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By Root 1908 0

wife. She had been an attractive woman, Elsie thought, using the past tense a little harshly. She wore a plain dark skirt and a white shirt with a black and green bow at its collar. Her hat was black trimmed with a green ribbon. She looked mild and competent. Her subject was “A Woman’s Place.” She began by saying that she was grateful to the last speaker for having raised the subject of the sacred values of the Home, for it was of the Home she wished to speak. When it was mentioned in this way, she thought, everyone had a pleasant image of a woman in a sunlit house with a garden, and a warm fire in winter, surrounded by plump and smiling children, a baby perhaps in her arms, her mind full of little comforts for her husband on his return from an arduous day in the office or the club. Such a woman’s head would be full of delicious new receipts for cakes and jellies, delightful new covers for cushions and original decorations for hat-brims and corsages. Women in this happy state were in fact few. Rich women did not mind their children, might go days or weeks without seeing them, delegated the care of their health to nursemaids and the care of their minds to governesses, and sent them away, as soon as they could, to schools where they might well be homesick or bullied. And then, such women suffered from boredom. Women could not use minds which had been fed on nothing but sugar flowers and cream soup and hatpins. And the vast majority of working women—and there were thousands and thousands of working women who not only earned the household bread but did what sweeping they could and spread the bread with what grease they could scavenge—they did indeed value the Home and keeping it together, however many adults and children slept in one room—for one step beyond such homes was the Workhouse, which was a mockery both of home and work. The “values of the Home” was an abstract paper phantom.

And let women not think that their sense of duty, their influence in their proper sphere, in the Home, counted for anything in the face of the law. A woman who shielded her children from an unreasonable or violent father had no chance of taking them with her if she fled from unhappiness. Such a man could claim that outside his Home she was unfit, not only to care for, but even to see or to visit, her children, who had been her life, though her heart might be breaking. Under the sweet sentiments about the domestic sphere of happiness, lip service paid to the wisdom of motherhood, lay cruelty. It was true that a young woman, seduced by a plausible man—an employer, an employer’s son, maybe—if unmarried, was alone responsible in law for the welfare of her unhappy child. But a married mother, separated for whatever reason from her husband, ceased at that moment to have any rights as a mother.

• • •

Elsie’s spirit drew back as Mrs. Methley grew more passionate. She was right, of course, but she cared too much, Elsie wanted to stop watching her caring. The Methleys surely had no children.

Elsie thought of her own mother. She had worked. She had been good at her craft and the air of the kilns had made her ill. She had tried to make a home for them. They had had a geranium in a pot on a window sill. They had had a Minton plate—it was a second—hung on a nail on the wall. They all knew what these things meant. They meant they were respectable. Just respectable. She tried to think she wouldn’t so much mind being trapped in a gilded cage of a comfortable Home—she had done a fair amount of substitute Home-making at Purchase House, not so much out of a desire for homeliness as out of a powerful dislike for mess, and shoddiness, and discomfort, which was unshared by the Purchase women. All this talk about what women did, or should, or might want was unsettling to her. She had wanted shoes and a belt and she had them. She wanted—she wanted—she wanted—to live. But it was beginning to irritate her that she had thought so little. If she had sat up all night reading, who would she be now? She raised her face under her gallant hat, to look at the women on the platform,