CHAPTER V

To feel potential within one’s self the capacity to live and yet to have no means of realizing this capacity is doubtless one of the least comfortable and agreeable of human experiences.  Such, as summer came on, was Janet’s case.  The memory of that visit to Silliston lingered in her mind, sometimes to flare up so vividly as to make her existence seem unbearable.  How wonderful, she thought, to be able to dwell in such a beautiful place, to have as friends and companions such amusing and intelligent people as the stranger with whom she had talked!  Were all the inhabitants of Silliston like him?  They must be, since it was a seat of learning.  Lise’s cry, “I’ve just got to go away, anywhere,” found an echo in Janet’s soul.  Why shouldn’t she go away?  She was capable of taking care of herself, she was a good stenographer, her salary had been raised twice in two years,—­why should she allow consideration for her family to stand in the way of what she felt would be self realization?  Unconsciously she was a true modern in that the virtues known as duty and self sacrifice did not appeal to her,—­she got from them neither benefit nor satisfaction, she understood instinctively that they were impeding to growth.  Unlike Lise, she was able to see life as it is, she did not expect of it miracles, economic or matrimonial.  Nothing would happen unless she made it happen.  She was twenty-one, earning nine dollars a week, of which she now contributed five to the household,—­her father, with characteristic incompetence, having taken out a larger insurance policy than he could reasonably carry.  Of the remaining four dollars she spent more than one on lunches, there were dresses and underclothing, shoes and stockings to buy, in spite of darning and mending; little treats with Eda that mounted up; and occasionally the dentist—­for Janet would not neglect her teeth as Lise neglected hers.  She managed to save something, but it was very little.  And she was desperately unhappy when she contemplated the grey and monotonous vista of the years ahead, saw herself growing older and older, driven always by the stern necessity of accumulating a margin against possible disasters; little by little drying up, losing, by withering disuse, those rich faculties of enjoyment with which she was endowed, and which at once fascinated and frightened her.  Marriage, in such an environment, offered no solution; marriage meant dependence, from which her very nature revolted:  and in her existence, drab and necessitous though it were, was still a remnant of freedom that marriage would compel her to surrender....