Mme. Abraham looked at her, taken aback; the impertinence was all too evident. She replied dryly, "The old one is good enough for us."
"But it might not be a bad thing to enlarge it a little."
"What would you like to add to it?"
"Nothing very much," said Annette, calmly. "Freedom and humanity."
Mme. Abraham, hurt, said: "The right to love, no doubt?"
"No," said Annette, "the right to have a child."
As she went out she shrugged her shoulders at her useless bravado. . . . Stupid! . . . What was the use of making an enemy? . . . She laughed just the same as she thought of the vexed expression of her antagonist. A woman cannot resist the pleasure of slighting another. Bah! The Abraham woman would remain her enemy only until Annette had reconquered her position. And she would reconquer it!
Annette visited other institutions, but there were no positions. There were none for women. The Latin democracies are only made for men; they sometimes put feminism on their programmes, but they distrust it; they are in no hurry to furnish arms to what still remains, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the enslaved rival, a rival that will not long so remain, thanks to the tenacity of the Nordic woman. Pressure will have to be brought by the public opinion of the rest of the world to oblige them to offer a crabbed welcome to the woman who works and wishes to exercise her rights.
Annette might have been admitted, however, to two or three positions if her susceptibility had not caused her to lose them. They would have been ready to shut their eyes to her irregular situation if she herself had been willing to give them some specious explanation—that she was a widow or divorced by her own choice. But when she was questioned her absurd pride drove her to tell the facts as they were. After two or three rebuffs, she approached no more institutions, not even the University, although in the latter she had left sympathetic friends behind her and would have found minds large enough to help her without censuring her. But she was afraid of being wounded. She was still inexperienced in the country of the poor. The hands of her pride had not had time to become callous.
She looked about for a chance to give private lessons. She did not wish to seek them among the friends of her own class; she preferred to conceal her steps. She turned to those clandestine employment—those exploitative—agencies that still exist in Paris. She was not skilful enough to appear well from their point of view. She had too much disdain. They resented her fastidiousness. Instead of accepting whatever offered, like so many unhappy souls who are fortified with very few recommendations, who will teach anything that is asked of them at famine prices and work from dawn till dark, she presumed to pick and choose.