The Price She Paid [111]
new place and the new room, with no sense of strangeness. She was reproaching herself for hardness, for not caring about Cyrilla, the best and truest friend she had ever had. But the truth lay in quite a different direction. The house, the surroundings, where she had lived luxuriously, dreaming her foolish and fatuous dreams, was not the place for such a struggle as was now upon her. And for that struggle she preferred, to sensitive, sober, refined, impractical Cyrilla Brindley, the companionship and the sympathy, the practical sympathy, of Agnes Belloc. No one need be ashamed or nervous before Agnes Belloc about being poor or unsuccessful or having to resort to shabby makeshifts or having to endure coarse contacts. Cyrilla represented refinement, appreciation of the finished work--luxurious and sterile appreciation and enjoyment. Agnes represented the workshop--where all the doers of all that is done live and work. Mildred was descending from the heights where live those who have graduated from the lot of the human race and have lost all that superficial or casual resemblance to that race. She was going down to live with the race, to share in its lot. She was glad Agnes Belloc was to be there.
Generalizing about such a haphazard conglomerate as human nature is highly unsatisfactory, but it may be cautiously ventured that in New England, as in old England, there is a curiously contradictory way of dealing with conventionality. Nowhere is conventionality more in reverence; yet when a New-Englander, man or woman, happens to elect to break with it, nowhere is the break so utter and so defiant. If Agnes Belloc, cut loose from the conventions that had bound her from childhood to well into middle life, had remained at home, no doubt she would have spent a large part of her nights in thinking out ways of employing her days in outraging the conventionalities before her horrified and infuriated neighbors. But of what use in New York to cuff and spit upon deities revered by only an insignificant class--and only officially revered by that class? Agnes had soon seen that there was no amusement or interest whatever in an enterprise which in her New England home would have filled her life to the brim with excitement. Also, she saw that she was well into that time of life where the absence of reputation in a woman endangers her comfort, makes her liable to be left alone --not despised and denounced, but simply avoided and ignored. So she was telling Mildred the exact truth. She had laid down the arms she had taken up against the social system, and had come in--and was fighting it from the safer and wiser inside. She still insisted that a woman had the same rights as a man; but she took care to make it clear that she claimed those rights only for others, that she neither exercised them nor cared for them for herself. And to make her propaganda the more effective, she was not only circumspect herself, but was exceedingly careful to be surrounded by circumspect people. No one could cite her case as proof that woman would expand liberty into license. In theory there was nothing lively that she did not look upon at least with tolerance; in practice, more and more she disliked seeing one of her sex do anything that might cause the world to say ``woman would abuse liberty if she had it.'' ``Sensible people,'' she now said, ``do as they like. But they don't give fools a chance to titter and chatter.''
Agnes Belloc was typical--certainly of a large and growing class in this day--of the decay of ancient temples and the decline of the old-fashioned idealism that made men fancy they lived nobly because they professed and believed nobly. She had no ethical standards. She simply met each situation as it arose and dealt with it as common sense seemed in that particular instance to dictate. For a thousand years genius has been striving with the human race to induce it to abandon its superstitions and hypocrisies and to defy common sense, so adaptable, so tolerant, so conducive to long and healthy and happy life. Grossly materialistic,
Generalizing about such a haphazard conglomerate as human nature is highly unsatisfactory, but it may be cautiously ventured that in New England, as in old England, there is a curiously contradictory way of dealing with conventionality. Nowhere is conventionality more in reverence; yet when a New-Englander, man or woman, happens to elect to break with it, nowhere is the break so utter and so defiant. If Agnes Belloc, cut loose from the conventions that had bound her from childhood to well into middle life, had remained at home, no doubt she would have spent a large part of her nights in thinking out ways of employing her days in outraging the conventionalities before her horrified and infuriated neighbors. But of what use in New York to cuff and spit upon deities revered by only an insignificant class--and only officially revered by that class? Agnes had soon seen that there was no amusement or interest whatever in an enterprise which in her New England home would have filled her life to the brim with excitement. Also, she saw that she was well into that time of life where the absence of reputation in a woman endangers her comfort, makes her liable to be left alone --not despised and denounced, but simply avoided and ignored. So she was telling Mildred the exact truth. She had laid down the arms she had taken up against the social system, and had come in--and was fighting it from the safer and wiser inside. She still insisted that a woman had the same rights as a man; but she took care to make it clear that she claimed those rights only for others, that she neither exercised them nor cared for them for herself. And to make her propaganda the more effective, she was not only circumspect herself, but was exceedingly careful to be surrounded by circumspect people. No one could cite her case as proof that woman would expand liberty into license. In theory there was nothing lively that she did not look upon at least with tolerance; in practice, more and more she disliked seeing one of her sex do anything that might cause the world to say ``woman would abuse liberty if she had it.'' ``Sensible people,'' she now said, ``do as they like. But they don't give fools a chance to titter and chatter.''
Agnes Belloc was typical--certainly of a large and growing class in this day--of the decay of ancient temples and the decline of the old-fashioned idealism that made men fancy they lived nobly because they professed and believed nobly. She had no ethical standards. She simply met each situation as it arose and dealt with it as common sense seemed in that particular instance to dictate. For a thousand years genius has been striving with the human race to induce it to abandon its superstitions and hypocrisies and to defy common sense, so adaptable, so tolerant, so conducive to long and healthy and happy life. Grossly materialistic,