Now and then we went out to a sociable or to the Rathbones for supper. Less frequently we had them to a meal with us. It was characteristic of business partnerships in Higgleston that they involved you in obligations of chicken salad and banana cake and the best tablecloth. Tommy enjoyed these occasions, and if he had allowed himself to criticise me at all, it would have been for my ineptitude at the happy social usage. Things went on so with us month after month. And if you ask me why I didn't take the chance life offers to women to justify themselves to the race, I will say that though the hope of a child presents itself sentimentally as opportunity, it figures primarily in the calculation of the majority, as a question of expense. The hard times foreseen by Burton Brothers hung black-winged in the air. We had not, in fact, been able to do more than keep up the interest on what was still due on the stock and fixtures. Nor had I even quite recovered the bodily equilibrium disturbed by my first encounter with the rending powers of life. There was a time when the spring came on in a fulness, when the procreant impulse stirred awake. I saw myself adequately employed shaping men for it ... maybe ... but the immediate deterring fact was the payment to be made in August. I went on living in Higgleston where human intercourse was organized on the basis that whatever a woman has of intelligence and worth, over and above the sum of such capacity in man, is to be excised as a superfluous growth, a monstrosity. Does anybody remember what the woman's world was like in small towns before the days of woman's clubs? There was a world of cooking and making over; there was a world of church-going and missionary societies and ministerial coöperation, half grudged and half assumed as a virtue which, since it was the only thing that lay outside themselves, was not without extenuation. And there was another world which underlay all this, coloured and occasioned it, sicklied over with futility; it was a world all of the care and expectancy of children overshadowed by the recurrent monthly dread, crept about by whispers, heretical but persistent, of methods of circumventing it, of a secret practice of things openly condemned. It was a world that went half the time in faint-hearted or unwilling or rebellious anticipation, and half on the broken springs of what as the subject of the endless, objectionable discussions, went by the name of "female complaints."