"Do you seriously intend to stay here all your life?" asked Delia. "To wash dishes that the next meal will soil, to arrange flowers that will wither in a week, to walk in fear and trembling of what Mrs. Marshall Gurney will say, although you know quite well that she hasn't got the intelligence to say anything worth saying?"
Intelligence? Muriel remembered how once she had suggested to Aunt Beatrice that she would like to go to college, and Aunt Beatrice had replied, "Well, dear, it isn't as if you were as clever as all that, is it?" And reluctantly Muriel, with the memory of the elusive mathematics prize before her, had had to admit that she was not as clever as all that.
"We can't all be clever," she said, without much joy in the thought.
"Clever? who said that we all had to be clever? But we have to have courage. The whole position of woman is what it is to-day, because so many of us have followed the line of least resistance, and have sat down placidly in a little provincial town, waiting to get married. No wonder that the men have thought that this is all that we are good for."
Muriel looked at her with grave distaste. She knew what her mother had to say about the suffragettes.
"Because I happened to be an idealist," remarked Delia, with the solemnity of twenty-two addressing eighteen, "Marshington could never forgive me. It could not forgive me for thinking my education incomplete unless I sought it beyond the councils of Marshington matrons. I happened to think that service of humanity was sometimes more important than respectability. I valued truth more highly than the conventional courtesies of a provincial town, while Marshington spends half its time in sparing other people's feelings in order that it may the more effectually ruin their reputations."
Muriel remembered hearing what Delia had said to Mrs. Cartwright over the Nursing Club accounts. She felt interested but uncomfortable. She had never been to a college debating society, and was unaccustomed to hearing what she called rudeness defended on principle. Also, she distrusted all this talk, feeling that she could be an idealist, too, without making so much fuss about it.
"But of course," continued Delia, "women in Marshington are not expected to have Ideals, only sex."
Muriel knit her brows. Sex conveyed to her merely a synonym for gender, masculine, feminine or neuter. She sought for more familiar ground.
"I certainly am not going to college, because my mother needs me at home. I am not unhappy here. Some of us have to stay at home. I have my duty too," she added stiffly.