Part 34 (1/2)

A droll look came into her rosy Irish face, and a funny little touch of brogue into her voice.

”I'd think if he loved me the way he ought to, Miss Privet, he'd be willing to take a whack himself now and then, just in the way of love.

Besides,” she added, ”I'd come it round Ranny when it was anything I really wanted. Any man's soft enough if a woman knows how to treat him right.”

I abandoned the discussion, as I am always forced to abandon a talk of this sort with Rosa. I suppose in her cla.s.s the crude doctrine that it is the right of the man to take and the duty of the woman to give still exists with a good deal of simplicity and force, but it almost stops my breath to hear Rosa state it. It is like a bit of primeval savagery suddenly thrust into my face in the midst of nineteenth-century civilization. The worst of it all is, moreover, to feel the habits of old generations buzzing dizzily in my ears until I have a confused sensation as if in principle the absurd vagaries of Rosa might be right.

I am tinglingly aware that fibres which belonged to some remote progenitress, some barbaric woman captured by force, perhaps, after the marriage customs of primitive peoples, retain the instinct of submission to man and respond to Rosa's uncivilized theories. I have a sort of second sense that if a man I loved came and a.s.serted a brutal sovereignty over me, it would appeal to these inherited instincts as right and proper, according to the order appointed by nature. I know what nonsense this is. The sense of justice has in the modern woman displaced the old humiliating subjection,--although if one loved a man the subjection would not be humiliating, but just the highest pleasure.

I can conceive of a woman's being so fond of a man that to be his abject slave would be so much the happiest thing in the world that to serve him to her very utmost would be so great a delight as almost to be selfishness.

How Father would have shouted over a page like this! I would not have supposed even Rosa could have spurred me into such an attempt at philosophy, and I hardly believed I knew so many long words. After all I doubt if Rosa and I are so far apart in our instincts; only she has the coolness to put them into words I only imitate, and cannot pretend to rival.

September 24. It is delightful to see how really fond Tom is becoming of baby. I came home from a walk this afternoon, and there in the parlor was Tom down on the floor with Tomine, shaking his head at her like a bear, and making her laugh. Rosa beamed from the background with the most complete approval. He sprang up when I appeared, but I ignored all the strangeness, and only said how glad I was to see him. I think he liked my taking as a matter of course his being there, and very likely this was what made him confess he had been in two or three times to play with baby when he knew that I was not at home.

”I saw you going down the other side of the river,” he said, ”so I came to keep Thomasine from being lonesome.”

I returned that it was not very complimentary to tell me he had tried to avoid me, but that I appreciated how much more fascinating baby was than I, so he need not apologize; and the end of it was that after this nonsense had broken the ice we sat on the floor together to entertain her ladys.h.i.+p. She was pleased to be in the most sunny mood imaginable, and responded to our fooling most graciously. With truly feminine preference, however, she bestowed most of her attention upon the man.

She is a more entrancing creature every day; and she certainly has her father's eyes. I compared them this afternoon.

September 26. The reading-room seems really at last to be coming into being. I have found a place for it. It is a kind of square box over the post-office, but with furniture and pictures it can be made rather attractive. I have made out a list of periodicals, and sent to Boston for framed photographs for the walls. To-day I went to talk over the plan with Deacon Richards.

The mill was fragrant with its sweet mealy smell, and Deacon Daniel was as dusty as a moth-miller. As I stood in the doorway waiting for him to come down from the wheel, where he was doing something or other about the hopper, I fell to humming the old rhyme we sang as children when we went by the mill:--

”'Miller, miller, musty-poll, How many bags of wheat you stole?'

'One of wheat and one of rye.'

'You naughty miller, you must die!'”

”That isn't very polite,” Deacon Daniel said, coming up behind me before I knew he had left his perch.

I turned and greeted him smilingly, repeating the last line:--

”You naughty miller, you must die!”

”I suppose I must,” he a.s.sented; ”but it won't be for stealing, Miss Ruth.”

I love the old mill, with its great beams and its continual sound of das.h.i.+ng water and the chirruping of the millstones grinding away at the corn like an insatiate monster that can never have enough. The smell of the meal, too, is so pleasant, and even the abundant dust is so clean and fresh it seems to belong there. The mellow light through the dim windows and the shadows hiding in every corner have always from childhood appealed to my imagination. I find there always a soothing and serene mood.

”I want your advice, Deacon Richards,” I said.

”So as not to follow it?” he demanded. ”That's what women generally want of advice.”

I a.s.sured him I was ready to follow his advice if it were good, and so we talked about the reading-room. I told him it seemed to me that if it was to go on properly it should have a head; somebody to manage it and be responsible for the way in which it was carried on.

”But you will do that yourself,” he said.

I answered that it must be a man, for it was nonsense to think of a woman's running a reading-room for men. He looked at me for a moment with his droll grin, and then he was pleased to say that for a woman I had a remarkable amount of common sense. I thanked him for the compliment to my s.e.x, and then asked if he would undertake the business, and promise not to freeze the readers out the way he did the prayer-meetings.

”I'm not the sort of person you want,” he answered, chuckling at my allusion to the fire question. ”I've sense enough to know that without being a woman. Why don't you ask Tom Webbe?”