And what, after all, was it that made it hard? What had decreed that she, one girl, should not go to see another girl who was in trouble?
Such a natural human action was dictated by the ethics and by the religion of her kind and by all the teachings of her church, and yet, when it was proposed to practise these precepts, she found them treated cynically, as if they were of no worth or meaning. That very evening the representatives of the law and of theology had urged against it!
At breakfast her mother sat at table with her. Mrs. Ward had breakfasted an hour earlier with her husband, but she had a kindly way of following the members of her family one after another to the table, and of entertaining them while they ate. She had told her husband of Elizabeth's contemplated visit to the prison, and then had decided to say nothing of it to Elizabeth, in the hope that the whim would have passed with the night. But Mrs. Ward could not long keep anything in her heart, and she was presently saying:
"I hope, dear, that you have given up that notion of going to see Gusta.
I hope," she quickly added, putting it in the way she wished she had put it at first, "that you see your duty more clearly this morning."
"No," said Elizabeth, idly tilting a china cup in her fingers, and allowing the light that came through the tall, broad windows to fill it with the golden luminosity of the sun, "I don't see it clearly at all.
I wish I did."
"Don't you think, dear, that you allow yourself to grow morbid, pondering over your duty so much?"
"I don't think I'm morbid." She would as readily have admitted that she was superstitious as that she was morbid.
"You have--what kind of conscience was it that Mr. Parrish was talking about the other night?" Mrs. Ward knitted the brows that life had marked so lightly.
"New England, I suppose," Elizabeth answered wearily. "But I have no New England conscience, mama. I have very little conscience at all, and as for my duty, I almost never do it. I am perfectly aware that if I did my duty I should lead an entirely different life; but I don't; I go on weakly, day after day, year after year, leading a perfectly useless existence, surrounded by wholly artificial duties, and now these same artificial duties keep me from performing my real duty--which, just now, seems to me to go and see poor little Gusta."
Mrs. Ward was more disturbed, now that her daughter saw her duty, than she had been a moment before, when she had declared she could not see it.
"I do wish you could be like other girls," she said, speaking her thought as her habit was.
"I am," said Elizabeth, "am I not?"
"Well," Mrs. Ward qualified.
"In all except one thing."
Mrs. Ward looked her question.
"I'm not getting married very fast."
"No," said Mrs. Ward.
Elizabeth laughed for the first time that morning.
"You dear little mother, I really believe you're anxious to get rid of me!"
"Why, Elizabeth!" said Mrs. Ward, lifting her eyes and then lowering them suddenly, in her reproach. "How can you say such a thing!"
"But never mind," Elizabeth went on:
"'If no one ever marries me I sha'n't mind very much; I shall buy a squirrel in a cage and a little rabbit hutch.
I shall have a cottage in a wood, and a pony all my own, And a little lamb quite clean and tame that I can take to town.
And when I'm getting really old--at twenty-eight or nine-- I shall buy a little orphan girl and bring her up as mine."
She smiled as she finished her quotation, and then suddenly sobered as she said:
"I'm twenty-seven already!"
"Who wrote that?" asked Mrs. Ward.
"Alma-Tadema."
"Oh! I thought Mr. Marriott might have done it. It's certainly very silly."
Nora had brought her breakfast, and the action recalled Gusta to Elizabeth.
"What did papa say--about my going to the prison?"
"He said," Mrs. Ward began gladly, "that, of course, we all felt very sorry for Gusta, but that you couldn't go _there_. He said it would be absurd; that you don't understand." Mrs. Ward was silent for a moment, knowing how much greater the father's influence was than her own. She was glad that Elizabeth seemed altogether docile and practicable this morning.
"There's a good girl now," Mrs. Ward added in the hope of pressing her advantage home.
Elizabeth gave a little start of irritability.
"I wish you wouldn't talk to me in that way, mama. I'm not a child."
"But surely your father knows best, dear," the mother insisted, "more than--we do."
"Not necessarily," said Elizabeth.
"Why! How can you say so!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward, who bowed to all authority as a part of her religion.
"Papa takes merely the conventional view," Elizabeth went on, "and the conventional view is taken without thought."
"But--surely--" Mrs. Ward stammered, in the impotence of one who, easily convinced without reasons, has no reasons at command--"surely--you heard what Mr. Modderwell and Mr. Eades said."
"Their view is conventional," said Elizabeth, "and proper." She gave a little curl of her lip as she spoke this last word.
"Well, I'm sure, dear, that we all wish to be proper, and Mr. Modderwell and Mr. Eades--"
"Oh! Don't quote those two men to me! Two such prigs, such Pharisees, I never saw!"
Mrs. Ward looked at her daughter in a new horror. "Why, Elizabeth! I'm surprised--I thought that Mr. Eades especially--"
"Well, don't you think Mr. Eades especially at all! He's not especially; he thinks he is, no doubt, and so does everybody else, but they have no right to, and hereafter Mr. Eades can't come here--that's all!" Her eyes were flashing.
Mrs. Ward ventured no further just then, but presently resumed:
"Think what people would say!"
"Oh, mother! Please don't use that argument. I have often told you that I don't care at all what people say."
"I only wish you cared more." She looked at Elizabeth helplessly a moment and then broke out with what she had been tempted all along to say.
"It's that Gordon Marriott! That's what it is! He has such strange, wild notions. He defends these criminals, it seems. I don't see how he can approve their actions the way he does."