This FreedomHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
This Freedom
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
“Yes, your study, rather. Each of us with our own study! A lark, eh?
And Rosalie, in mine there’ll be a special chair for you and in yours a
special chair for me. We’ll stroll in on each other’s work--”
She loved him for that. “Like two men in chambers,” she said.
His reply was, “We’ll rip out this fireplace and put you in one in
oak; the walls something between gold and brown, eh? Now come into
the drawing-room. This’ll be the room. Let’s start with the hearth and
imagine it’s winter. This is where we’ll have tea the days when I get
back in time--”
“And when I get back in time.”
“Of course, I’d forgotten that. Why, then whichever of us is back first
will be all ready with the tea and waiting to welcome the other. Can’t
you see the room? Warm, shadowed, glowing here and there, here and there
gleaming, and the tea table shining? Won’t it be a place to rush back
to? I say, Rosalie, it’s going to be rather wonderful, isn’t it?”
Dear Harry! Yes, men that married for a home.
So she had known that from the start; and, the significant thing (as
later perceived) she never had mentioned it to Harry. There was not
a line of her life, as lived before she knew him, that she had not
revealed to him; there was not a passage of her life, when joined to
his, that was not handed to him to write upon; but this, that she knew
he’d married for a home, was never revealed, never inscribed upon the
tablets submitted daily for his annotation.
Yes, significant!
But how could its significance have been perceived? Look here, there had
been a night--a thousand years ago!--when a girl had turned her face to
her pillow and cried, most frightfully. Significant! Why, that girl’s
world had lain in atoms at the significance of that girl’s grief. And
she that now looked back had been born out of those tears, as the first
woman drawn from the side of the first man, and fondly had chid that
child that no significance was there at all. There was none. There was
nothing to fear. A natural joy of life that had been stifled had been
embraced, a shattered world had been remoulded on foundings firmer and,
ah, nearer to the heart’s desire. Significant! It had been so disproved
that not more possibly could fears arise from those, her lovely
dissipations of those fears, than from its watchful mother’s reassuring
candle and her soothing words new terrors to a frightened child at
night.
Then how, she used to ask herself, could significance have been
perceived in not admitting Harry to her smiling thought on men and home?
Significance--then? Nay, memory bear witness, much, much the contrary!
Bear witness, memory, it was that very thought of Harry as boy with
cave, as man with home, had suddenly suffused her with...
“Dear Harry!” she had thought, and with the thought...
Anna! That cry of Anna’s upon that frightening night, striking her hands
against her bosom, “I have a longing--here!” Never till then its meaning
nor even thought upon its meaning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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