United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

Page 19 text:

when even I know I’m writing sentimental rot. This life is stifling me. “I’ve done all my living between the covers of books. I’ve turned myself into an unsexed old bluestocking. I should have mar¬ ried and had eleven children.” “Well, Betty, you had your choice twenty-five years ago, and I, personally, think you chose right.” “Why, Roger Knight, what are you saying!” “I guess this is pretty strong, but thirty years’ friendship ought to protect me, so I’m going to tell you the truth. Twenty-five years ago I asked you to marry me but you wouldn’t give me an answer. You wanted to dabble round in Art for a while. For three years I hung around like a sick cat and then, in disgust, I married a woman who looked as though she didn’t even know what tragedy was. She didn’t, but she soon learned what bridge was, and gossiping over back fences. Just the same I think I made a good swop. God, I feel for you artistic women and the men you get hold of. You never get in touch with life. Look at yourself. M.A. ’28, two years in an office, then twenty odd years of this, varied by school-teachers’ expeditions into the Trossachs and the Alps. Not a breath of fresh air! If you had married me I would have been afraid to act like a normal man, for fear your imagination would squeeze a fat check from some publisher out of my love-making. I would have had to deal with hysterical wives, kids brought up to be geniuses. You would have dragged Hamlet to meals, into bed at night. Heaven preserve me from that! Gambling debts and offended neighbors are nothing compared to it.” No longer was there anything out in the shadow which took Elizabeth’s attention. “I knew you never forgave me for not marry¬ ing me.” “Oh, forget it, Betty. I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s the problem that confronts any modem woman capable of education. It’s the bloody generosity with which the male animal has thrown open a new and forbidden world of emotions to the female, with¬ out supplying the scale of values, or expecting it all to make any difference in a woman. Betty, you are a damn good example of the results of higher education for women. You’re an extreme case and easy to analyze, an anarchy of emotions and not one atom of ethics in your whole virgin body. Just keep on with your stories and don’t let Eve get the upper hand as she did tonight. You’ll be happiest that way. Well I’d better be off or Bertha will be suing you for alienation of affection. She has always suspected you. She doesn’t know you.” [17]

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The anger faded out of Elizabeth’s eyes. Her goodbye was amiable if rather absent. As the door closed behind Roger, she walked back to the desk, murmuring . . . “Mary,” he said, “you look very beautiful tonight.” “Only sad, John,” answered Mary, “the Eve in me has the upper hand tonight. I’m thinking of all the children I should have had and didn’t have.” III. Ruth lay awake, vaguely aware of the lean strength of her husband’s body. She envied him his deep sleep, and tried vainly to school herself into relaxation. Finally she sat up hugging her knees. She looked down at Gregor’s sharp cheekbones and at the angular contours of his large, thin, loose-limbed body. Shadows etched gro¬ tesque hollows in his cheeks, and drew her eyes to the black jagged forms of the leafless oak-trees outside. Strange how she could not leave this drab prairie city behind her! She had fled to the other end of the world and here she was again. Familiar landscape churned up the old struggle. A childhood passed just on the edge of poverty. Four hard-earned years in university. Two years of being kicked about from one worthless job to another. Visions crumbling. Various impulses to flight; a nunnery, the backwoods. Both these solutions meant isolation however, and a lately crumbled vision of self-worth and sanity made Ruth a little uncertain of her ability to work out her salvation alone. Educate a woman to think, press her on all sides with cheap jobs, poor wages, senseless survivals from the China Doll Age, and expect her to come out of it as placid as a deep pool. Your expectations will be disappointed. You get a half- fledged, bewildered creature. Such was the Ruth who fled in the only direction in which she saw any hope. Once safely sheltered on a collective farm, she pressed her forehead into the flanks of the cows after the best Hardy fashion and became a successful and respected milkmaid. Contentment increased in an atmosphere which took successful female labors for granted. The hope, remote though it had been, had proven true. Ruth had known that for centuries the women of Eastern Europe had done men’s work in the fields. Therefore, in this new time of emancipation, they should not be in the position of absurdly pampered children, possessed of one more bauble which they could not use for want of experience and oppor¬ tunity. In this atmosphere, Ruth rose from milkmaid to agronom without exciting wonder. She became the real modem woman; a being capable of creation only as a result of work done, and cor¬ responding not at all to the mythical modern woman of the western [19]