"I understand."
"No man can understand,"—her voice growing shrill with pain. "It's not easy to eat the bread needed for other mouths day after day, with your hands tied, idle and helpless. A boy can go out and work, in a hundred ways: a girl must marry; it's her only chance for a livelihood, or a home, or anything to fill her heart with. Don't blame my mother, Paul. She had ten of us to work for. From the time I could comprehend, I knew her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and her daughters in homes of their own. It was the old story, Doctor Blecker,"—with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry. "I've noticed it since in a thousand other houses. Young girls like me in these poor-genteel families,—there are none of God's creatures more helpless or goaded, starving at their souls. I couldn't teach. I had no talent; but if I had, a woman's a woman: she wants something else in her life than dog-eared school-books and her wages year after year."
Blecker could hardly repress a smile.
"You are coming to political economy by a woman's road, Grey."
"I don't know what that is. I know what my life was then. I was only a child; but when that man came and held out his hand to take me, I was willing when they gave me to him,—when they sold me, Doctor Blecker. It was like leaving some choking pit, where air was given to me from other lungs, to go out and find it for my own. What marriage was or ought to be I did not know; but I wanted, as every human being does want, a place for my own feet to stand on, not to look forward to the life of an old maid, living on sufferance, always the one too many in the house."
"That is weak and vulgar argument, child. It should not touch a true woman, Grey. Any young girl can find work and honorable place for herself in the world, without the defilement of a false marriage."
"I know that now. But young girls are not taught that. I was only a child, not strong-willed. And now, when I'm free,"—a curious clearness coming to her eye,—"I'm glad to think of it all. I never blame other women. Because, you see,"—looking up with the flickering smile,—"a woman's so hungry for something of her own to love, for some one to be kind to her, for a little house and parlor and kitchen of her own; and if she marries the first man who says he loves her, out of that first instinct of escape from dependence, and hunger for love, she does not know she is selling herself, until it's too late. The world's all wrong, somehow."
She stopped, her troubled face still upturned to his.
"But you,—you are free now?"
"He is dead."