Abigail Read Online Free Page A

has a mind (which most girls find hard to believe of themselves), then how to use it, and she will grow up to be contemptuous of most other women (or pitying—which is as bad). She will suffer them badly, and frighten the men and dogs and horses, and in general be a thorough misfit.”
    Nora would have had no such qualms. To her the happiness of Winifred was worth ten thousand other blighted lives. “It is not your concern,” she said with vast assurance. “They are their parents’ responsibility as far as that choice goes.”
    “I haven’t told you the nub of it yet. The real point is that if women—women as a class—are ever going to change their station—our station—we are going to need thousands of such misfits. Need their intellect, their money, their social position, their contempt or pity for their sisters—and, not least, their ability to frighten men and other animals. Their discontent will be the steam to drive our engine forward. From station to station.” She laughed at her own pun, but with little humour.
    “Not a school, but a hotbed of discontent,” Nora said.
    “A seedbed of Womanism!”
    “Whatever that may be.”
    “Yes. I often wonder what it’s going to be.” This time her laugh was genuine.
    At that moment Abigail came in, so innocently that Winifred’s eyes narrowed at once. “Have you been eavesdropping?”
    “You bray like Stentor. It’s hard to avoid.” She took the peach Winifred had earlier toyed with. “Anyway, I see no dilemma.”
    “Oh?” Winifred was torn between a desire to have someone—anyone—lay out an answer to her ethical doubts, and a lifelong unwillingness to accord any wisdom whatever to her younger sister.
    “Yes. Who says the average ill-educated girl is happy with her gay hussar? Only three-decker novelists—and only in the final chapter even then. And what’s wrong with discontent? Especially if it leads you to do something. You’ve swallowed the very notion of happiness you reject as the proper goal for a modern woman!”
    Nora laughed and clapped her hands. Abigail had not one-tenth of Winifred’s persistence or intellectual rigor; she could never master a subject with that utter thoroughness of Winifred’s. But every now and then she had these flashes of insight that were worth a year of plodding inquiry. Even now, as she spoke the words that would surely banish all of Winifred’s qualms, she seemed much more interested in skinning the peach without getting its juice all over her.
    Winifred stared at Abigail, mouth open, testing her words for flaws and finding none.
    “Cause and effect,” Abigail said absently, still working fastidiously at the peach skin. “If the cause is right, we must pursue it with all our heart, and leave the effects to God.”
    Winifred stood and ran across the room to her sister. “Abbie! You angel! You are so very, very right, of course!” And she hugged her.
    Abigail looked at the spilled peach juice on her arms and Winifred’s hands. “Some of the effects, anyway,” she said solemnly.

Chapter 4
    The heavy rain was a mere squall at the leading edge of the shower. Abigail stood beneath the cedar, halfway up the driveway to Winifred’s school, and watched it pass, a filmy sheet of gray falling with a tender slowness on slate roofs and among bare branches. It unfurled wetness on Parliament Hill, over Gospel Oak, Tufnell Park, Kentish Town…on into London. The names, not the cold, made her shudder: those ghastly suburbs, filled with ghastly houses, all built and rented by her mother. Worth eight million one day soon, she said. Abigail wouldn’t have given a penny for them, those awful furnished tombs where lives were whiled away in furtive cheeseparing and carefully graded public show.
    A few nights ago, when Winnie had spoken of those foolish qualms to their mother, the vision of domestic bliss that had presented itself to eavesdropping Abigail was the loathsome one-percent life in those pinched, meanly