“My beloved Mab, is England a world of shadows?”
“It is exactly that—to women in our class of life, at any rate—and I am sick of shadows. Our life has become so smooth, and polished, and refined, that it is not life at all. We are all Tomlinsons more or less—getting our emotions second-hand from books and plays. Some of us go into the slums or the hospitals in search of experiences (you’ll say that was what I tried to do), but even then we only see things, we don’t feel them. I wanted to get to a place where things still happened, where there were real people and real passions.”
“Do you know, Mab”—Georgia fixed a critical eye on her—“if you had been a little younger, I should have suspected you of a yearning to enter the Army Nursing Service? I can’t tell you how many girls have lamented to me at different times the unreality of their lives, and proposed to set them right by means of that particular act of self-sacrifice. But as things are, I suppose, to use plain English, you were bored?”
“Bored to exasperation, then, you unsympathetic creature! But I am serious, Georgie. There’s something you quoted in one of your letters from Kubbet-ul-Haj that has haunted me ever since, and expresses what I mean. It was something like: ‘When the world grows too refined and too cultured, God sends great judgments to beat us back to the beginning of history again, to toils and pain and peril, and the old first heroic lessons—how to fight and how to endure.’ It would be absurd for me, in England, to take to living in a slum, making my own things, and teaching people who are much better than I am, but I thought out here——”
“And you find Dick and me dressing for dinner every evening, and getting the magazines monthly! You had better cross the border into Ethiopia, Mab. We are just as artificial here as at home.”
“Georgie! as if I wanted to make a savage of myself, like the youth in ‘Locksley Hall’! Surely life can be simple and primitive without being squalid?”
“You haven’t asked my advice, and I don’t know whether you want it, but it’s dreadfully commonplace. Get married.”
“You mean that I should know then what reality is? What an indictment to bring against Dick! What in the world does he do to you, Georgie?”
Georgia smiled superior. “You don’t expect me to begin to defend Dick to you?” she asked, then laughed aloud. “No, Mab, you needn’t try to tease me about him at this hour of the day. But what I mean is, that you get into the way of looking at things in quite a different light when you are married. You don’t hold a brief for your own sex any longer, but for men as well. That makes the difference, I think. You are in the middle instead of on one side, and that is at any rate a help towards seeing life whole.”
“But do you always look at things now through Dick’s spectacles? How painfully monotonous!”