Jennie About to Be Read Free Page A

I’d think it was Isabel.”
    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. “There’s more than George, you know, my girl, and the choice has to be yours. But don’t 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€œAnd remember to keep my tongue behind my teeth.”
    â€œAye, remember that,” her aunt said. “ I had to.”
    Keeping one’s 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 boys’ 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 girls’ 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 aunt’s house. To her there was something degrading in being beautifully dressed and having one’s hair done by a maid so that one could be paraded like a mare or a heifer at an auction.
    Besides, she hadn’t seen anyone yet with whom she could bear to think of sharing the marriage bed.
    â€œIt’s rather wonderful with someone you love,” Sylvia had told her after a month of William. “It makes you understand John Donne better, too. But I’d abhor doing it with someone I didn’t love.” She shuddered. “One might just as well be a light woman, except that she’d be paid for it, and a wife isn’t.”
    The parson adored Sylvia, and she was complacent in her own right. If you made a man fall in love with you, the advantage wasn’t all to him. William said he had resented God’s 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 couldn’t be sure that when Sylvia had knelt beside her bed, looking as devout as Desdemona before Othello fell upon her with that pillow, she hadn’t been praying for the parson’s wife to be painlessly removed by the time Sylvia was old enough to marry him.
    In spite of Papa’s 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 parson’s 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 hadn’t believed could exist; she wouldn’t have known now except for the little girl who used to light the fires and black the grates.
    She’d hopelessly and helplessly wept at her chore one morning, blinded with the tears that wouldn’t stop flowing from her swollen eyes, not able to keep her nose from running. Jennie caught her at it, dried the child’s eyes, made her blow her nose on one of