The Precipice | Page 9

living, Honora, as nothing else
could--nothing else!
"Mummy wouldn't like me to write like this. She doesn't approve of
women whose understanding jumps ahead of their experiences. But
what is the use of pretending that I don't encompass your miracle? I
knew all about it from the beginning of the earth.
"This will mean that you will have to give up your laboratory work
with David, I suppose. Will that be a hardship? Or are you glad of the
old womanly excuse for passing by the outside things, and will you
now settle down to be as fine a mother as you were a chemist? Will you
go further, my dear, and make a fuss about your house and go all

delicately bedizened after the manner of the professors' nice little
wives--go in, I mean, for all the departments of the feminine
profession?
"I do hope you'll have a little son, Honora, not so much on your
account as on his. During childhood a girl's feet are as light as a boy's
bounding over the earth; but when once childhood is over, a man's life
seems so much more coherent than a woman's, though it is not really so
important. But it takes precisely the experience you are going through
to give it its great significance, doesn't it?
"What other career is there for real women, I wonder? What, for
example, am I to do, Honora? There at the University I prepared myself
for fine work, but I'm trapped here in this silly Silvertree cage. If I had
a talent I could make out very well, but I am talentless, and all I do now
is to answer the telephone for father and help mummy embroider the
towels. They won't let me do anything else. Some one asked me the
other day what colors I intended wearing this autumn. I wanted to tell
them smoke-of-disappointment, ashes-of-dreams, and
dull-as-wash-Monday. But I only said ashes-of-roses. "'Not all of your
frocks, surely, Kate,' one of the girls cried. 'All,' I declared; 'street
frocks, evening gowns, all.' 'But you mustn't be odd,' my little friend
warned. 'Especially as people are a little suspicious that you will be
because of your going to a co-educational college.'
"I thought it would be so restful here, but it doesn't offer peace so much
as shrinkage. Silvertree isn't pastoral--it's merely small town. Of course
it is possible to imagine a small town that would be ideal--a community
of quiet souls leading the simple life. But we aren't great or quiet souls
here, and are just as far from simple as our purses and experience will
let us be.
"I dare say that you'll be advising me, as a student of psychology, to
stop criticizing and to try to do something for the neighbors here--go in
search of their submerged selves. But, honestly, it would require too
much paraphernalia in the way of diving-bells and air-pumps.
"I have, however, a reasonable cause of worry. Dear little mummy isn't

well. At first we thought her indisposition of little account, but she
seems run down. She has been flurried and nervous ever since I came
home; indeed, I may say she has been so for years. Now she seems
suddenly to have broken down. But I'm going to do everything I can for
her, and I know father will, too; for he can't endure to have any one
sick. It arouses his great virtue, his physicianship."
* * * * *
A week later Kate mailed this:--
"I am turning to you in my terrible fear. Mummy won't answer our
questions and seems lost in a world of thought. Father has called in
other physicians to help him. I can't tell you how like a frightened child
I feel. Oh, my poor little bewildered mummy! What do you suppose
she is thinking about?"
* * * * *
Then, a week afterward, this--on black-bordered paper:--
"SISTER HONORA:--
"She's been gone three days. To the last we couldn't tell why she fell ill.
We only knew she made no effort to get well. I am tormented by the
fear that I had something to do with her breaking like that. She was
appalled--shattered--at the idea of any friction between father and me.
When I stood up for my own ideas against his, it was to her as
sacrilegious as if I had lifted my hand against a king. I might have
capitulated--ought, I suppose, to have foregone everything!
"There is one thing, however, that gives me strange comfort. At the last
she had such dignity! Her silence seemed fine and brave. She looked at
us from a deep still peace as if, after all her losing of the way, she had
at last found it and Herself. The search has carried her beyond our