wished to rule, not merely my body, but my mind, and it seemed as if
every new thing that I learned was an additional affront to him. I
don't think I was rendered disagreeable by my culture; my only
obstinacy was in maintaining the right of the children to do their
own thinking. But during this time my husband was making money, and
filling his life with that. He remained in his every idea the
money-man, an active and bitter leader of the forces of greed in our
community; and when my studies took me to the inevitable end, and I
joined the local of the Socialist party in our town, it was to him
like a blow in the face. He never got over it, and I think that if
the children had not been on my side, he would have claimed the
Englishman's privilege of beating me with a stick not thicker than
his thumb. As it was, he retired into a sullen hypochondria, which
was so pitiful that in the end I came to regard him as not
responsible.

I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were
graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything
but torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce. I had helped
to lay the foundation of his fortune, cementing it with my blood, I
might say, and I could fairly have laid claim to half what he had
brought from the farm; but my horror of the parasitic woman had
come to be such that rather than even seem to be one, I gave up
everything, and went out into the world at the age of forty-five to
earn my own living. My children soon married, and I would not be a
burden to them; so I came East for a while, and settled down quite
unexpectedly into a place as a field-worker for a child-labour
committee.

You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to