“So long as you believe that, you never can,” said Madam Bowker; “and your married life will be a failure—­as great a failure as mine was—­as your mother’s was.  If I had only known what I know now—­what I am telling you—­” Madam Bowker paused, and there was a long silence in the room.  “Your married life, my dear,” she went on, “will be what you choose to make of it.  You have a husband.  Never let yourself indulge in silly repinings or ruinous longings.  Make the best of what you have.  Study your husband, not ungenerously and superciliously, but with eyes determined to see the virtues that can be developed, the faults that can be cured, and with eyes that will not linger on the faults that can’t be cured.  Make him your constant thought and care.  Never forget that you belong to the superior sex.”

“I don’t feel that I do,” said Margaret.  “I can’t help feeling women are inferior and wishing I’d been a man.”

“That is because you do not think,” replied Madam Bowker indulgently.  “Children are the center of life—­its purpose, its fulfillment.  All normal men and women want children above everything else.  Our only title to be here is as ancestors—­to replace ourselves with wiser and better than we.  That makes woman the superior of man; she alone has the power to give birth.  Man instinctively knows this, and it is his fear of subjection to woman that makes him sneer at and fight against every effort to develop her intelligence and her independence.  If you are a true woman, worthy of your race and of your breeding, you will never forget your superiority—­or the duties it imposes on you—­what you owe to your husband and to your children.  You are a married woman now.  Therefore you are free.  Show that you deserve freedom and know how to use it.”

Margaret listened to the old woman with a new respect for her—­and for herself.  “I’ll try, Grandmother,” she said soberly.  “But—­it won’t be easy.”  A reflective silence, and she repeated, “No, not easy.”

“Easier than to resist and repine and rage and hunt another man who, on close acquaintance, would prove even less satisfactory,” replied her grandmother.  “Easy—­if you honestly try.”  She looked down at the girl with the sympathy that goes out to inexperience from those who have lived long and thoughtfully and have seen many a vast and fearful bogy loom and, on nearer view, fade into a mist of fancy.  “Above all, child, don’t waste your strength on imaginary griefs and woes—­you’ll have none left for the real trials.”

Margaret had listened attentively; she would remember what the old lady had said—­indeed, it would have been hard to forget words so direct and so impressively uttered.  But at the moment they made small impression upon her.  She thought her grandmother kindly but cold.  In fact, the old lady was giving her as deep commiseration as her broader experience permitted in the circumstances, some such commiseration as one gives a child who sees measureless calamity in a rainy sky on a long-anticipated picnic morning.