Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"She thinks he's wonderful."

"I know she does. He has a way with women. All the same, she needs somebody else."

"She doesn't--" Jenny Blair began, and held back the words until they stood under one of the old sugar maples on the corner. "She doesn't seem real. There are times, just fleeting instants, when she looks like death. Sometimes I wonder if it is her smile. She doesn't seem able to stop smiling, not even when she thinks she is alone."

"That's what I meant. I wonder what your grandfather would say."

"He wouldn't say anything. Only that she's perfect. I'm sure he doesn't know it," she added, with the insight of thwarted impulse, "but he has always been in love with her in his heart. I shouldn't admit this to anybody else, but it is really true."

She had expected a laugh, or at least a smile, but he answered gravely, "Well, it can't do any harm, I suppose. Not at eighty-three."

"Oh no, it can't do any harm."

"You haven't told me anything I didn't know. But you think you're observant, don't you?"

"I think more than that," she retorted angrily. "I could tell you of some one else who I think is in love with her." It was wrong, she knew, to say that, but she couldn't help striking back when he teased her. Never could they be together ten minutes without a quarrel! And it wasn't make-believe, as Grandfather tried to pretend. She had disliked John Welch even when she was a child, and she had known, without knowing why or how she knew it, that he disliked her. Then, because she felt that she had gone too far, she continued, "But I don't care. I want to go away. I'm tired of Queenborough. I'm tired of everything," and she was indeed for the moment. Already she was regretting that she had given up the struggle to go to New York and try to be an actress. "I sometimes wish I were a suffragette. The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble."

"Well, there are plenty of ways to make trouble. You won't have to look far if you want to do that."

"I gave up going to New York because of Mamma and Grandfather," she said, and really believed that she was speaking the truth.

"I'd go myself like a shot," he answered, "but for Cousin Eva. I couldn't leave Cousin Eva when she is like this."

"I thought you liked it here. I thought you were perfectly happy."

"No, you didn't think that."

"Well," she hesitated, trying to keep a note of vexation out of her voice, "I did think you liked Queenborough. Of course I know you are always fussing about things."

"I'd fuss anywhere. That's the way I'm made. But there's no opportunity in a place like this. All the young men are going away. As soon as a man begins to make a name, he packs up and takes the first train for some other place. That's especially true in my profession. If you stay here, it means arrested development."

"Then I shouldn't stay. I'd go as soon as I could."

"There's Cousin Eva."

"Yes, of course there's Cousin Eva. But she may get well."

"If she gets well, I'll go. I'll go the first of next year. There's a place waiting for me with Burdette in New York. He's one of the very best men in the Neurological Institute."

For the first time she looked at him with animation, almost with interest. "It's good of you to wait," she said, "and I know that she depends on you." Feeling that this perfunctory praise was not sufficient, she added, "I wonder if people always want to go away and be something else? Grandfather thinks they do."

"As long as they're young, and sometimes after they're middle-aged. The trouble is we imagine we can change ourselves by changing our scenery. I feel that way, though I ought to have learned better. I'd like to go away and be free, and I know perfectly well the kind of freedom I am looking for has not yet been invented. After all, Queenborough is only a small patch in the world. It is the same everywhere. People who have tradition are oppressed by tradition, and people who are without it are oppressed by the lack of it—or by whatever else they have put in its place. You want to go to New York and pretend to be unconventional, but nothing is more cramping than the effort to be unconventional when you weren't born so. It is as hard on the nerves as pretending, like Cousin Eva, to be an ideal."

"But all places are not like Queenborough."

"Some are worse, and some are bigger. It is all nonsense to talk as if Southerners were a special breed, all wanting the same things and thinking after the same pattern. There are as many misfit minds here as anywhere else. Washington Street used to be a little Mayfair at the tail end of the procession, and Queenborough has all the foul or stale odours of civilization. If we have our false sense of security, so have New York and London and even Moscow. It looks, by the way, as if England's sense of security is about to be tried. Her next war will probably be with Ulster, and it may come any day."

"Grandfather was telling us that last night. It was dreadful, too, about the killing of the Austrian Crown Prince."

"Yes, but that didn't excite me. Somehow, if anybody has to be sacrificed, I prefer that it should be a crown prince. There are few persons I can spare easier. The thing that pricks through my skin is when some hundreds of poor devils are blown up in a mine owned by philanthropists."

She smiled vaguely. "You are very advanced, aren't you?"

"Perhaps. That depends on the way you're going, I suppose, and on how far you've gone."

"Well, you're different, anyway. That's the reason Grandfather likes you so much, though you never seem to agree about anything. But he says all the Archbalds are eccentric. I suppose it began with his great-aunt Sabina, who was a witch. There were only two witches in the Colony," she added proudly, "and she was one of them. I don't mind that a bit. I think it's nice to be different. Grandfather thinks it hurts dreadfully. That's what he means when he says he made a good living by putting an end to himself. Mrs. Birdsong understands, but I don't."

"You wouldn't, not with your sparrow vision. But it's true, nevertheless. You must be a slave or starve in this damned world. That's the trouble I'm facing now, and it is as true of medicine as of everything else. Conform, or be kicked out."

"If I felt like that," she said when he paused and looked at her with a frown, as if he dreaded yet expected an answer, "I'd go as far away as I could."

"Where? There isn't any place far enough away for a man who asks more civilization, not less. It's silly to talk, as some people do, about seeking an opportunity outside the South, unless, of course, he is merely seeking more patients to experiment on, or more clients to keep out of prison. Our civilization is as good as the rest, perhaps better than most, because it's less noisy; but the whole thing is a hollow crust everywhere. A medical man is expected to take it easier when he calls it anthropology, but I can't see how that helps. They forget that living in anthropology may be quite as disagreeable to a sensitive mind as living in civilization."

She laughed a little vacantly, because she was wondering how she could hurt George at the station to-morrow. Would it be better to behave as if she didn't know he was there or to nod disdainfully when she told Mrs. Birdsong good-bye? "That sounds like Grandfather," she said. "But, you know, he's much happier now than he was in his youth. He thinks you will be less vehement about wrongs when you are older."

"That's easy to say when you are eighty-three; but what are you going to do about living while you still have to live? Of course if you happen to be either a primitive or a pervert, it's a simple problem. Then you can escape to the South Sea Islands, eat breadfruit, and debauch the natives. But suppose you're neither a primitive nor a pervert, but merely civilized. Suppose you ask a better social order, not a worse one--"