cumb!

"How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers,
city hall, Guy and Vida. But----It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to
'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs,
and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony
eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul.

"Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And
I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn't
enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like
him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on."

IV

Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she
had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a
gold and crimson cigar-band.

V

She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in
the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not
determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by
dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved
in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty:
not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad
breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.

The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida
Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room
Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below
the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering
pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She
murmured:

"Guy, do you want to help me?"

"My dear! How?"

"I don't know!"

He waited.

"I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of
the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million
women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business
women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives
of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and
go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would
say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that.
There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more
coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and
wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder
how they can escape their kind parents. What do we w