“You, that the school women said was the knowingest and most-looked-up-to woman in all the land!”
“I that have knowledge, temporary fame, and what the world calls success, still lack the one thing necessary: I have no life for my heart,” cried Emily Scarborough.
Dosia gazed at her kinswoman, fascinated, dumb.
“Do you think a woman can be just a mind?” demanded the essayist, passionately, “that such husks as honors, flattery, success, can feed one’s real life? Do you not see that I am hideously alone, without a tie to link me to the race, and that the loneliness and isolation are killing me?”
After this outburst, Emily Scarborough sat a long while fronting the dimmed mountains, struggling for calmness. When she spoke again, it was with controlled utterance:
“You know, Dosia, that I was an only child, born at the close of the Civil War, and brought up by my father, a general of the Confederate army. Broken in health and spirit by the war, he found his chief solace afterward in handing down to me a portion of his ripe scholarship. On the next plantation lived a boy, a year or two older than I, of whom my father was fond, and whom he taught along with me. As we grew up, the comradeship between Godfrey and me became love. My father planned for me a college education. To this Godfrey could not look forward. Not only were all the old families land-poor in those days, but, as eldest son, he must stay and run the plantation and provide for a widowed mother and his sisters and brothers. When I left home, it was with the hope of marrying him on the completion of my course.
“I arrived at college just at the time when there came to the women of America, especially to the little band then receiving the higher education, the first thrilling realization of their own possibilities. To stand alone, to achieve, to prove to the world what woman’s unaided strength could do, seemed to many not only a worthy ambition, but a sacred duty. One of my professors, a brilliant woman and a leader in the new movement, hailed my gifts with joy. ‘Assuredly, Emily, if your development is not interfered with, you will one day be a torch-bearer of the new womanhood,’ she declared. ‘Marriage,’ she would say at other times, ‘is for the ungifted, the uninspired. Let the drudgery of home-making and child-bearing be performed by women incapable of higher things.’ When I ventured to tell her of my engagement to Godfrey, she was horrified. ‘Bury your talents, your gifts for speaking and writing, in the mud of a Virginia plantation!’ she exclaimed; ‘never shall you be guilty of such weakness!’”
Drawn by F. R. Gruger. Half-tone plate engraved by G. M. Lewis
“‘YAN SIDE OF THEM IS WHERE YOU LIVED AT WHEN YOU WAS LITTLE, MAW SAYS’”