There were letters beside her plate. One was from Canterton, who had gone north to plan a rich manufacturer’s new garden. She had not seen him since that drive to London, for he had been away when she had arrived at “Rock Cottage” to settle the furniture and begin her new life with Mrs. Baxter and the puppy.
She read Canterton’s letter first.
“Carissima,—I shall be back to-morrow, early, as I stayed in town for a night. Perhaps I shall find you at work. It would please me to discover you in the rosery. I am going to place Guinevere among the saints, and each year I shall keep St. Guinevere’s feast day.
“I hope everything pleases you at the cottage. I purposely left the garden in an unprejudiced state. It may amuse you to carry out your own ideas.—A rivederci.”
She smiled. Yes, she would go and set up her easel in the rosery, and be ready to enter with him upon their spiritual marriage.
Under a furniture-dealer’s catalogue lay a pamphlet in a wrapper with the address typed. Eve slit the wrapper and found that she held in her hand an anti-suffrage pamphlet, written by Gertrude Canterton.
She was a little surprised, not having heard as yet a full account of that most quaint and original of interviews. But she read the pamphlet while she ate her toast, and there was a glimmer of light in her eyes that told of amusement.
“A woman’s sphere is the home!” “A woman who is busy with her children is busy according to Nature! No sensible person can have any sympathy with those restless and impertinent gadabouts who thrust themselves into activities for which they are not suited. Sex forbids certain things to women. The eternal feminine is a force to be cherished!” “Woman is the sympathiser, the comforter. She is the other beam of the balance. She should strive to be opposite to man, not like him. A sweet influence in the home, something that is dear and sacred!”
Eve asked herself how Gertrude Canterton could write like this. It was so extraordinarily lacking in self-knowledge, and suggested the old tale of the preacher put up to preach, the preacher who omitted to do the things he advocated, because he was so busy telling other people what they should do. How was it that Gertrude Canterton never saw her real self? How did she contrive to live with theories, and to forget Lynette?
Yet in reading the pamphlet, Eve carried Gertrude Canterton’s contentions to their logical conclusion.