Sidney had paused with one glove half off. Katie's tone carried conviction. Was life making another of its queer errors, and were Christine and K. in love with each other? K. had always been HER friend, HER confidant. To give him up to Christine--she shook herself impatiently. What had come over her? Why not be glad that he had some sort of companionship?
She went upstairs to the room that had been her mother's, and took off her hat. She wanted to be alone, to realize what had happened to her. She did not belong to herself any more. It gave her an odd, lost feeling. She was going to be married--not very soon, but ultimately. A year ago her half promise to Joe had gratified her sense of romance. She was loved, and she had thrilled to it.
But this was different. Marriage, that had been but a vision then, loomed large, almost menacing. She had learned the law of compensation: that for every joy one pays in suffering. Women who married went down into the valley of death for their children. One must love and be loved very tenderly to pay for that. The scale must balance.
And there were other things. Women grew old, and age was not always lovely. This very maternity--was it not fatal to beauty? Visions of child-bearing women in the hospitals, with sagging breasts and relaxed bodies, came to her. That was a part of the price.
Harriet was stirring, across the hall. Sidney could hear her moving about with flat, inelastic steps.
That was the alternative. One married, happily or not as the case might be, and took the risk. Or one stayed single, like Harriet, growing a little hard, exchanging slimness for leanness and austerity of figure, flat-chested, thin-voiced. One blossomed and withered, then, or one shriveled up without having flowered. All at once it seemed very terrible to her. She felt as if she had been caught in an inexorable hand that had closed about her.
Harriet found her a little later, face down on her mother's bed, crying as if her heart would break. She scolded her roundly.
“You've been overworking,” she said. “You've been getting thinner. Your measurements for that suit showed it. I have never approved of this hospital training, and after last January--”
She could hardly credit her senses when Sidney, still swollen with weeping, told her of her engagement.