Marriage -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"What I want of it all I am not yet sure--for me personally, I mean.
But there is my husband, to begin with, and his work that I can help
grow--and his old friends. And they are not all. I keep hearing of new
ones I must meet--and they are mixed in with all those things I have
discovered in the town. A few of these people were born here--but most
have come from all over the country. Sometimes I shut my eyes and
ask--'Where are you now, all over the land, you others who are to come
to New York and be friends of mine and of my children?'
"I want children--more than one. How many I am not quite sure. That's
another point--you decide these things." She frowned and scratched this
sentence out. "And children grow--and the idea of bringing them up
makes me feel very young and humble, too. But in that we are all in the
same boat--for the whole country, I suppose, is a good deal the same.
What a queer and puzzling, gorgeous age we are just beginning--all of
us! I wonder what I shall make of it? What shall I be like ten years
from now? How much shall I mean to my husband--and to other men and
women? But most of all to women--for we are coming together so! I
wonder what we shall make of it all? I wonder how much we women who
march--march on and on to everything--are really going to mean in the
world!
"Oh, how solemn! Good-night, my dears! A kiss to every one of you!"
She folded her letter with the rest, and then she quickly squeezed them
all into a large envelope, which she addressed to Miss Barbara Wells,
Bismarck, North Dakota. Ethel's eyes were very bright. She sniffed a
little and smiled at herself. "Oh, don't be a baby! It's all over now,
you know--I mean it's just beginning!"
She stopped for a moment by the table, with the letter in her hand, and
looked down at Amy's picture. "That is all any one needs to know."
Her look was pitying, tender, but a little curious, too.
"I wonder what you were like at my age! I wonder what you went through,
poor dear? . . . But it's over now--all over. All we don't like
will fade away, and you'll grow so beautiful again. Susette will love
her mother. . . . But she won't be just like you, my dear."
Ethel went slowly out of the room. At the doorway she switched off the
light, and the bare, empty room was left in the dark. The photograph
was invisible now. On the street below, a motor stopped; and there was
a murmur of voices, a laugh. Tomorrow somebody else would be here.
THE END
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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