Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/141

I am too rebel to the primal laws. No Wilderness Girl should ever be married, I think. Oh, the silence and the freedom and the sacred solitudes of maidenhood! I think of them with a passionate hunger and thirst. I remember how Gwendolen, after one of her scenes with Grandcourt, complained to herself that she could not even make a passionate exclamation, or throw up her arms as she would have done in her maiden days.

But she did not love her husband. I never thought to see the time when I should thank God that I do love mine. But now I perceive that if I did not the foundations of the great deep would be broken up. And I should—What should I do? What could I do?

Job just pulled something from the basket on my sewing-table and brought it to me, wagging rather piteously. It is the little blue blanket that I am trying to embroider for my son. It grows slowly; I never liked to sew.

Let me learn to be divinely patient, as women can, as women must. I must remember that happiness has not fled from my life at all. The angel Joy will return with a sweet and solemn face.

"And a little child shall lead them."

I Have spent most of the evening with Father, for he, too, feels, I can see, the emotion of this