"Oh, I am not mercenary," I replied, hastily, "and I shall save out of thirty pounds a year. I must keep a nice dress for my home visits and for Sundays, though it is dreadful to think that I shall not always go to church every Sunday until little Joyce is older; that will be a sad deprivation."
"Yes, my poor child, but you must not speak as though this were the only serious drawback; you will find plenty of difficulties in your position; even Mrs. Morton confessed that."
"The world is full of difficulties," I returned, loftily; "there have been thorns and briars ever since Adam's time. Do you remember your favourite fable of the old man and the bundle of sticks, Aunt Agatha? I mean to treat my difficulties in the same way he managed his. I shall break each stick singly."
She smiled approvingly at this, and then, as Uncle Keith's knock reached her ear, she rose quickly and went out of the room.
The moment I was left alone my assumed briskness of manner dropped into the mental dishabille that we wear for our own private use and comfort. Those two had always so much to say to each other that I was sure of at least half an hour's solitude, and in some moods self is the finest company. Yes, I had destroyed my boats, and now my motto must be "Forward!" This afternoon I had pledged myself to a new service—a service of self-renunciation and patient labour, undertaken—yes, I dare to say it—for the welfare of the large sisterhood of waiting and working women. A servant? No, a soldier; for I should be one among the vanguard, who strive to make a breach in the great fortress of conventionality. Not that I feared the word service, considering what Divine lips had said on that subject—"I am among you as one who serveth—" but I knew how the world shrank from such terms.
I have always maintained that half the so-called difficulties of life consist mainly in our dread of other people's opinions; women are especially trammelled by this bondage. They breathe the atmosphere of their own special world, and the chill wind of popular opinion blows coldly over them; like the sensitive plant, they shiver and wither up at a touch. I believe the master minds that achieve great things have created their own atmosphere, else how can they appear so impervious to criticism? How can they carry themselves so calmly, when their contemporaries are sneering round them? We must live above ourselves and each other; there is no other way of getting rid of the shams and disguises of life; and yet how is one who has been born in slavery to be absolutely true? How is an English gentlewoman to shake off the prejudices of caste and declare herself free?
Ah, well! this was the enigma I had set myself to solve. And now the old life—the protected girl's life—was receding from me; the old guards, the old landmarks were to be removed by my own hands. Should I live to repent my rash act, as Aunt Agatha predicted, or should I at some future time, when I looked back upon this wintry day, thank God, humbly and with tears of gratitude, that I had courage given me to see the right and do it, "ad finem fidelis," faithful to the last?
I found those last few days of home-life singularly trying. Indeed, I am not sure that I was not distinctly grateful when the final evening arrived. When one has to perform a painful duty there is no use in lingering over it; and when one is secretly troubled, a spoken and too discursive sympathy only irritates our mental membrane. How could Job, for example, tolerate the sackcloth and ashes, and, worse still, the combative eloquence of his friends?
Aunt Agatha's pathetic looks and pitying words fretted me to the very verge of endurance. I wished she would have been less mindful of my comforts, that she would not have insisted on helping me with my sewing, and loading me with little surprises in the shape of gifts. But for the bitter cold that kept me an unwilling prisoner by the fireside, I would have escaped into my own room to avoid the looks that seemed to follow me everywhere.