subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some
shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would
sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old
and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called
her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and
without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it.
Work!--a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did
she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her--or
rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous.
She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and
smiling at her through the glass wall of an aquarium, he being on
the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his
strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some
sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her
backbone against the word _job_. Even the substitutes, _employment_
or _work_, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not
want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be
more _infra dig_ than the performing of a set of special actions day
in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings
every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar,
sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far
better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and
impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of
modern work.
She trembled with anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the
thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him.
He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better
to take the strange leap, over into his element, than to condemn
oneself to the routine of a job? He would have been curious and
dishuman. But after all, it would have been an experience. In a way,
she liked him. There was something odd and integral about him, which
she liked. He was not a liar. In his own line, he was honest and
direct. Then he would take her to South Africa: a whole new
_milieu_. And perhaps she would have children. She shivered a
little. No, not his children! He seemed so curiously cold-blooded.
And yet, why not? Why not his curious, pale, half cold-blooded
children, like little fishes of her own? Why not? Everything was
possible: and even desirable, once one could see the strangeness of
it. Once she could plunge through the wall of the aquarium! Once she
could kiss him!
Therefore Miss Pinnegar's quiet harping on the string was
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