She knew she would never be much of a success as an
elementary school teacher. But neither had she failed. She hated
it, but she had managed it.
Maggie had left St. Philip's School, and had found a more
congenial post. The two girls remained friends. They met at
evening classes, they studied and somehow encouraged a firm hope
each in the other. They did not know whither they were making,
nor what they ultimately wanted. But they knew they wanted now
to learn, to know and to do.
They talked of love and marriage, and the position of woman
in marriage. Maggie said that love was the flower of life, and
blossomed unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked
where it was found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its
duration.
To Ursula this was unsatisfactory. She thought she still
loved Anton Skrebensky. But she did not forgive him that he had
not been strong enough to acknowledge her. He had denied her.
How then could she love him? How then was love so absolute? She
did not believe it. She believed that love was a way, a means,
not an end in itself, as Maggie seemed to think. And always the
way of love would be found. But whither did it lead?
"I believe there are many men in the world one might
love--there is not only one man," said Ursula.
She was thinking of Skrebensky. Her heart was hollow with the
knowledge of Winifred Inger.
"But you must distinguish between love and passion," said
Maggie, adding, with a touch of contempt: "Men will easily have
a passion for you, but they won't love you."
"Yes," said Ursula, vehemently, the look of suffering, almost
of fanaticism, on her face. "Passion is only part of love. And
it seems so much because it can't last. That is why passion is
never happy."
She was staunch for joy, for happiness, and permanency, in
contrast with Maggie, who was for sadness, and the inevitable
passing-away of things. Ursula suffered bitterly at the hands of
life, Maggie was always single, always withheld, so she went in
a heavy brooding sadness that was almost meat to her. In
Ursula's last winter at St. Philip's the friendship of the two
girls came to a climax. It was during this winter that Ursula
suffered and enjoyed most keenly Maggie's fundamental sadness of
enclosedness. Maggie enjoyed and suffered Ursula's struggles
against the confines of her life. And then the two girls began
to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of life wherein
Maggie must remain enclosed.