Feminist fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Kate slept lightly that night. She had gone to bed with a sense of
gentle happiness, which arose from the furtive conviction that she was
going to surrender to Ray and to his point of view. He could take all
the responsibility if he liked and she would follow the old instincts of
woman and let the Causes of Righteousness with which she had allied
herself contrive to get along without her. It was nothing, she told
herself, but sheer egotism for her to suppose that she was necessary to
their prosperity.
She half awoke many times, and each time she had a vague, sweet longing
which refused to resolve itself into definite shape. But when the full
morning came she knew it was Ray she wanted. She couldn't wait out the
long week he had prescribed as a season of fasting and prayer before she
gave her answer, and she was shamelessly glad when her superior, over
there at the Settlement House, informed her that she would be required
to go to a dance-hall at South Chicago that night--a terrible place,
which might well have been called "The Girl Trap." This gave Kate a
legitimate excuse to ask for Ray's company, because he had besought her
not to go to such places at night without his escort.
"But ought I to be seeing you?" he asked over the telephone in answer
to her request. "Wouldn't it be better for my cause if I stayed away?"
In spite of the fact that he laughed, she knew he was quite in earnest,
and she wondered why he hadn't discerned her compliant mood from her
intonations.
"But I had to mind you, hadn't I?" she sent back. "You said I mustn't go
to such places without you."
From her tone she might have been the most betendriled feminine vine
that ever wrapped a self-satisfied masculine oak.
"Oh, I'll come," he answered. "Of course I'll come. You knew you had
only to give me the chance."
He was on time, impeccable, as always, in appearance. Kate was glad that
he was as tall as she. She knew, down in her inner consciousness, that
they made a fine appearance together, that they stepped off gallantly.
It came to her that perhaps they were to be envied, and that they
weren't--or at least that she wasn't--giving their good fortune its full
valuation.
She told him about her dinner with the Fitzgeralds and about the opera,
but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the
episode of Marna's wistful tears when she heard the music, and her
amazing _volte-face_ at remembering the baby's feeding-time. She would
have loved to spin out the story to him--she could have deepened the
colors just enough to make it all very telling. But she wasn't willing
to give away the reason for her changed mood. It was enough, after all,
that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm
he held it in a clasp that asserted his right to keep it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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