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that she had finished university? Of course her father recommended marriage and settling into the domestic life--a pretty girl like her. Him and his antiquated ideals--a pretty girl in the kitchen, indeed! At twenty-three she had finally come to her senses and refused to marry the young man to whom she had been betrothed, Her mother had frequently confided to Gretchen her views on the varied pleasures--and trials--inherent in marriage, admitting that as the years passed she found the pleasures perhaps not worth the other hardships--the outward subjugation of her own feelings and the constant deference she was required to display within the confines of that marriage, as if she had no independent mind. Gretchen had long since determined that would not be her fate. She had come to believe that no suitable man could be found, yet she remained unsatisfied. The only true regret she had about casting off her family ties was that she had disappointed her mother. It was her mother who had worked so hard, really, to see that Gretchen had an education; her father only begrudgingly went along for the sake of domestic tranquility when all efforts to dissuade her had failed. At university Gretchen had imbibed the rarefied intellectual atmosphere with increasing eagerness and found herself drawn irresistibly up the slopes of Parnassus. She had always intended to work after completing university--and work she did, though she had difficulty making due with what employment she could find. Even a superlative education, she had learned in six years, did not buy one certain rights or reasonable wages. She hoped that she would yet see the flowering of an age that she could higher material aspirations, but she was content with little in the way of physical comforts. Why the privilege of spending nearly all her days in the library would have been worth almost any sacrifice--what need had she of wages! It was lamentable, she decided, that she should have to forgo marital companionship if she were to retain her individuality--for the price of her freedom was a monumental sort of loneliness that only the severest mental discipline could overcome. She had seen so many of her school friends smothered in the clutches of bad marriages, worn out beneath their husbands' heels--almost like doormats. To be truthful there were those who seemed to prosper in the state of matrimony, but she thought them few. Yet, she still had an abiding fear that she would grow old alone--and soon enough become as obdurate as Miss Sadie-- a pitiable spinster with none of the finer sensibilities left to her. Was there no man, Gretchen wondered, with whom she could share her life and interests--a man with progressive ideas? Not a man that she, like a tiny moon, would orbit eternally, | ||||
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