“‘But answer me, Aunt Varina—can I?’
“‘What thinking is as important to a woman as thinking how to please a good, kind husband? What would become of her family if she no longer tried to do this?’
“So you see, we opened up a large subject. I know you consider me a backward person, and you may be interested to learn that there are some to whom I seem a terrifying rebel. Picture poor Aunt Varina, her old face full of concern, repeating over and over, ‘My child, my child, I hope I have come in time! Don’t scorn the advice of a woman who has paid bitterly for her mistakes. You have a good husband, a man who loves you devotedly; you are one of the most fortunate of women—now do not throw your happiness away!’
“‘Aunt Varina,’ I said (I forget if I ever told you that her husband gambled and drank, and finally committed suicide) ‘Aunt Varina, do you really believe that every man is so anxious to get away from his wife that it must take her whole stock of energy, her skill in diplomacy, to keep him?’
“‘Sylvia,’ she answered, ‘you put things so strangely, you use such horribly crude language, I don’t know how to talk to you!’ (That must be your fault, Mary. I never heard such a charge before.) ‘I can only tell you this—that the wife who permits herself to think about other things than her duty to her husband and her children is taking a frightful risk. She is playing with fire, Sylvia—she will realize too late what it means to set aside the wisdom of her sex, the experience of other women for ages and ages!’
“So there you are, Mary! I am studying another unwritten book, the Maxims of Aunt Varina!
“She has found the remedy for my troubles, the cure for my disease of thought—I am to sew! I tell her that I have more clothes than I can wear in a dozen seasons, and she answers, in an awesome voice, ‘There is the little stranger!’ When I point out that the little stranger will be expected to have a ‘layette’ costing many thousands of dollars, she replies, ‘They will surely permit him to wear some of the things his mother’s hands have made.’ So, behold me, seated on the gallery, learning fancy stitches—and with Kautsky on the Social Revolution hidden away in the bottom of my sewing-bag!”
3. The weeks passed. The legislature at Albany adjourned, without regard to our wishes; and so, like the patient spider whose web is destroyed, we set to work upon a new one. So much money must be raised, so many articles must be written, so many speeches delivered, so many people seized upon and harried and wrought to a state of mind where they were dangerous to the future career of legislators. Such is the process of social reform under the private property régime; a process which the pure and simple reformers imagine we shall tolerate for ever—God save us!
Sylvia asked me for the news, and I told it to her—how we had failed, and what we had to do next. So pretty soon there came by registered mail a little box, in which I found a diamond ring. “I cannot ask him for money just now,” she explained, “but here is something that has been mine from girlhood. It cost about four hundred dollars—this for your guidance in selling it. Not a day passes that I do not see many times that much wasted; so take it for the cause.” Queen Isabella and her jewels!
In this letter she told me of a talk she had had with her husband on the “woman-problem.” She had thought at first that it was going to prove a helpful talk—he had been in a fairer mood than she was usually able to induce. “He evaded some of my questions,” she explained, “but I don’t think it was deliberate; it is simply the evasive attitude of mind which the whole world takes. He says he does not think that women are inferior to men, only that they are different; the mistake is for them to try to become like men. It is the old proposition of ‘charm,’ you see. I put that to him, and he admitted that he did like to be ‘charmed.’