Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a few years earning her living.
"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world. But what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook. It's something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going to be able to give him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of the real world, if she's going to be able to educate him into real living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual is a good thing."
"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry me till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"
Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.
Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing, KNOWING, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply because she can't shift for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain, CERTAIN, that it isn't just necessity that keeps her a home woman?
"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want the door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the door she could fly.
"For keeping her," said Mary, "I should want to trust to my own wings and not to bars.
"However," said Mary, going farther into the future, "the process isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children! We want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their bread when they are NOT bearing children, they are relieved of dependence on the individual character of another human person while they ARE. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women bear children they perform a service to the state. Children are important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right relationship—love a necessity, money a welcome romance!
"It's remote, very remote," said Mary. "And we can't dream it out in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal sentiment. It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the final answer to the postponement of marriage."
In the November instalment of "The Women of To-morrow," Mr. Hard will discuss "The Wasters."