Sylvias Marriage | Page 8

I explained to her the aims and the methods of our child-labour committee. We lobbied to get new legislation; we watched officials to compel them to enforce the laws already existing; above all, we worked for publicity, to make people realise what it meant that the new generation was growing up without education, and stunted by premature toil. And that was where she could help us most--if she would go and see the conditions with her own eyes, and then appear before the legislative committee this winter, in favour of our new bill!
She turned her startled eyes upon me at this. Her ideas of doing good in the world were the old-fashioned ones of visiting and almsgiving; she had no more conception of modern remedies than she had of modern diseases. "Oh, I couldn't possibly make a speech!" she exclaimed.
"Why not?" I asked.
"I never thought of such a thing. I don't know enough."
"But you can learn."
"I know, but that kind of work ought to be done by men."
"We've given men a chance, and they have made the evils. Whose business is it to protect the children if not the women's?"
She hesitated a moment, and then said: "I suppose you'll laugh at me."
"No, no," I promised; then as I looked at her I guessed. "Are you going to tell me that woman's place is the home?"
"That is what we think in Castleman County," she said, smiling in spite of herself.
"The children have got out of the home," I replied. "If they are ever to get back, we women must go and fetch them."
Suddenly she laughed--that merry laugh that was the April sunshine of my life for many years. "Somebody made a Suffrage speech in our State a couple of years ago, and I wish you could have seen the horror of my people! My Aunt Nannie--she's Bishop Chilton's wife--thought it was the most dreadful thing that had happened since Jefferson Davis was put in irons. She talked about it for days, and at last she went upstairs and shut herself in the attic. The younger children came home from school, and wanted to know where mamma was. Nobody knew. Bye and bye, the cook came. 'Marse Basil, what we gwine have fo' dinner? I done been up to Mis' Nannie, an' she say g'way an' not pester her--she busy.' Company came, and there was dreadful confusion--nobody knew what to do about anything--and still Aunt Nannie was locked in! At last came dinner-time, and everybody else came. At last up went the butler, and came down with the message that they were to eat whatever they had, and take care of the company somehow, and go to prayer-meeting, and let her alone--she was writing a letter to the Castleman County Register on the subject of 'The Duty of Woman as a Homemaker'!"
8. This was the beginning of my introduction to Castleman County. It was a long time before I went there, but I learned to know its inhabitants from Sylvia's stories of them. Funny stories, tragic stories, wild and incredible stories out of a half-barbaric age! She would tell them and we would laugh together; but then a wistful look would come into her eyes, and a silence would fall. So very soon I made the discovery that my Sylvia was homesick. In all the years that I knew her she never ceased to speak of Castleman Hall as "home". All her standards came from there, her new ideas were referred there.
We talked of Suffrage for a while, and I spoke about the lives of women on lonely farms--how they give their youth and health to their husband's struggle, yet have no money partnership which they can enforce in case of necessity. "But surely," cried Sylvia, "you don't want to make divorce more easy!"
"I want to make the conditions of it fair to women," I said.
"But then more women will get it! And there are so many divorced women now! Papa says that divorce is a greater menace than Socialism!"
She spoke of Suffrage in England, where women were just beginning to make public disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his wife subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit to such a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a woman to divorce her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by desertion or cruelty. Surely not even her father would consider that a decent arrangement! I mentioned a recent decision of the highest court in the land, that a man who brought his mistress to live in his home, and compelled his