And I was right in insisting that we go right on with our plan, as if nothing had happened. I have forced myself to go over the whole difficult business, thinking it out step by step; and I was right.
It is a difficult business. Sometimes, at night, when my imagination slips out of control and dream-pictures come of a home of my own, it is almost more than I can bear. Last night I had to switch on the lights and work until daylight over the notes for Volume Six. (That is to be the section devoted to “True Intervals and Natural Song.”)
I am driving myself to think constantly of the other side of the picture—to realize how beautiful Heloise is, what a person she is and what a voice she has. No home that I could conceivably offer her would be large enough to contain her life. And when I construct in my mind the years during which she would have to fight her own inclinations, deliberately confine her activities and build barriers against the growth of her own soul, my resolution strengthens. If it is hard to give her up now, it would be impossible then. I know myself well enough to know what I should be and do, then. I would be jealous of her very bigness. I would, likely as not, come to hate her beauty, her voice, her capacity for work. I would fight to make a Hausfrau of her, with babies, and meals to get—meals for me!—and sweeping and dusting to look after. And then, should I succeed in that miserable purpose; should I have to realize, every day and every night, with her beauty fading and with that wonderful edge on her voice becoming blunted and the tones growing uneven and foggy, that I had shut her out of the chance for growth that God gave her—this, after she had already taken one desperate, tragic step toward freedom—should I find myself forced to live, day after day, year after year, with any such realization as that, I think the time would come when I would want to kill myself.
The man who deliberately stops a woman's growth—no matter what his traditions and beliefs; no matter what his fears for her—is doing a monstrous thing, a thing for which he must some day answer to the God of all life.
As civilization stands now, the woman who marries shuts herself out from the possibility of a career. Not in every instance, of course; but certainly in such an average, modest marriage as mine would have to be. I have some means, of course; but not nearly enough. And it is not likely that I shall ever “make” money in any large way.
No, I really don't believe the thing can be done. Not yet. I like to hope that some day the world will become more nearly civilized as regards marriage. But first we must make it less a matter of land and houses and goods, and of woman as property along with these. And I think we shall probably come to some system of paying woman directly for the great service of child-bearing and rearing. Yes, we men must give up the last shreds of our thought of woman as a personal possession. We are farther from that, still, than we realize, I think. I myself am far, far from it. Where Hel-oise is concerned, I know perfectly well that I am not to be trusted. God only knows what I would do, what I would come to think and believe. For the magic that is always between us would be confused in a thousand subtle ways with the heritage, of deep-lying racial habits that are in me as in every other man.
But at least, I have come to see it. For this I am thankful.