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Updated: May 4, 2025
"I think," said Ideala, "that it is more absurd for 'all the ages' to subscribe to an oath which something stronger than themselves makes it impossible for half of them to keep. Strength of character must decide the question of place in a household as it does elsewhere; and it is surely folly to require, and useless to insist on, the submission of the strong to the weak.
For one thing, Lorrimer considered famine and war inevitable scourges of the human race, necessary for the removal of the surplus population, and useless to contend against, because destined to recur, so long as there is a human race; but he would have limited intellectual pursuits for women, because culture is held to prevent the trouble for which the elder expedients only provided a cure a point upon which Ideala did not agree with him at all.
He led her through halls and lecture-rooms, places of recreation and places for work; he showed her picture galleries, statuary, the library, and a museum, and told her the plan of it all clearly, like one reciting a lesson, and indifferently, like one performing a task that must be got through somehow, but making it all most interesting, nevertheless. Ideala began to be taken out of herself.
Later, when I was alone with my sister, I said: "Ideala did nothing but put her foot in it this evening. What was the matter with her? I never heard her speak so strongly before, except when she was alone with us. And I don't think she ought to discuss such subjects with such people; it is hardly delicate." Claudia sighed wearily. "Who knows what pain is at the bottom of it all?" she said.
She made the announcement just after breakfast, and Claudia rose and left the room without a word. My sister had never been able to speak to Ideala on the subject, but she did not cease to urge me to expostulate, and she had suggested many arguments which had affected Ideala, and made her unhappy, but without altering her determination.
Poor starved heart, crushed back upon itself, suffering silently, suffering always, but never hardening on the contrary, growing tenderer for others the more it had to endure itself! Would it always be so? Was there no peace on earth for Ideala? No one who could be all her own? I felt responsible for this last hard blow; had I done well?
They were both considered brilliant in conversation, but somehow on these occasions neither of them shone. I suppose when two such bright and shining lights come together they put each other out. Then it was time for Ideala to go. A bitter wind met them in the face on their way to the station, and before they had gone far Ideala noticed that Lorrimer's mood had changed again.
Beth asked. "By poking their noses into things that don't concern them," he asseverated, "things they wouldn't know anything about if they weren't damned nasty-minded. There's that fanatical Lady Fulda Guthrie, and Mrs. Orton Beg, and Mrs. Kilroy, besides Madam Ideala they're all busybodies, and if they succeed in what they're at just now, by Jove, they'll ruin me!
"But what else could I have done?" she asked, when she saw we were laughing at her. "Well, my dear," said the Bishop, who always treated her with the kind indulgence that is accorded to a favourite child, "you might have paid the difference for the woman, and travelled comfortably yourself, don't you know?" Ideala never thought of that!
This gentleman's name promised well for him, for he belonged to people whose integrity was well known; and his position vouched for his ability and also for his age to Ideala, whose imagination had pictured a learned old gentleman, bald, spectacled, benevolent, full of knowledge of the world, "wise saws and modern instances."
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