The Rainbow

Ursula had only two more terms at school. She was studying

for her matriculation examination. It was dreary work, for she

had very little intelligence when she was disjointed from

happiness. Stubbornness and a consciousness of impending fate

kept her half-heartedly pinned to it. She knew that soon she

would want to become a self-responsible person, and her dread

was that she would be prevented. An all-containing will in her

for complete independence, complete social independence,

complete independence from any personal authority, kept her

dullishly at her studies. For she knew that she had always her

price of ransom--her femaleness. She was always a woman,

and what she could not get because she was a human being, fellow

to the rest of mankind, she would get because she was a female,

other than the man. In her femaleness she felt a secret riches,

a reserve, she had always the price of freedom.

However, she was sufficiently reserved about this last

resource. The other things should be tried first. There was the

mysterious man's world to be adventured upon, the world of daily

work and duty, and existence as a working member of the

community. Against this she had a subtle grudge. She wanted to

make her conquest also of this man's world.

So she ground away at her work, never giving it up. Some

things she liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French,

mathematics and history. Once she knew how to read French and

Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of

English literature. Why should one remember the things one read?

Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated

her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history

puzzled her and made her ponder, but the political parts angered

her, and she hated ministers. Only in odd streaks did she get a

poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging from

her studies; one afternoon, reading As You Like It; once when,

with her blood, she heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how

the blood beat in a Roman's body; so that ever after she felt

she knew the Romans by contact. She enjoyed the vagaries of

English Grammar, because it gave her pleasure to detect the live

movements of words and sentences; and mathematics, the very

sight of the letters in Algebra, had a real lure for her.

She felt so much and so confusedly at this time, that her

face got a queer, wondering, half-scared look, as if she were

not sure what might seize upon her at any moment out of the

unknown.

Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion

in her. When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were

folded, minute and complete, the finished flowers of the summer

nine months hence, tiny, folded up, and left there waiting, a

flash of triumph and love went over her.