After the Storm

Mrs. Emerson sighed again faintly, while her eyes dropped from the

face of her visitor and sunk to the floor. A shadow was falling on

her spirit--a weight coming down with a gradually increasing

pressure upon her heart. She remembered the night of her return from

Ivy Cliff and the language then used by her husband on this very

subject, which was mainly in agreement with the range of opinions

attributed to him by Mrs. Talbot.

"Marriage, to a spirited woman," she remarked, in a pensive

undertone, "is a doubtful experiment."

"Always," returned her friend. "As woman stands now in the estimate

of man, her chances for happiness are almost wholly on the side of

old-maidism. Still, freedom is the price of struggle and combat; and

woman will first have to show, in actual strife, that she is the

equal of her present lord."

"Then you would turn every home into a battlefield?" said Mrs.

Emerson.

"Every home in which there is a tyrant and an oppressor," was the

prompt answer. "Many fair lands, in all ages, have been trampled

down ruthlessly by the iron feet of war; and that were better, as

the price of freedom, than slavery."

Irene sighed again, and was again silent.

"What," she asked, "if the oppressor is so much stronger than the

oppressed that successful resistance is impossible? that with every

struggle the links of the chain that binds her sink deeper into her

quivering flesh?"

"Every age and every land have seen noble martyrs in the cause of

freedom. It is better to die for liberty than live an ignoble

slave," answered the tempter.

"And I will die a free woman." This Irene said in her heart.