Aunt Matilda's system in rearing a child. I had been reared by it.

I owe much to Aunt Matilda. She sent me to good schools, to a good
college; took me with her on most of her trips abroad, and at twenty
presented me to society, but she never knew me, never in the least
understood the hunger in my heart for what it was not in her power to
give. I never told her there was hunger in my heart. I rarely told
her of anything she could not see for herself.

In childhood I had learned the fixedness of her ideas, the rigidity
of her type of mind, the relentlessness of her will; and that
independence on my part survived was due to sturdy stubbornness, to a
refusal to be dominated, and an incapacity for subjection. But this,
too, she failed to understand.

That I would not marry as she wished was a grievous blow to her. I
had no desire to marry, and it was when refusing to do so that
certain realizations came to me sharply, and all the more acutely,
because I had so long been seemingly indifferent to them. On the
morning following the night in which I had faced frankly undeniable
facts I went to Aunt Matilda's room and told her I could no longer be
dependent, told her of my purpose to earn my own living. I was
strong, healthy, well educated. There was no reason why I should not
do what other women were doing.

As I talked her amazement and indignation deepened into anger, and
had I been a child I "would undoubtedly have been punished for my
impertinence and audacity in daring to desire to go out into the
world to earn what there was no necessity for my earning. Socially,
a woman could be autocratic, I was told, but in all things else she