Greatheart

And yet she longed for freedom as she had never longed in her life before. She was nearly desperate with longing, so sweet had been the first, intoxicating taste thereof. For the first time she had seen life from the standpoint of the ordinary, happy girl, and the contrast to the life she knew had temporarily upset her equilibrium. Her mother's treatment, harsh before, seemed unendurable now. Her cheeks burned afresh with a fierce, intolerable shame. No, no! She could never face it again. She could not! She could not! Already her brief emancipation had begun to cost her dear. She must--she must--find a way of escape ere she went back into thraldom. For she knew her mother's strength so terribly well. It would conquer all resistance by sheer, overwhelming weight. She could not remember a single occasion upon which she had ever in the smallest degree held her own against it. Her will had been broken to her mother's so often that the very thought of prolonged resistance seemed absurd. She knew herself to be incapable of it. She was bound to crumple under the strain, bound to be humbled to the dust long ere the faintest hope of outmatching her mother's iron will had begun to dawn in her soul. The very thought made her feel puny and contemptible. If she resisted to the very uttermost of her strength, yet would she be crushed in the end, and that end would be more horribly painful than she dared to contemplate. All her childhood it had been the same. She had been conquered ere she had passed the threshold of rebellion. She had never been permitted to exercise a will of her own, and the discovery that she possessed one had been something of a surprise to Dinah.

It was partly this discovery that made her long so passionately for freedom. She wanted to grow, to develop, to get beyond the stultifying influence of that unvarying despotism. She longed to get away from the perpetual dread of consequences that so haunted her. She wanted to breathe her own atmosphere, live her own life, be herself.

"I believe I could do lots of things if I only had the chance," she murmured to herself; and then she was suddenly plunged into the memory of another occasion when she had received summary and austere punishment for omitting scales from her practising. But then no one ever liked doing what they must, and she had never had any real taste for music; or if she had had, it had vanished long since under the uninspiring goad of compulsion.

All her morning depression came back while these bitter meditations racked her brain. Oh, if only--if only--her father had chosen a lady for his wife! It was disloyal, she knew, to indulge such a thought, but her mood was black and her soul was in revolt. She was sure--quite sure--that marriage presented the only possibility of deliverance, and deliverance was beginning to seem imperative. Her whole individuality, which this past week of giddy liberty had done so much to develop, cried aloud for it.