Catherine felt Margaret's uneasiness, akin to her own faint shrinking from the access of personal probing.
"You need, as I told Margaret the other night, to touch all these other women who have stepped out of their grooves. It's wonderful, what that does for you. It's solidarity feeling, workers go after it in their unions, and women so much lack it. You think you are making a solitary struggle, and you're only part of all this----" Her sudden gesture sent her empty tumbler spinning to the edge of the table. Margaret's quick hand caught it.
"It's true." Catherine was bewildered to find tears in her eyes, and a rush of affection toward Amy--she might be fanatic, but a spark from her overfanned fires could warm you! "Are any of these celebrities married?" she asked, with apparent irrelevance.
"Oh--" Amy shrugged. "I think they have husbands, some of them. Hard to tell. That woman there has just got her divorce, I know."
She had a moment with Margaret later, standing near the fireplace, while Amy rushed off to greet a newcomer.
"She's a funny old dear, isn't she?" Margaret was nonchalant.
"I hoped you would. She's really fine, if you get her." Her eyes, traveling across to the small figure in the fur coat, one arm raised in emphasis, were tender. "You'd roar if you heard her comments on Charles. She has a certain cosmic attitude toward all men, lumps them. I'm thrilled, Cathy, at your trip. And your salary! You show some pick-up on this job."
"Will you take me shopping for decent clothes?" Catherine regarded her sister wistfully. "I'm going to dress the old thing up for once."
During the next weeks Catherine lunched frequently at Amy's club. "You were quite right," she told her one day. "I needed perspective. This place and these women make the whole business of my working seem matter of course. As if I'd be a fool not to. That's a more comforting feeling than my old one, that I might be only an egoistic pig."
"That's the trouble with ordinary married women," declared Amy. "They are all shut up in separate cages, until they don't have an idea what is happening outside."
"At least there is comfort in finding that other women want the same thing I want, and get it."
But marriage wasn't a cage, she thought, later. She found herself not so much imprisoned as bewildered. It's more like a labyrinth. There are ways out, if you can find them. Out, not of marriage itself, but out of the thing people have made of it--for women.