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"Of course, sir! and so I shall," she answered, drawing up her pretty little head, while Lady Archfield gave hers a boding shake. "Time, and life, and wifehood teach lessons," murmured Mrs. Woodford in consolation, and the Doctor changed the subject by asking Peregrine whether the ladies abroad were given to housewifery.
Amelia lacked the discipline of contact with her kind, but she was nevertheless smooth as silk in her new wifehood. "Law, yes, bring it along," said she. "It's a good day to clutter up. The' won't be nobody in."
Redmain that he had a wife! and he had heart enough left to imagine it might mortally hurt her to find he lived a life so utterly apart from hers that she had so little of the relations though all the rights of wifehood. It was no wonder, therefore, if he was more than willing to change the subject.
Wifehood, motherhood, honour and delight to one school girl; gnawing, restless uselessness to the next. "I only hope you girls are going to marry," their mother would sometimes say plaintively; "but I declare I don't know who with all the nice boys leaving town the way they do!
An excellent housekeeper, no doubt, but what shadow of qualification for wifehood and motherhood in this year 1886? The whole question was disgusting to a rational man especially to that vigorous example of the class, by name Harvey Rolfe. Late as it was, he did not care to go to bed.
Rather than complain that Alma fell short of the ideal in wifehood, should he not marvel, and be grateful that their marriage might still be called a happy one? Happiness in marriage is a term of such vague application: Basil Morton, one in ten thousand, might call himself happy; even so, all things considered, must the husband who finds it just possible to endure the contiguity of his wife.
That the female who drives steam-driven looms, producing scores of yards of linen in a day, should therefore desire less the fellowship of her corresponding male than had she toiled at a spinning-wheel with hand and foot to produce one yard; that the male should desire less of the companionship of the woman who spends the morning in doctoring babies in her consulting-room, according to the formularies of the pharmacopoeia, than she who of old spent it on the hillside collecting simples for remedies; that the woman who paints a modern picture or designs a modern vase should be less lovable by man, than her ancestor who shaped the first primitive pot and ornamented it with zigzag patterns was to the man of her day and age; that the woman who contributes to the support of her family by giving legal opinions will less desire motherhood and wifehood than she who in the past contributed to the support of her household by bending on hands and knees over her grindstone, or scrubbing floors, and that the former should be less valued by man than the latter these are suppositions which it is difficult to regard as consonant with any knowledge of human nature and the laws by which it is dominated.
Casaubon's studies of the past were not carried on by means of such aids. Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion. Everything seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she would like an alteration.
The wifehood she looked on as a means to something else, to what she could hardly say; in itself she did not desire it. Lady Richard's prayer was answered no thanks to herself or her hints, no thanks either to Mrs. Baxter's motherly remonstrance or to Morewood's blunt speech. It was May herself who sent Quisanté away.
All over the country there are lonely women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to motherhood.
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