Monologue
“And the moral of that is,” quoted June as she dug her chin into Adele’s shoulder after the manner of the Duchess, “that women are more interested in men than in ideas. I thought that I was a free and emancipated young woman and I found out that I wasn’t at all, really. I got excited over socialists and the I.W.W.’s, and anarchists and birth controlists and suffragists and if I had not been working on a newspaper and bumped into them all at once, I would have gone on from one to another of them and joined them all, and kept on being fervent for years.
“As it was, I fell in love, happily at an early age, and I’m still in love. And it looks to me that this freedom is just a modernity gown, a new trapping that we women affect to capture the man we want. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but they only prove it.
“I know what I want. It’s Dick and marriage and babies! And I’ll have them yet. Wait and see.”
And the girls got up from the bench where they had been watching the sparrows fluttering around waiting for crumbs from the pockets of the little old ladies’ aprons, and hurried back to the long white wards where the twilight cast blue shadows over the beds and the patients waited for their evening meal.