“YES, mum, I see un go up to the churchyard. He’s tidyin’ up the place a bit for the weddin’.”

“The wedding?” repeated Hadria vaguely. Mrs. Gullick looked at her as at one whose claims to complete possession of the faculties there seems sad reason to doubt.

“Oh, Miss Jordan’s, yes. When is it?”

“Why, it’s this mornin’, ma’am!” cried Mrs. Gullick.

“Dear me, of course. I thought the village looked rather excited.”

People were all standing at their doors, and the children had gathered at the gate of the church, with hands full of flowers. The wedding party was, it appeared, to arrive almost immediately. The children set up a shout as the first carriage was heard coming up the hill.

The bride appeared to be a popular character in Craddock. “Dear, dear, she will be missed, she will, she was a real lady, she was; did her duty too to rich and poor.”

The Professor asked his companion if she remarked that the amiable lady was spoken of universally in the past tense, as some one who had passed from the light of day.

Hadria laughed. “Whenever I am in a cynical mood I come to Craddock and talk to the villagers.”

Dodge was found resting on a broom-handle, with a flower in his button-hole. Marion Jordan had supplied him with port wine when he was “took bad” in the winter. Dodge found it of excellent quality. He approved of the institution of landed property, and had a genuine regard for the fair-haired, sweet-voiced girl who used to come in her pony-cart to distribute her bounty to the villagers. Her class in the Sunday-school, as he remarked, was always the best behaved.

The new schoolmistress, a sour and uncompromising looking person, had issued from her cottage in her Sunday best to see the ceremony.

“That’s where little Martha’s mother used to live,” said Hadria, “and that is where she died.”

“Indeed, yes. I think Mr. Walker pointed it out to me.”

“Ah! of course, and then you know the village of old.”

“’Ere they comes!” announced a chorus of children’s voices, as the first carriage drove up. The excitement was breathless. The occupants alighted and made their way to the church. After that, the carriages came in fairly quick succession. The bridegroom was criticised freely by the crowd. They did not think him worthy of his bride. “They du say as it was a made up thing,” Dodge observed, “and that it wasn’t ’im as she’d like to go up to the altar with.”

“Well, I don’t sort o’ take to ’im neither,” Mrs. Gullick observed, sympathizing with the bride’s feeling. “I do hope he’ll be kind to the pore young thing; that I do.”

“She wouldn’t never give it ’im back; she’s that good,” another woman remarked.

“Who’s the gentleman as she had set her heart on?” a romantic young woman enquired.

“Oh, it’s only wot they say,” said Dodge judicially; “it’s no use a listening to all one hears—not by a long way.”

“You ’ad it from Lord Engleton’s coachman, didn’t you?” prompted Mrs. Gullick.

“Which he heard it said by the gardener at Mr. Jordan’s, as Miss Marion was always about with Mr. Fleming.”

The murmur of interest at this announcement was drowned by the sound of carriage wheels. The bride had come.

“See the ideal and ethereal being whom you have been so faithfully impersonating all the afternoon!” exclaimed Hadria.

A fair, faint, admirably gentle creature, floating in a mist of tulle, was wafted out of the brougham, the spring sunshine burnishing the pale hair, and flashing a dazzling sword-like glance on the string of diamonds at her throat.

It seemed too emphatic, too keen a greeting for the faint ambiguous being, about to put the teaching of her girlhood, and her pretty hopes and faiths, to the test.

She gave a start and shiver as she stepped out into the brilliant day, turning with a half-scared look to the crowd of faces. It seemed almost as if she were seeking help in a blind, bewildered fashion.

Hadria had an impulse. “What would she think if I were to run down those steps and drag her away?” Professor Theobald shook his head.

Within the church, the procession moved up the aisle, to the sound of the organ. Hadria compared the whole ceremony to some savage rite of sacrifice: priest and people with the victim, chosen for her fairness, decked as is meet for victims.

“But she may be happy,” Lady Engleton suggested when the ceremony was over, and the organ was pealing out the wedding march.

“That does not prevent the analogy. What a magnificent hideous thing the marriage-service is! and how exactly it expresses the extraordinary mixture of the noble and the brutal that is characteristic of our notions about these things!”

“The bride is certainly allowed to remain under no misapprehension as to her function,” Lady Engleton admitted, with a laugh that grated on Hadria. Professor Theobald had fallen behind with Joseph Fleming, who had turned up among the crowd.

“But, after all, why mince matters?”

“Why indeed?” said Hadria. Lady Engleton seemed to have expected dissent.

“I think,” she said, “that we are getting too squeamish nowadays as to speech. Women are so frightened to call a spade a spade.”

“It is the spade that is ugly, not the name.”

“But, my dear?”

“Oh, it is not a question of squeamishness, it is the insult of the thing. One insult after another, and everyone stands round, looking respectable.”

Lady Engleton laughed and said something to lead her companion on.

She liked to listen to Mrs. Temperley when she was thoroughly roused.

“It is the hideous mixture of the delicately civilized with the brutally savage that makes one sick. A frankly barbarous ceremony, where there was no pretence of refinement and propriety and so forth, would be infinitely less revolting.”

“Which your language is plain,” observed Lady Engleton, much amused.

“I hope so. Didn’t you see how it all hurt that poor girl? One of her training too—suspended in mid air—not an earthward glance. You know Mrs. Jordan’s views on the education of girls. Poor girls. They are morally skinned, in such a way as to make contact with Fact a veritable torture, and then suddenly they are sent forth defenceless into Life to be literally curry-combed.”

“They adjust themselves,” said Lady Engleton.

“Adjust themselves!” Hadria vindictively flicked off the head of a dandelion with her parasol. “They awake to find they have been living in a Fool’s Paradise—a little upholstered corner with stained glass windows and rose-coloured light. They find that suddenly they are expected to place in the centre of their life everything that up to that moment they have scarcely been allowed even to know about; they find that they must obediently veer round, with the amiable adaptability of a well-oiled weather-cock. Every instinct, every prejudice must be thrown over. All the effects of their training must be instantly overcome. And all this with perfect subjection and cheerfulness, on pain of moral avalanches and deluges, and heaven knows what convulsions of conventional nature!”

“There certainly is some curious incongruity in our training,” Lady Engleton admitted.

“Incongruity! Think what it means for a girl to have been taught to connect the idea of something low and evil with that which nevertheless is to lie at the foundation of all her after life. That is what it amounts to, and people complain that women are not logical.”

Lady Engleton laughed. “Fortunately things work better in practice than might be expected, judging them in the abstract. How bashful Professor Theobald seems suddenly to have become! Why doesn’t he join us, I wonder? However, so much the better; I do like to hear you talk heresy.”

“I do more than talk it, I mean it,” said Hadria. “I fail utterly to get at the popular point of view.”

“But you misrepresent it—there are modifying facts in the case.”

“I don’t see them. Girls are told: ‘So and so is not a nice thing for you to talk about. Wait, however, until the proper signal is given, and then woe betide you if you don’t cheerfully accept it as your bounden duty.’ If that does not enjoin abject slavishness and deliberate immorality of the most cold-blooded kind, I simply don’t know what does.”

Lady Engleton seemed to ponder somewhat seriously, as she stood looking down at the grave beside her.

“How we ever came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me,” Hadria continued, “and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight through one’s fingers.”

“Chiefly, perhaps, because women won’t speak out,” suggested Lady Engleton.

“They have been so drilled,” cried Hadria, “so gagged, so deafened, by ‘the shrieks of near relations.’”

Lady Engleton was asking for an explanation, when the wedding-bells began to clang out from the belfry, merry and roughly rejoicing. “Tom-boy bells,” Hadria called them. They seemed to tumble over one another and pick themselves up again, and give chase, and roll over in a heap, and then peal firmly out once more, laughing at their romping digression, joyous and thoughtless and simple-hearted. “Evidently without the least notion what they are celebrating,” said Hadria.

The bride came out of church on her husband’s arm. The children set up a shout. Hadria and Lady Engleton, and, farther back, Professor Theobald and Joseph Fleming, could see the two figures pass down to the carriage and hear the carriage drive away. Hadria drew a long breath.

“I am afraid she was in love with Joseph Fleming,” remarked Lady Engleton. “I hoped at one time that he cared for her, but that Irish friend of Marion’s, Katie O’Halloran, came on the scene and spoilt my little romance.”

“I wonder why she married this man? I wonder why the wind blows?” was added in self-derision at the question.

The rest of the party were now departing. “O sleek wedding guests,” Hadria apostrophized them, “how solemnly they sat there, like all-knowing sphinxes, watching, watching, and that child so helpless—handcuffed, manacled! How many prayers will be offered at the shrine of the goddess of Duty within the next twelve months!”

Mrs. Jordan, a British matron of solid proportions, passed down the path on the arm of a comparatively puny cavalier. The sight seemed to stir up some demon in Hadria’s bosom. Fantastic, derisive were her comments on that excellent lady’s most cherished principles, and on her well-known and much-vaunted mode of training her large family of daughters.

“Only the traditional ideas carried out by a woman of narrow mind and strong will,” said Lady Engleton.

“Oh those traditional ideas! They might have issued fresh and hot from an asylum for criminal lunatics.”

“You are deliciously absurd, Hadria.”

“It is the criminal lunatics who are absurd,” she retorted. “Do you remember how those poor girls used to bewail the restrictions to their reading?”

“Yes, it was really a reductio ad absurdum of our system. The girls seemed afraid to face anything. They would rather die than think. (I wonder why Professor Theobald lingers so up there by the chancel? The time must be getting on.)”

Hadria glanced towards him and made no comment. She was thinking of Mrs. Jordan’s daughters.

“What became of their personality all that time I cannot imagine: their woman’s nature that one hears so much about, and from which such prodigious feats were to be looked for, in the future.”

“Yes, that is where the inconsistency of a girl’s education strikes me most,” said Lady Engleton. “If she were intended for the cloister one could understand it. But since she is brought up for the express purpose of being married, it does seem a little absurd not to prepare her a little more for her future life.”

“Exactly,” cried Hadria, “if the orthodox are really sincere in declaring that life to be so sacred and desirable, why on earth don’t they treat it frankly and reverently and teach their girls to understand and respect it, instead of allowing a furtive, sneaky, detestable spirit to hover over it?”

“Yes, I agree with you there,” said Lady Engleton.

“And if they don’t really in their hearts think it sacred and so on (and how they can, under our present conditions, I fail to see), why do they deliberately bring up their girls to be married, as they bring up their sons to a profession? It is inconceivable, and yet good people do it, without a suspicion of the real nature of their conduct, which it wouldn’t be polite to describe.”

Mrs. Jordan—her face irradiated with satisfaction—was acknowledging the plaudits of the villagers, who shouted more or less in proportion to the eye-filling properties of the departing guests.

Hadria was seized with a fit of laughter. It was an awkward fact, that she never could see Mrs. Jordan’s majestic form and noble bonnet without feeling the same overwhelming impulse to laugh.

“This is disgraceful conduct!” cried Lady Engleton.

Hadria was clearly in one of her most reckless moods to-day.

“You have led me on, and must take the consequences!” she cried. “Imagine,” she continued with diabolical deliberation, “if Marion, on any day previous to this, had gone to her mother and expressed an overpowering maternal instinct—a deep desire to have a child!”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Engleton.

“Why so shocked, since it is so holy?”

“But that is different.”

“Ah! then it is holy only when the social edict goes forth, and proclaims the previous evil good and the previous good evil.”

“Come, come; the inconsistency is not quite so bad as that. (How that man does dawdle!)”

Hadria shrugged her shoulders. “It seems to me so; for now suppose, on the other hand, that this same Marion, on any day subsequent to this, should go to that same mother, and announce an exactly opposite feeling—a profound objection to the maternal function—how would she be received? Heavens, with what pained looks, with what platitudes and proverbs, with what reproofs and axioms and sentiments! She would issue forth from that interview like another St. Sebastian, stuck all over with wounds and arrows. ‘Sacred mission,’ ‘tenderest joy,’ ‘holiest mission,’ ‘highest vocation’—one knows the mellifluous phrases.”

“But after all she would be wrong in her objection. The instinct is a true one,” said Lady Engleton.

“Oh, then why should she be pelted for expressing it previously, if the question is not indiscreet?”

“Well, it would seem rather gruesome, if girls were to be overpowered with that passion.”

“So we are all to be horribly shocked at the presence of an instinct to-day, and then equally shocked and indignant at its absence to-morrow; our sentiment being determined by the performance or otherwise of the ceremony we have just witnessed. It really shows a touching confidence in the swift adaptability of the woman’s sentimental organization!”

Lady Engleton gave an uneasy laugh, and seemed lost in uncomfortable thought. She enjoyed playing with unorthodox speculations, but she objected to have her customary feelings interfered with, by a reasoning which she did not see her way to reduce to a condition of uncertainty. She liked to leave a question delicately balanced, enjoying all the fun of “advanced” thought without endangering her favourite sentiments. Like many women of talent, she was intensely maternal, in the instinctive sense; and for that reason had a vague desire to insist on all other women being equally so; but the notion of the instinct becoming importunate in a girl revolted her; a state of mind that struggled to justify itself without conscious entrenchment behind mere tradition. Lady Engleton sincerely tried to shake off prejudice.

“You are in a mixed condition of feeling, I see,” Hadria said. “I am not surprised. Our whole scheme of things indeed is so mixed, that the wonder only is we are not all in a state of chronic lunacy. I believe, as a matter of fact, that we are; but as we are all lunatics together, there is no one left to put us into asylums.”

Lady Engleton laughed.

“The present age is truly a strange one,” she exclaimed.

“Do you think so? It always seems to me that the present age is finding out for the first time how very strange all the other ages have been.”

“However that may be, it seems to me, that a sort of shiver is going through all Society, as if it had suddenly become very much aware of things and couldn’t make them out—nor itself.”

“Like a creature beginning to struggle through a bad illness. I do think it is all extremely remarkable, especially the bad illness.”

“You are as strange as your epoch,” cried Lady Engleton.

“It is a sorry sign when one remarks health instead of disease.”

“Upon my word, you have a wholesome confidence in yourself!”

“I do not, in that respect, differ from my kind,” Hadria returned calmly.

“It is that which was that seems to you astonishing, not that which is to be,” Lady Engleton commented, pensively. “For my part I confess I am frightened, almost terrified at times, at that which is to be.”

“I am frightened, terrified, so that the thought becomes unbearable, at that which is,” said Hadria.

There was a long silence. Lady Engleton appeared to be again plunged in thought.

“The maternal instinct—yes; it seems to be round that unacknowledged centre that the whole storm is raging.”

“A desperate question that Society shrinks from in terror: whether women shall be expected to conduct themselves as if the instinct had been weighed out accurately, like weekly stores, and given to all alike, or whether choice and individual feeling is to be held lawful in this matter—there is the red-hot heart of the battle.”

“Remember men of science are against freedom in this respect. (I do wish our man of science would make haste.)”

“They rush to the rescue when they see the sentimental defences giving way,” said Hadria. “If the ‘sacred privilege’ and ‘noblest vocation’ safeguards won’t hold, science must throw up entrenchments.”

“I prefer the more romantic and sentimental presentment of the matter,” said Lady Engleton.

“Naturally. Ah! it is pathetic, the way we have tried to make things decorative; but it won’t hold out much longer. Women are driving their masters to plain speaking—the ornaments are being dragged down. And what do we find? Bare and very ugly fact. And if we venture to hint that this unsatisfactory skeleton may be modified in form, science becomes stern. She wishes things, in this department, left as they are. Women are made for purposes of reproduction; let them clearly understand that. No picking and choosing.”

“Men pick and choose, it is true,” observed Lady Engleton in a musing tone, as if thinking aloud.

“Ah, but that’s different—a real scientific argument, though a superficial observer might not credit it. At any rate, it is quite sufficiently scientific for this particular subject. Our leaders of thought don’t bring out their Sunday-best logic on this question. They lounge in dressing-gown and slippers. One gets to know the oriental pattern of that dressing-gown and the worn-down heels of those old slippers.”

“They may be right though, notwithstanding their logic,” said Lady Engleton.

“By good luck, not good guidance. I wonder what her Serene Highness Science would say if she heard us?”

“That we two ignorant creatures are very presumptuous.”

“Yes, people always fall back on that, when they can’t refute you.”

Lady Engleton smiled.

“I should like to hear the question discussed by really competent persons. (Well, if luncheon is dead cold it will be his own fault.)”

“Oh, really competent persons will tell us all about the possibilities of woman: her feelings, desires, capabilities, and limitations, now and for all time to come. And the wildly funny thing is that women are ready, with open mouths, to reverently swallow this male verdict on their inherent nature, as if it were gospel divinely inspired. I may appear a little inconsistent,” Hadria added with a laugh, “but I do think women are fools!”

They had strolled on along the path till they came to the schoolmistress’s grave, which was green and daisy-covered, as if many years had passed since her burial. Hadria stood, for a moment, looking down at it.

“Fools, fools, unutterable, irredeemable fools!” she burst out.

“My dear, my dear, we are in a churchyard,” remonstrated Lady Engleton, half laughing.

“We are at this grave,” said Hadria.

“The poor woman would have been among the first to approve of the whole scheme, though it places her here beneath the daisies.”

“Exactly. Am I not justified then in crying ‘fool’? Don’t imagine that I exclude myself,” she added.

“I think you might be less liable to error if you were rather more of a fool, if I may say so,” observed Lady Engleton.

“Oh error! I daresay. One can guard against that, after a fashion, by never making a stretch after truth. And the reward comes, of its kind. How green the grave is. The grass grows so fast on graves.”

Lady Engleton could not bear a churchyard. It made one think too seriously.

“Oh, you needn’t unless you like!” said Hadria with a laugh. “Indeed a churchyard might rather teach us what nonsense it is to take things seriously—our little affairs. This poor woman, a short while ago, was dying of grief and shame and agony, and the village was stirred with excitement, as if the solar system had come to grief. It all seemed so stupendous and important, yet now—look at that tall grass waving in the wind!”