. As John says when I ask him profound questions, 'Get up against something real!'"
For Isabelle could be admirably wise where another was concerned.
"Yes," Margaret admitted, "I suppose I am at fault. It is my job to make life worth living for all of us,—the Bishop, mother-in-law, children, Larry,—all but myself. That's a woman's privilege."
So she did her "job." But within her the lassitude of dead things was ever growing, sapping her physical buoyancy, sapping her will. She called to her soul, and the weary spirit seemed to have withdrawn.
"A case of low vitality," in the medical jargon of the day. And hers was a vital stock, too.