as looking into my eyes as though she were reading my soul.
She wasn't, whatever she might have thought she was doing. 'Than what
she had before, of course,' she said with some asperity.
'But perhaps what she had before was just what she liked best.'
'But if it was only the sort of joy every woman who is young and pretty
gets heaped on her, does it not take wings and fly away the moment she
happens to look haggard, or is low-spirited, or ill?'
It was as I had feared. Charlotte was strenuous. There was not a doubt
of it. And the strenuous woman is a form of the sex out of whose way I
have hitherto kept. Of course I knew from the pamphlets and the lectures
that she was not one to stay at home and see the point of purring over
her husband's socks; but I had supposed one might lecture and write
things without bringing the pamphlet manner to bear on one's own blood
relations.
'You were very jolly in the water,' I said. 'Why are you suddenly so
serious?'
'The water,' replied Charlotte, 'is the only place I am ever what you
call jolly in. It is the only place where I can ever forget how terribly
earnest life is.'
'My dear Charlotte, shall we sit down? The bathing has made me tired.'
We did sit down, and leaning my back against a rock, and pulling my hat
over my eyes, I gazed out at the sunlit sea and at the flocks of little
white clouds hanging over it to the point where they met the water,
while Charlotte talked. Yes, she was right, nearly always right, in
everything she said, and it was certainly meritorious to use one's
strength, and health, and talents as she was doing, trying to get rid of
mouldy prejudices. I gathered that what she was fighting for were equal
rights and equal privileges for women and men alike. It is a story I
have heard before, and up to now it has not had a satisfactory ending.
And Charlotte was so small, and the world she defied was so big and so
indifferent and had such an inconsequent habit of associating all such
efforts--in themselves nothing less than heroic--with the
ridiculousness of cropped hair and extremities clothed in bloomers. I
protest that the thought of this brick wall of indifference with
Charlotte hurling herself against it during all the years that might
have been pleasant was so tragic to me that I was nearly tempted to try
to please her by offering to come and hurl myself too. But I have no
heroism. The hardness and coldness of bricks terrifies me. What, I
wondered,
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