Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/248

Rh wisdom. Once safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt herself Justine’s superior. “That’s all very well now—you see the romantic side of it,” she said, as if humouring her friend’s vagaries. “But in time you’ll want something else; you’ll want a husband and children—a life of your own. And then you’ll have to be more practical. It’s ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don’t make a difference. And if you married a rich man, I just think what a lot of good you could do! Westy will be very well off—and I’m sure he’d let you endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a ward in the very hospital where you’d been a nurse! I read something like that in a novel the other day—it was beautifully described. All the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to receive her … and her little boy went about and gave toys to the crippled children.…”

If the speaker’s concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had intended, it was perhaps only because Justine’s attention had been arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to ﬁnd happiness in it—strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost craving! “A life of your own”—that was what even Bessy, in her [ 232 ]