Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/310

278 But it was the present that goaded her thoughts into the even darker future.

She hated her work and the thought of to-morrow.

She saw the rows of girls, she heard the chalk against the blackboard.

The girls, their often commonplace, heavy faces, their awkward, undeveloped figures, their dress already betraying vanity and vulgarity—she saw herself grinding them.

They liked her, of course; every one liked her. She wished they would hate her. She was lonely—desperate. For friends, her colleagues; their outlook, their common shop, stifled her. "What are we doing with all these girls?" she asked herself.

"We are making them upright, sensible women, who will not argue in a circle or manoeuvre to get husbands," Katharine had said. Would Katharine never see that not doing things is not enough for a woman? She believed they were overworking these girls. "We are killing the spirit in them," she thought, "as it has been killed in me."

In the thought of her work there was no comfort.

And then, had her own nature no needs beyond being sensible? She thought of life as it had been in her imaginings, in her dreams, and as it even might be in reality. What was her part in it?

To be sensible.

There was love, and there was home, and there was reasonable rest, and there was the exaltation of spirit that art can give, and music and poetry and nature; and the voice of a hideous mockery said:

"You can be sensible."

As she heard it more and more clearly, as a voice outside, she defied it from within, where something told her that the crowning

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