Miss Louisa, at home in the dingy vicarage, had suffered a great deal over her
sister’s wedding. Having once begun to cry out against it, during the
engagement, she had been silenced by Mary’s quiet: “I don’t
agree with you about him, Louisa, I want to marry him.” Then Miss
Louisa had been angry deep in her heart, and therefore silent. This dangerous
state started the change in her. Her own revulsion made her recoil from the
hitherto undoubted Mary.
“I’d beg the streets barefoot first,” said Miss Louisa,
thinking of Mr Massy.
But evidently Mary could perform a different heroism. So she, Louisa the
practical, suddenly felt that Mary, her ideal, was questionable after all. How
could she be pure—one cannot be dirty in act and spiritual in being.
Louisa distrusted Mary’s high spirituality. It was no longer genuine for
her. And if Mary were spiritual and misguided, why did not her father protect
her? Because of the money. He disliked the whole affair, but he backed away,
because of the money. And the mother frankly did not care: her daughters could
do as they liked. Her mother’s pronouncement:
“Whatever happens to him, Mary is safe for life,”—so
evidently and shallowly a calculation, incensed Louisa.
“I’d rather be safe in the workhouse,” she cried.
“Your father will see to that,” replied her mother brutally. This
speech, in its indirectness, so injured Miss Louisa that she hated her mother
deep, deep in her heart, and almost hated herself. It was a long time resolving
itself out, this hate. But it worked and worked, and at last the young woman
said:
“They are wrong—they are all wrong. They have ground out their
souls for what isn’t worth anything, and there isn’t a grain of
love in them anywhere. And I will have love. They want us to deny it.
They’ve never found it, so they want to say it doesn’t exist. But I
will have it. I will love—it is my birthright. I will love
the man I marry—that is all I care about.”
So Miss Louisa stood isolated from everybody. She and Mary had parted over Mr
Massy. In Louisa’s eyes, Mary was degraded, married to Mr Massy. She
could not bear to think of her lofty, spiritual sister degraded in the body
like this. Mary was wrong, wrong, wrong: she was not superior, she was flawed,
incomplete. The two sisters stood apart. They still loved each other, they
would love each other as long as they lived. But they had parted ways. A new
solitariness came over the obstinate Louisa, and her heavy jaw set stubbornly.
She was going on her own way. But which way? She was quite alone, with a blank
world before her. How could she be said to have any way? Yet she had her fixed
will to love, to have the man she loved.
