Violists — A Closer Reading

he had been estranged from her family for six years and rarely given them serious thought since fleeing Connecticut. A simple enough row it had been to start--what should she do now that she had finished university? Of course her father recommended marriage and settling into the domestic life--a pretty girl like her. Him and his antiquated ideals--a pretty girl in the kitchen, indeed! At twenty-three she had finally come to her senses and refused to marry the young man to whom she had been betrothed, no matter how well matched her father thought they were.

Her mother had frequently confided to Gretchen her views on the varied pleasures--and trials--inherent in marriage, admitting that as the years passed she found the pleasures perhaps not worth the other hardships--the outward subjugation of her own feelings and the constant deference she was required to display within the confines of that marriage, as if she had no independent mind. Gretchen had long since determined that would not be her fate. She had come to believe that no suitable man could be found, yet she remained unsatisfied. The only true regret she had about casting off her family ties was that she had disappointed her mother. It was her mother who had worked so hard, really, to see that Gretchen had an education; her father only begrudgingly went along for the sake of domestic tranquility when all efforts to dissuade her had failed.

At university Gretchen had imbibed the rarefied intellectual atmosphere with increasing eagerness and found herself drawn irresistibly up the slopes of Parnassus. She had always intended to work after completing university--and work she did, though she had difficulty making due with what employment she could find. Even a superlative education, she had learned in six years, did not buy one certain rights or reasonable wages. She hoped that she would yet see the flowering of an age that she could call an enlightened one. She might have been bitter had she higher material aspirations, but she was content with little in the way of physical comforts. Why the privilege of spending nearly all her days in the library would have been worth almost any sacrifice--what need had she of wages!

It was lamentable, she decided, that she should have to forgo marital companionship if she were to retain her individuality--for the price of her freedom was a monumental sort of loneliness that only the severest mental discipline could overcome. She had seen so many of her school friends smothered in the clutches of bad marriages, worn out beneath their husbands' heels--almost like doormats. To be truthful there were those who seemed to prosper in the state of matrimony, but she thought them few. Yet, she still had an abiding fear that she would grow old alone--and soon enough become as obdurate as Miss Sadie--a pitiable spinster with none of the finer sensibilities left to her. Was there no man, Gretchen wondered, with whom she could share her life and interests--a man with progressive ideas? Not a man that she, like a tiny moon, would orbit eternally, but one with whom she could find a state of mutual orbit. Well, she thought, something of that nature anyway. Her knowledge of astronomy was not up to the task of finding a better analogy, and she resolved to remedy that as soon as she was able. She added another volume--'something concerning the heavens' she called it--to the list of books she thought she really must read.

Gretchen bustled, thinking these thoughts, dreading her next birthday. She blew softly on a wisp of auburn hair that had somehow escaped from the green ribbon with which she tied it back that morning. Several strands had somehow got into her mouth but her arms were too full of books--heavy tomes, all--to pull them away with her fingers. She was on the verge of setting down the burden and tending to her hair for a moment when, as she turned a corner into the next row, a shadow fell across the topmost book in her arms. She glanced up in surprise. A man stood mere inches in front of her--and looked up to find her bearing down upon him with a full head of steam--even as he stepped toward her.

"Oh!" she cried, attempting to stop herself. The books slid irretrievably from her grasp, their pages flying open with a flutter.

The man's arms shot out. "The books!" came his cry of astonishment as they tumbled about him. He tried to catch a few, left and then right, but alas they fell--all but one--to the floor with a dull clatter.