Iâd think it was Isabel.â
It was an astonishing speech to come from Aunt Higham, and she stood up quickly, as if she repented instantly this gush of emotion. Jennie stood, too, and her aunt gave her a hard pat on the shoulder. âThereâs more than George, you know, my girl, and the choice has to be yours. But donât be like the poor soul who went all the way through the woods looking for the right stick and had to pick up a crooked one at last.â
âAnd remember to keep my tongue behind my teeth.â
âAye, remember that,â her aunt said. â I had to.â
Keeping oneâs mouth shut was not a Hawthorne trait. Free speech had been one of the few luxuries possible for the Hawthorne girls. Raising his daughters in an old house entailed on him without any money to go with it, their widowed and scholarly father had decided that about all he could do for his girls was to give them the best education possible and allow them to run what some called wild.
The elderly, unorthodox scholar had also found it cheap and practical to let them ride, roam the sands and marshes, and climb the hills in nankeen pantaloons, short jackets, and boysâ boots until they were thirteen or so, saving their frocks and slippers for special occasions.
Thus they had had exceptional freedom. It was his gift to those whom society would cage soon enough. He thought it was a dreadful world which penalized a human being for being born a female, and his girlsâ condition as adults would not be bettered by their having been reared in ignorance and trained to a false and hobbling docility.
Therefore, Jenny had not the best training for being a demurely marriageable lass in her auntâs house. To her there was something degrading in being beautifully dressed and having oneâs hair done by a maid so that one could be paraded like a mare or a heifer at an auction.
Besides, she hadnât seen anyone yet with whom she could bear to think of sharing the marriage bed.
âItâs rather wonderful with someone you love,â Sylvia had told her after a month of William. âIt makes you understand John Donne better, too. But Iâd abhor doing it with someone I didnât love.â She shuddered. âOne might just as well be a light woman, except that sheâd be paid for it, and a wife isnât.â
The parson adored Sylvia, and she was complacent in her own right. If you made a man fall in love with you, the advantage wasnât all to him. William said he had resented Godâs taking away his first wife but forgave Him when He sent Sylvia to him. Jennie forbore telling him that God had nothing to do with it; Sylvia had had her eye on him since she was fifteen, and even now Jennie couldnât be sure that when Sylvia had knelt beside her bed, looking as devout as Desdemona before Othello fell upon her with that pillow, she hadnât been praying for the parsonâs wife to be painlessly removed by the time Sylvia was old enough to marry him.
In spite of Papaâs theories, Sylvia believed stubbornly in a gruff but benign Personage, someone like Papa, only more glorious, who inclined His ear unto her and heard her cry. This was a useful attribute for a parsonâs wife.
But if Sylvia knew what Jennie now knew, she would be hard put to make excuses for her God.
She knew now, for instance, that outside the pleasant crescents and squares, the parks where the Quality rode, the theaters and ballrooms, there lay the filthy warrens of a destitution and vice she hadnât believed could exist; she wouldnât have known now except for the little girl who used to light the fires and black the grates.
Sheâd hopelessly and helplessly wept at her chore one morning, blinded with the tears that wouldnât stop flowing from her swollen eyes, not able to keep her nose from running. Jennie caught her at it, dried the childâs eyes, made her blow her nose on one of