Dunk once pointed out to me, a good thing to get
"Indianized." We have our community obligations and they must be
faced. The children, undoubtedly, would have advantages in the city.
And to find my family reunited would be "_le desir de paraitre_." But
I can't help remembering how much there is to remember. I'm humbler
now, it's true, than I once was. I no longer say "One side, please!"
to life, while life, like old Major Elmes on Murray Hill, declines to
vary its course for one small and piping voice. Instead of getting
gangway, I find, I'm apt to get an obliterating thump on the spine.
Heaven knows, I want to do the right thing. But the issue seems so
hopelessly tangled. I have brooded over it and I have even prayed over
it. But it all seems to come to nothing. I sometimes nurse a ghostly
sort of hope that it may be taken out of my hands, that some power
outside myself may intervene to decide. For it impresses me as ominous
that I should be able to hesitate at such a time, when a woman, for
once in her life, should know her own mind, should see her own fixed
goal and fight her way to it. I've been wondering if I haven't ebbed
away into that half-warm impersonality which used to impress me as the
last stage in moral decay.

But I'm not the fishy type of woman. I know I'm not. And I'm not a
hard-head. I've always had a horror of being hard, for fear my
hardness might in some way be passed on to my Dinkie. I want to keep
my boy kindly and considerate of others, and loyal to the people who
love him. But I balk at that word "loyal." For if I expect loyalty in
my offspring I surely must have it myself. And I stood up before a
minister of God, not so many years ago, and took an oath to prove
loyal to my husband, to cleave to him in sickness and in health. I
also took an oath to honor him. But he has made that part of the
compact almost impossible. And my children, if I go back to him, will
come under his influence. And I can't help questioning what that
influence will be. I have only one life to live. And I have a human
anxiety to get out of it all that is coming to me. I even feel that it
owes me something, that there are certain arrears of happiness to be
made up.... I wish I had a woman, older and wiser than myself, to talk
things over with. I have had the impulse to write to Peter, and tell
him everything, and ask him what I ought to do. But that doesn't
impress me as being quite fair to Peter. And, oddly enough, it does