There was, however, one formal call which gave Frederica great joy; her grandmother and Miss Eliza Graham came over from the Laurels2 to see her—and she never behaved more outrageously3! She told Mr. Weston afterward4 that she had had the time of her life joshing Mrs. Holmes. He assured her that she was an imp5, but that he would gladly have paid the price of admission if he had only known that the circus was going to take place. He asked his cousin about it afterward, but her description of the scene was not so funny as Fred's. Indeed, it was rather pathetic—poor Freddy, fighting her grandmother, while Miss Eliza stood outside the ring, so to speak, and watched, pityingly.
"For there's nothing one can do for her, Arthur," Miss[Pg 173] Eliza told him; "she's got to get some very hard knocks before she'll give up advising the Creator how to manage His world."
She and Mr. Weston had found a deserted6 spot on the veranda7 at the Laurels, and she told him what she thought of Freddy. "It's a sort of violent righteousness that possesses the child," she said. "Where does she come from, Arthur? That mother! That grandmother! She must be a foundling."
"Her father had power. His righteousness was not very violent, but his temper was."
"She must make her mother very unhappy."
"Yeast8 makes dough9 uncomfortable, I suppose," he admitted.
"She's an unscrupulous truth-teller," Miss Graham said, and repeated some of the impertinently accurate things that Frederica, sitting in her ugly little living-room, with the Japanese fans on the walls, and yellow "Votes for Women" pennons over the doors, had flung at Mrs. Holmes. "Her grandmother said the 'women of to-day cheapened themselves'; to which she replied that 'the women of yesterday were dear at any price'!"
"She told me she had merely been truthful," Mr. Weston said. "Justifying10 herself on the ground of Truth is Fred's form of repentance11. But the girl suffers, Cousin Eliza!"
"She'll have to suffer a good deal before she'll amount to anything," Miss Eliza said, dryly; "I wanted to shake her! Arthur, if you had any missionary12 spirit, you would marry her."
[Pg 174]
"But Cousin Mary says she is 'not a young woman who is calculated'—"
They both laughed. "Nonsense! If she gets a master, she'll make him happy. A good-natured boy won't do. The gray mare13 would be the better horse. Marry her and beat her."
"Maitland will have to do the beating," he said. But he could not evade14 her.
"Don't be a fool. Take her! I know you want her."
"I do," he confessed. "But the little matter of her not wanting me seems to be an obstacle."
Miss Eliza, her old eagle head silhouetted15 against the dazzle of the lake, meditated16; then she said, "Is she engaged to Mr. Maitland?"
"No, but she's going to be. Besides, dear lady, I am forty-seven and she is twenty-six. Youth calls to Youth! Please don't suggest that she might prefer to be an 'old man's darling.'"
"You're not an old man. But the average young man—if he fell in love with her—would be under her thumb."
"Why do you say 'if'? Maitland has fallen in love with her, head over heels! He can't stop talking about her brains for five minutes at a time!"
Miss Eliza gave him a keen look. "Well, perhaps human nature has changed since my time. Then, a boy didn't fall in love with a girl's brains, though a grown man sometimes did. Cleverness in a girl is like playfulness in a kitten; it amuses a middle-aged17 man. The next thing he knows, he's in love!"
"Amuses!" Arthur Weston broke in, cynically18; "to[Pg 175] 'amuse' a middle-aged man doesn't seem a very satisfying occupation for a girl. Don't you think she'd rather have a boy's ridiculously solemn devotion?"
"But don't I tell you?—Love comes next! And I know you are in love, because you are so foolish. Arthur, I'm ashamed of you! Do have some spunk19. Get her! Get her! I don't believe she's in love with that boy."
He gave a rather hopeless laugh. "Oh, yes, she is. I haven't the ghost of a chance; besides—" he paused, took off his glasses, and put them on again, with deliberation—"besides, if I had a chance, I'd be a cur to take it. As you know, I had a blow below the belt. A man never quite gets his wind again, after a little affair like mine. It would be great luck for me to have Fred, but what sort of luck would it be for her to spend her life 'amusing' me?"
"Nonsense! I won't listen to such—" she paused, while three girls, romping20 along, arm in arm, swept past them, down the veranda. "Pretty things, aren't they?" she said, looking after them with tender old eyes; "how lovely Youth is!—even when it does its best to be ugly as to clothes and manners, like two of those youngsters. They didn't even see us, they were so absorbed in being young, bless their hearts! The outside one who bowed is a Wharton girl. She is a charming child, charming! And doing wonderfully at college. But those others—!"
"Awful," he agreed. "Cousin Eliza, what's the matter with women, nowadays?"
"Perfectly21 simple. They are drunk!"
"Drunk?"
"With the sudden sense of freedom. My dear boy,[Pg 176] reflect: When you were born—no, you're too young"—he waved a deprecating hand, but he liked the phrase—"when I was born—that's seventy-three years ago—women were dependent upon your delightful22 sex; so, of course, they were cowards and you were bullies23. Oh, yes; there were exceptions! There were courageous24 women, and henpecked men. And, of course, cowardice25 didn't always know it was cowardly, and bullying26 was often nothing but kindness. But you can say what you please, women were not free! They had to do what their men wanted—or quarrel with their families, and strike out for themselves! And what was there for them to do to earn their living? Outside of domestic service, nothing but teaching, sewing, and Sairey Gamp nursing! When I was a girl I did not know enough to teach and I hated sewing. So, if I had wanted to do anything my father and mother didn't approve of, I couldn't have kicked up my heels and said, 'I'll support myself!' Besides, I shouldn't have dared. The Fifth Commandment was still in existence when I was young. But now," she ended, "that's all changed. Girls can kick up their heels whenever they feel like it!"
He laughed, and said that Fred Payton had kicked entirely27 over the traces.
"She's not the only one," Miss Graham said; "those three girls who passed us have done it. That nice Wharton child is going to study law, if you please! Yes, Freedom! It's gone to their heads; it's champagne28 on empty stomachs. Empty only for the last two generations—before that there were endless occupations to fill our stomachs.[Pg 177] (My metaphors29 are a little mixed!) When I was a girl, the daughters of a house, even when people were as well off as Father, always had things to do—'Duties,' we called them. But nowadays there's not enough housework to go round; so if girls are rich, they play at work in—in anything, just to kill time! Like your Miss Freddy."
"Fred is making a success of her real-estate business," he said; "I hadn't a particle of faith in it, but she's making it go."
"It doesn't matter whether you have faith or not; the change has come: she had to have something to do! That's the secret of the situation, and there's no use kicking against it. You men have just got to accept the fact of the change. All you can do is to fall back on the thing that hasn't changed, and never can change, and never will change. Give girls that and they will get sober!"
He looked puzzled.
"My dear boy, let them be women, be wives, be mothers! Then being suffragists, or real-estate agents, or anything else, won't do them the slightest harm. Marry them, Arthur, marry them!"
"All of them?" he protested, in alarm.
She laughed, but held her own. "I always tell Mary that all that nice, bad child, your Freddy Payton, needs, is a husband. Which Mary thinks is very indelicate in me. But it's true. As for suffrage30 that the women are all cackling about, I don't care a—a—"
"Damn?" he suggested.
"Copper31," she reproved him. "I don't care a copper about it! I've always called myself an anti, but I never[Pg 178] really gave it much thought, one way or the other, until I went to an anti-suffrage meeting last year; that made me a suffragist! I declare, the foolishness of some of their arguments against voting went a long ways toward proving that perhaps they really haven't the brains to vote! Somebody said—Bessie Childs, I believe it was—that the ballot32 would take woman out of the Home. I reflected that Bridge took Bessie out of her home, for three or four hours once a week, and voting would take her out for three or four minutes, once a year. But I kept quiet until somebody intimated that the 'hand that rocks the cradle' is not competent, if you please, to deposit a ballot! Then I stood right up in meeting, and said, 'I'm only a poor old maid, but to my way of thinking, if the hand is as incompetent33 as that, it is far more dangerous to trust a cradle to it than a ballot!'"
"What did they say to that?"
"They said a cradle was every woman's first duty. 'But it would be most improper34 in me to have a cradle!' I said. I know they thought me coarse."
"So you are a suffragist?"
"Indeed I'm not! I went to a suffrage meeting, and really, Arthur, I was ashamed of my sex; such violence! such conceit35! such shallowness! such impropriety! One of them said that any married woman whose husband did not believe in suffrage should leave him or else have branded on her forehead a word—I cannot repeat to you the word she used. And another of them said that all the antis were 'idiotic36 droolers.' I thought of my dear sister, and I just couldn't stand that! I said, 'Well, ladies, if[Pg 179] the women who don't want the vote are idiots, is it wise to thrust it upon them? Will idiots make good voters?'"
"You had 'em there."
"No; they just said 'the vote would educate women.' And as for women not wanting it—'why, we'll cram37 it down their throats,' one of them said. Nice idea of democracy, wasn't it? She explained that some slaves hadn't wanted freedom, but that was no reason for not abolishing slavery! And, of course, she was right. The suffragists have brains, you know, Arthur. Well, as a result of a dose of each party, I'm nothing at all—very much."
"You're agin' 'em both?" he suggested.
"Oh, I still call myself an anti, because the antis are, at least, harmless; but I really don't care much, one way or the other. No; the thing that troubles me isn't suffrage or non-suffrage; it's the fact that somehow women seem to be fighting Nature. That worries me. I know that Nature can be depended upon to spank38 them into common sense when she gets hold of them, but, unfortunately, men won't help Nature out. They don't like girls like Miss Payton—I mean, the young men don't. They don't like girls who are cleverer than they are; but no girl is cleverer than you! Do 'come out of the West, Lochinvar, come out of the West'!"
He laughed and shook his head. "My dear cousin, I am dead in love with you, so don't try to turn my affections in another direction. Besides, Howard Maitland is coming home the end of November."
点击收听单词发音
1 flora | |
n.(某一地区的)植物群 | |
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2 laurels | |
n.桂冠,荣誉 | |
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3 outrageously | |
凶残地; 肆无忌惮地; 令人不能容忍地; 不寻常地 | |
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4 afterward | |
adv.后来;以后 | |
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5 imp | |
n.顽童 | |
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6 deserted | |
adj.荒芜的,荒废的,无人的,被遗弃的 | |
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7 veranda | |
n.走廊;阳台 | |
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8 yeast | |
n.酵母;酵母片;泡沫;v.发酵;起泡沫 | |
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9 dough | |
n.生面团;钱,现款 | |
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10 justifying | |
证明…有理( justify的现在分词 ); 为…辩护; 对…作出解释; 为…辩解(或辩护) | |
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11 repentance | |
n.懊悔 | |
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12 missionary | |
adj.教会的,传教(士)的;n.传教士 | |
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13 mare | |
n.母马,母驴 | |
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14 evade | |
vt.逃避,回避;避开,躲避 | |
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15 silhouetted | |
显出轮廓的,显示影像的 | |
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16 meditated | |
深思,沉思,冥想( meditate的过去式和过去分词 ); 内心策划,考虑 | |
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17 middle-aged | |
adj.中年的 | |
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18 cynically | |
adv.爱嘲笑地,冷笑地 | |
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19 spunk | |
n.勇气,胆量 | |
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20 romping | |
adj.嬉戏喧闹的,乱蹦乱闹的v.嬉笑玩闹( romp的现在分词 );(尤指在赛跑或竞选等中)轻易获胜 | |
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21 perfectly | |
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地 | |
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22 delightful | |
adj.令人高兴的,使人快乐的 | |
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23 bullies | |
n.欺凌弱小者, 开球 vt.恐吓, 威胁, 欺负 | |
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24 courageous | |
adj.勇敢的,有胆量的 | |
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25 cowardice | |
n.胆小,怯懦 | |
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26 bullying | |
v.恐吓,威逼( bully的现在分词 );豪;跋扈 | |
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27 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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28 champagne | |
n.香槟酒;微黄色 | |
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29 metaphors | |
隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 ) | |
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30 suffrage | |
n.投票,选举权,参政权 | |
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31 copper | |
n.铜;铜币;铜器;adj.铜(制)的;(紫)铜色的 | |
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32 ballot | |
n.(不记名)投票,投票总数,投票权;vi.投票 | |
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33 incompetent | |
adj.无能力的,不能胜任的 | |
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34 improper | |
adj.不适当的,不合适的,不正确的,不合礼仪的 | |
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35 conceit | |
n.自负,自高自大 | |
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36 idiotic | |
adj.白痴的 | |
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37 cram | |
v.填塞,塞满,临时抱佛脚,为考试而学习 | |
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38 spank | |
v.打,拍打(在屁股上) | |
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