Mrs. Page sat with her hand on the handle of the old silver-plated coffee-pot. Harriet ignored her.
“You are a young woman now. You have health and energy, and you have youth, which I haven't. I'm past forty. In the next twenty years, at the outside, I've got not only to support myself, but to save something to keep me after that, if I live. I'll probably live to be ninety. I don't want to live forever, but I've always played in hard luck.”
Sidney returned her gaze steadily.
“I see. Well, Aunt Harriet, you're quite right. You've been a saint to us, but if you want to go away—”
“Harriet!” wailed Mrs. Page, “you're not thinking—”
“Please, mother.”
Harriet's eyes softened as she looked at the girl
“We can manage,” said Sidney quietly. “We'll miss you, but it's time we learned to depend on ourselves.”
After that, in a torrent, came Harriet's declaration of independence. And, mixed in with its pathetic jumble of recriminations, hostility to her sister's dead husband, and resentment for her lost years, came poor Harriet's hopes and ambitions, the tragic plea of a woman who must substitute for the optimism and energy of youth the grim determination of middle age.
“I can do good work,” she finished. “I'm full of ideas, if I could get a chance to work them out. But there's no chance here. There isn't a woman on the Street who knows real clothes when she sees them. They don't even know how to wear their corsets. They send me bundles of hideous stuff, with needles and shields and imitation silk for lining, and when I turn out something worth while out of the mess they think the dress is queer!”
Mrs. Page could not get back of Harriet's revolt to its cause. To her, Harriet was not an artist pleading for her art; she was a sister and a bread-winner deserting her trust.
“I'm sure,” she said stiffly, “we paid you back every cent we borrowed. If you stayed here after George died, it was because you offered to.”
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