“I feel tempted to wish sometimes that every one of the ineffably stupid woolly creatures were lost for good and all, if it would only lead to our going ‘off the run’ and having to live somewhere else. Only I suppose they are our living, besides working up into delaines and merinos—so I ought not to despise them. But it’s the life I despise—shepherd, shearer, stockman—day after day, year after year. These, with rare exceptions (here she made a mock respectful bow to Jack), are the only people we see, or shall ever see, till we are gray.”
“You are rather intolerant of a country life, Miss Stangrove,” said Jack. “I always thought that ladies had domestic duties and—and so on—which filled up the vacuum, with a daily routine of small but necessary employments.”
“Which means that we can sew all day, or mend stockings, weigh out plums, currants, and sugar for the puddings—and that this, with a little nursing sick children, pastry-making, gardening, and very judicious reading, ought to fill up our time, and make us peacefully happy.”
“And why should it not?” inquired Mark, looking earnestly at his sister, as if the subject was an old one of debate between them. “How can a woman be better employed than in the duties you sneer at?”
“Do you really suppose,” said Maud, leaning forward and looking straight into his face with her lustrous eyes, in which the opaline gleam began to glow and sparkle, “that women do not wish, like men, to see the world, of which they have only dreamed—to mix a little change and adventure with the skim-milk of their lives—before they calm down into the stagnation of middle age or matrimony?”
“I won’t say what I suppose about women, Maud,” rejoined her brother. “Some things I know about them, and some things I don’t know. But, believe me, those women do best in the long run who neither thirst nor long for pleasures not afforded to them by the circumstances of their lives. If what they desire should come, well and good. If not, they act a more womanly and Christian part in waiting with humility till the alteration arrives.”
“What do you say, Mr. Redgrave?” asked the unconvinced damsel. “Is it wrong for the caged bird to droop and pine, or ought it to turn a tiny wheel and pull up a tiny pail of nothing contentedly all its days, unmindful of the gay greenwood and the shady brook; or, if it beat its breast against the wires, and lie dead when the captor comes with seed and water, is it to be mourned over or cast forth in scorn?”
“’Pon my word,” answered Jack, helplessly, rather overawed by the strong feeling and earnest manner of the girl, and much “demoralized” by those wonderful eyes of hers, “I hardly feel able to decide. I’m a great lover of adventure and change and all that kind of thing myself; can’t live without it. But for ladies, somehow, I really—a—feel inclined to agree with your brother. Sphere of home—and—all that, you know.”
“Sphere of humbug!” answered she, with all the sincerity of contempt in her voice. “You men stick together in advocating all kinds of intolerable dreariness and nonsensical treadmill work because you think it good for women! You would be ashamed to apply such reasoning to anything bearing on your own occupations. But I will not say another word on the subject; it always raises my temper, and that is not permitted to our sex, I know. Did you see my dear old Mameluke to-day, Mark?”
“Yes, and he’s now in the stable.”