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
Until she found her feet--not in her office, but at home at first
emergence from her school--until she found her feet she often used to be
kept uncommonly late at office. In a very short while she found her
feet and that excuse no longer was put forward. Every girl of Doda’s
association was on her feet in 1919; and for Doda very much easier, at
that, than for the generality, to establish her position in the house.
By 1920, when she was nineteen, she was conducting her life as she
pleased, as nineteen manifestly should. In 1921, when she was twenty,
the war work was over and she was “getting through the day” much as she
lived the night. It was pretty easy to get through the day in 1921. That
which the curmudgeons called license, and liberty the free, was in 1921
held by charter and by right prescriptive.
Look at her. There she is. She’s lovelier yet, if that which was
her budding loveliness could bear a lovelier hue. She’s always out
somewhere, or she’s always off somewhere, or she’s always coming in from
somewhere. Her eyes, in presentation more pronounced, have always got
that sleepy look or got that glinting look. She never talks much at
home. She seems to keep her talking for her friends and she never
brings her friends home. She’s on good terms with Rosalie. That’s the
expression for it. She was to have been a woman treasury into which was
to be poured by Rosalie all her woman love. She was to have been a woman
with her mother in the house of Harry and of Huggo. But that’s all done.
She’s not a daughter to her mother. She never asked to be born to her
mother, as once she told her mother, and though that never now again is
said it is the basis of her stand. She owes no obligations. They just
meet. They get on very pleasantly. She’s on good terms with Rosalie.
It is odd--or else it isn’t odd but only natural--that in all the
pictures seen by Rosalie there scarcely is a picture that ever shows
the children all together. They hardly ever, within the compass of
her pictures, were together. As in their schoolhood, so much more in
adolescence, they never showed a least desire for one another’s company.
They had their friends, each one, and much preferred their friends.
You’d not, it’s true, say that of Benji; but Benji in fraternal wish had
to take what was offered him and there was nothing offered him by Doda;
by Huggo less than nothing.
Benji!
Look, here’s the Benji one; the good, the quiet, gentle one; the one
that never gave a thought of trouble, Benji.
Her Benji! The one that came after disfavour, after remorse; that came
with tears, with thank God, charged-with-meaning tears. The littlest
one. The one that was so tiny wee beside the big and sturdy others. Her
last one! Her Benji!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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