Madeline had always been characterized by those who knew her as lovely
and placid. And why not? What else should life draw out of a girl of
normal nature, surrounded by protecting love, given the good things of
life as by right, shielded from the knowledge of evil, never facing a
problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to
stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life
she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless
maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women--uninteresting
women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like
tragedies--women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to
the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and
dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, even to play a little part in
society, and yet to be but half a woman! To be no link in the
generations! This was unendurable. The first demand of every soul is for
life, and yet life is life only when it is part of the future. To live
oneself one must live in others. All the mother hidden in the depths of
her rose and cried out against any destiny that shut her out from the
great stream of humanity.
"I shall be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy
and lead nowhere. And the rushing waters will go leaping and laughing
past."
She got up and moved restlessly up and down the room. She looked again
out of the window at the sober end of the winter day. In the tree
branches that clattered outside, her eyes fell on an empty nest.
"And am I to be such a thing?" she said. "Surely all the world must bow
down in pity for the solitary woman." Some half-forgotten lines came
back to her: "Mine ear is full of the rocking of cradles.
For a single cradle, saith Nature, I would give every one of my graves."
By her little practice piano her eyes fell on the pages of Schubert's
unfinished symphony.
"Unfinished!" she said. "And yet even there is the phrase that comes and
comes again, sweeter and more full of meaning in every renewed variety.
So I must have love to play through my life, or else it will be nothing
but a medley. It must be my music's theme; even if the symphony is
unfinished. Are there women who can do without it, who can take a life
alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I'm no
exceptional creature. I'm just a plain woman. And if life doesn't give
me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women
feel this way. This pretty little Lena,--is she bursting with primal
need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick's
face that was never there before--that I'd give my soul to see in a
man's face when he looks at me."