estic life--a pretty girl like her. Him and his antiquated
ideals--a pretty girl in the kitchen, indeed! At twenty-three she had
finally come to her senses and refused to marry the young man to whom
she had been betrothed, no matter how well matched her father thought
they were.

Her mother had frequently confided to Gretchen her views on the varied
pleasures--and trials--inherent in marriage, admitting that as the
years passed she found the pleasures perhaps not worth the other
hardships--the outward subjugation of her own feelings and the constant
deference she was required to display within the confines of that
marriage, as if she had no independent mind. Gretchen had long since
determined that would not be her fate. She had come to believe that no
suitable man could be found, yet she remained unsatisfied. The only
true regret she had about casting off her family ties was that she had
disappointed her mother. It was her mother who had worked so hard,
really, to see that Gretchen had an education; her father only
begrudgingly went along for the sake of domestic tranquility when all
efforts to dissuade her had failed.

At university Gretchen had imbibed the rarefied intellectual atmosphere
with increasing eagerness and found herself drawn irresistibly up the
slopes of Parnassus. She had always intended to work after completing
university--and work she did, though she had difficulty making due with
what employment she could find. Even a superlative education, she had
learned in six years, did not buy one certain rights or reasonable
wages. She hoped that she would yet see the flowering of an age that
she could call an enlightened one. She might have been bitter had she
higher material aspirations, but she was content with little in the way
of physical comforts. Why the privilege of spending nearly all her
days in the library would have been worth almost any sacrifice--what
need had she of wages!

It was lamentable, she decided, that she should have to forgo marital
companionship if she were to retain her individuality--for the price of
her freedom was a monumental sort of loneliness that only the severest
mental discipline could overcome. She had seen so many of her school
friends smothered in the clutches of bad marriages, worn out beneath
their husbands' heels--almost like doormats. To be truthful there were
those who seemed to prosper in the state of matrimony, but she thought
them few. Yet, she stil