my dear,” she exclaimed as she took off her tiny brown suede gloves and lifted her fashionably dotted veil to look around, “what a charming place your Mr. James lives in. And how hard you must be working!”
“Aunt Emily! You’ve surprised me!”
The room was strewn about with open books, piles of papers, ink pots, red and black, and I was still rudely sitting at the typewriting machine.
“Let me finish this line,” I said. “You’re so early!”
I went to help her with her things and to lean down to give her my customary kiss on her soft, papery cheek. She was dressed in her favourite colour, that rich cocoa that set off her dark eyes so well. Even after she removed her delicate little hat, her silvery hair was still its usual perfection in its braids and elaborate coils. She smiled, and I thought that her face showed a little tiredness from the journey, for her pleasant smile lines had deepened and her skin was not its usual perfectly transparent rosiness. She was telling me she had caught the earliest train.
“I was that eager to see you, my dear. And we’re all so curious about what it is you’re about here.” She looked around the room with its mess and books everywhere, so different from her tidy, plush-velvet Kensington home. “I’m afraid we’re all worried about your Mr. James, and what it’s like for you here all alone, without friends or family. My dear, whatever were you thinking?”
And so for the hundredth time I had to try to explain to someone, and even worse, a woman from my mother’s generation, what I was doing there with Mr. James. I was not homesick and was certain I would be fine once I was accustomed to the typewriting machine and to Mr. James and his unusual working style. By now, he almost seemed to be more like me than anyone in my family. But I could not tell Aunt Emily that! Looking around his masculine, leathery book-lined study, I could barely speak. My reticence had once again returned.
“Aunt Emily, I’m not sure—I need to work, I need to be on my own. As you know, my father—”
“Oh, don’t speak to me of your father, I’m not thinking about your father. He’ll do fine with that nice new bride to take care of him. No, Dora, it’s you I worry over. What are you doing here? Won’t you come back to the aunts and let us try once more to find you a husband? You know, you barely gave us a chance last summer before you hurried back to London and took a job in that secretarial bureau. Aunt Ellen and I were mortified. Really, my dear, none of our other nieces has ever done any such thing. Even Cousin Freddie when she went down to Swansea to teach in a boys’ school did not surprise me as much. Have we really failed you so badly?”
I knew I had to answer something, for my dear aunt had my best interests at heart, but what could I say? I could not explain how I had come to be there, instead of making the rounds to all the aunts and uncles, repeating the circuit until someone found the right man for me to marry. Well, I knew that would NEVER happen. When I was younger, my deep love for Ethel had made that clear to me, even if no one but my friends believed in me. But how could I tell this dear aunt the things that I had held silent in my mind and heart for so long, for years—a lifetime, it seemed—the things that would disturb her so?
While I was hesitating, Aunt Emily moved around the room, nervously fingering an object here, a piece of paper there, lifting up a book to look at the title by the light of the window, then putting it down with a shake of her silvery head. She turned again to me. “I suppose I’d better come right out with it. What we really want to know—Is it proper, do you think, for a gentleman’s daughter to be here, doing this sort of work? You know we’re not at all familiar with what it is you are doing here.”
I tried once again, explaining my work as literary secretary to Mr. James, helping with his correspondence, of course nothing personal, and then his real work, writing the prefaces, the stories, and the plays.
“Aunt Emily, I imagine as he dictates to my typewriting machine that he is talking only to me, as if I were his friend and we were sitting together over tea. He tells me about how he got his ideas or where he ran into trouble—it’s as if we are partners or old friends. He seems to tell me everything.”
“But Dora, is it proper? Is it right for a young, unmarried woman to be here in a man’s house, alone with him, upstairs, up in his room? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
I had to think for a minute why it seemed right to me. Of course, I had been uncomfortable at first. It was a small, intimate house and very much arranged for the comfort of the elderly bachelor who lived there, but then I thought back to why I had wanted to work with Mr. James from the first instant I heard about the job.
“Oh, he’s fine, Aunt Emily! Ever since I was a girl, I’ve loved his books. Maybe some things I could not understand, some subject matter was too old for me, and some things I still don’t understand. He is very deep, Aunt Emily. But always I’ve felt that Mr. James had a special gift, a way of making complicated things clear, as if he were writing for me or girls like me. Maybe it would help if I could show you.”
I went to the shelves to look, and Aunt Emily went to sit carefully on a small, old chair beside the writing desk. But first she had to move a book, which had been left there; she turned it over, with its yellow wrapping, its foreign-looking cover and French title, and she put it down carefully without checking inside. Then, looking around, frowning at where my typewriting machine made an ugly shadow on the floor, she folded her hands to wait.
I found the page. “Here, one of his young heroines is talking about how hard it is to grow up in this day and age. You’ve watched my girl cousins and me struggle. Listen . . . Here in this morning’s preface, Mr. James has young women in mind:
“‘One could count them on one’s fingers (an abundant allowance), the liberal firesides beyond the wide glow of which, in a comparative dimness, female adolescence hovered and waited.’
“Mr. James goes on to describe the ‘inevitable irruption of the ingenuous mind’; and then says,
“‘The ingenuous mind might, it was true, be suppressed altogether, the general disconcertment averted. . . . A girl might be married off the day after her irruption, or better still the day before it, to remove her from the sphere of the play of the mind;’
“Can you see, Aunt Emily? It’s as if he spoke our hopes aloud, finding words for us young women:
“‘That is it would be, by this scheme, so infinitely awkward, so awkward beyond any patching-up, for the hovering female young to be conceived as present at “good” talk, that their presence is, theoretically at least, not permitted till their youth has been promptly corrected by marriage—in which case they have ceased to be merely young. The better the talk prevailing in any circle, accordingly, the more organised, the more complete, the element of precaution and exclusion.’
“Aunt Emily, if we younger women can only find our own way, a way out of this ridiculous set of impossible expectations. Can’t you see?—Whenever I read this, it makes me feel that he sees us. He wants to help us, here in our preposterous position, caught between what we want and what is expected. He describes one of us, a young woman of 1907, kept modest and ignorant, and yet she’s still expected to know so much. We’re supposed somehow to stay innocent and yet understand every innuendo, to be good and also wise, to act helpless and yet to be strong, to appear beautiful and at the same time completely artless.”
Aunt Emily had moved uncomfortably in her chair. She did not like my use of “innocent” and its implied, unspoken opposite. She raised her head and protested, “But Dora, the old ways were there to protect the young girl—”
“My
