else's house, or a hireling in someone's employ, subject to their will, their whims. Very likely she would never again have access to a resource like the University Library. Her life, which had been defined by books, would now be defined by her position below the salt.
Professor Cathcart had insisted that at she think Cameron's offer over carefully before deciding, but her options were narrower than he thought; the choices were two, really. Take Jason Cameron's job (or search for another like it) and become a servant in the household of a wealthy, and probably autocratic man-or take a position teaching in a public school.
The latter actually offered fewer opportunities. It was unlikely that she would find such a public school position in Chicago; there were many aspiring teachers, and few jobs for them. She would have to seek employment out in the country, perhaps even in the scarcely-settled West or the backward South, where she would be an alien and an outsider.
In either case, as a private tutor or as a teacher, she would be a servant, for as a schoolteacher she must present a perfectly respectable front at all times, attending the proper church, saying the proper things, so as to be completely beyond reproach. Neither a schoolteacher nor a child's private tutor could even hint that she had read the uncensored Ovid. Neither would dare to have an original thought, or dare to contradict the men around her. The days of her freedom of thought, action and speech were over.
She had not wept since the funeral; she had remained dry-eyed before the Ivorssons, before Mr. Grumwelt, before his greedy minions. She had stood dry-eyed for days, but now something broke within her at the realization of how much a prisoner of society she had become overnight.
Her eyes burned, her throat closed, and she bit her knuckle trying to hold back the tears. She was unsuccessful, and quickly turned her face into the pillow, sobbing, smothering her weeping with the coarse linen so that no one would overhear her. How could any of the women here hope to understand her grief'? This prospect of life that she found intolerable was the same life that they had always led.
One born to slavery finds nothing amiss with chains ....
She curled up into a ball, forming herself around the pillow, as she cried uncontrollably. She had never believed that a heart could be 'broken,' but hers certainly felt that way now.
Oh Papa-why did you have to die and leave me like this?
Then came guilt for thinking such a terrible thing, which only made her weep the harder as she realized she would now face the rest of her life without his dear, if absentminded, presence. Finally, she could weep no more; she huddled around the soaked pillow, muscles and head aching, eyes swollen and burning, throat sore with holding back her sobs, nose irritated and raw. Her physical discomfort did nothing to distract her from her sorrow.
While she had cried out her grief, the noises to either side of her disappeared, leaving only the sounds of activity below-stairs. She did not feel that she could face anyone, and as for breakfast-the very notion made her ill.
Evidently either no one had missed her or Professor Cathcart had indicated that she was to be alone, for no one came to disturb her. Despair held her in that hard, narrow bed in invisible bonds; she could not even muster the strength to reach for her glasses. Once again, the presence of the laudanum in her valise beckoned temptingly. She need only drink down the entire bottle, and all her troubles would end in a sleep with no waking.
Would that be so bad? True Christian doctrine told her that suicide was a sin, but the ancients had held it no more a sin than healing a wound was. When the soul was wounded past bearing-when life became intolerable-why tolerate it?
Why, indeed? Why spend the remaining years of her life in an existence that was less than life? Why must she smother her very soul to see her body fed? Surely that was no less a sin than simple suicide!
How many grim, gray spinsters had she seen in her schools, withered creatures who had ruthlessly rooted out every vestige of intellectual curiosity in themselves and now sought to do the same to the pupils beneath them? Life as one such as they would be less than life.
Better to end it all now.
She spent a moment in fantasy, imagining what the news of her death would mean to those around her. The Ivorssons, of course, would cluck and shake their heads, and say that they had expected nothing else from her-she knew better than to anticipate remorse from any of them. She could leave a note, blaming her despair on Neville Tree-a subtle sort of revenge, since the stigma of having caused a girl's death would ruin him, especially if she did not say precisely why he had driven her to this. People would assume the worst; they always did.
She uncurled herself from her pillow; felt for her glasses and put them on, since she could not write a suicide note if she could not see. But her hand fell upon something else as well; Jason Cameron's letter. Almost against her will, she found herself drawing the letter from the envelope and reading it again.
But this time, reading it carefully rather than skimming it, she got a much different sense of the writer's personality than she had in the restaurant. There, she had been startled by the strangely accurate description of someone with precisely the same accomplishments as her own. Now she was drawn to the paragraph about the children.
In particular, her eyes were drawn to the statements about the daughter.'. . . the victim of prejudice that holds her sex as inferior to the male . . .'
