Wherein we are bewildered by the Cooings of Chivalry
Betty, flung back again upon her own resources, realized that, for a woman, there were two careers elaborately ordered by the deliberate plan of the world—marriage or vice. For the rest, to woman had been flung the slave-callings, the menial ends of professions, the ill-paid jobs of the commerce of life. This shabby deed of gift was leprously covered by an hypocrisy of Chivalry—which in practice largely worked out as the courting, when it did not interfere with other pleasures, of the young and comely women; the seizing and exploiting of the fortunes of the middle-aged; and the neglect of the old and the unprepossessing.
For a while Betty was at her wits’ end to know how to earn the wage of decency, when she again decided to apply to Netherby and ask him to get her some literary hack-work; and Netherby, entrusting her with a review or two of books, was delighted with the result, as was also his editor. Betty felt thankful to be doing work that did not force upon her the wading in personal humiliations; and this her new means of breadwinning, small though it was, helped in its very exercise to give her facility in the craftsmanship of her art—her hand thereby increased its cunning, and literary expression became a confirmed habit. She soon passed from the stage of seeking a style—the careful and laborious picking out of the notes from the music of the instrument and the placing them in telling harmonies, to the mastery of the whole range and gamut of the instrument, when the music came resonant and vivid in answer to the mood of her desire.
And she practised also the inevitable typewriter, taking bouts of work upon occasion, to win a little bread or to help Julia to the winning. Click-click-click went the deft fingers, spelling out into print the ill-shaped grammar of the city.
She saw much of Julia in these days; and to Julia she brought incalculable good—her cheerfulness and the gaiety and tenderness of her sweet young womanhood gave to the narrow-shouldered half-starved city girl a wholesome companionship that filled out her thin life and enlarged her cockney vision. Julia inhaled the atmosphere of good-breeding and of uncomplaining cheerful courage which was Betty’s very breath; and she grew to infinite riches by sharing the golden gifts that Betty had to give her.
Slave-castes mistake womanishness for womanliness. A true woman is neither an idiot nor a man.
The girl Julia had lived her girlhood receptively feminine—courageous in her defensive virtues. She was now roused to the positive virtues of womanhood.