Prentice Alvin Page 0,66
there it is already in my mind, all sorted out, the decision made. There's a school for women there, but what matters is the libraries. I have no formal schooling, but somehow I'll persuade them to let me in."
"It won't take much persuasion," Mistress Modesty said, "if you arrive with a letter from the governor of Suskwahenny. And letters from other men who trust my judgment well enough."
Peggy was not surprised that Mistress Modesty still intended to help her, even though Peggy had determined so suddenly, so ungracefully to leave. And Peggy had no foolish notion of pridefully trying to do without such help. "Thank you, Mistress Modesty!"
"I've never known a woman - or a man, for that matter - with such ability as yours. Not your knack, remarkable as it is; I don't measure a person by such things. But I fear that you are wasting yourself on this boy in Hatrack River. How could any man deserve all that you've sacrificed for him?"
"Deserving it - that's his labor. Mine is to have the knowledge
when he's ready to learn it."
Mistress Modesty was crying in earnest now. She still smiledfor she had taught herself that love must always smile, even in grief - but the tears flowed down her cheeks. "Oh, Peggy, how could you have learned so well, and yet make such a mistake?"
A mistake? Didn't Mistress Modesty trust her judgment, even now? "'A woman's wisdom is her gift to women,'" Peggy quoted. "'Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God.'"
Mistress Modesty shook her head as she listened to her own maxim from Peggy's lips. "So why do you intend to inflict your wisdom on this poor unfortunate man you say you love?"
"Because some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just a part of her."
"Is he such a man?"
How could Peggy answer? "He will be, or he won't have me."
Mistress Modesty paused for a moment, as if trying to find a beautiful way to tell a painful truth. "I always taught you that if you become completely and perfectly yourself, then good men will be drawn to you and love you. Peggy, let us say this man has great needs - but if you must become something that is not you in order to supply him, then you will not be perfectly yourself, and he will not love you. Isn't that why you left Hatrack River in the first place, so he would love you for yourself, and not for what you did for him?"
"Mistress Modesty, I want him to love me, yes. But I love the work he must accomplish even more than that. What I am today would be enough for the man. What I will go and do tomorrow is not for the man, it is for his work."
"But - " began Mistress Modesty.
Peggy raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. Mistress Modesty nodded and did not interrupt.
"If I love his work more than I love the man, then to be perfectly myself, I must do what his work requires of me. Won't I, then, be even more beautiful?"
"To me, perhaps," said Mistress Modesty. "Few men have vision clear enough for that subtle beauty."
"He loves his work more than he loves his life. Won't he, then, love the woman who shares in it more than a woman who is merely beautiful?"
"You may be right," said Mistress Modesty, "for I have never loved work more than I have loved the person doing it, and I have never known a man who truly loved his work more than his own life. All that I have taught you is true in the world I know. If you pass from my world into another one, I can no longer reach you anything."
"Maybe I can't be a perfect woman and also live my life as it must be lived."
"Or perhaps, Mistress Margaret, even the best of the world is not fit to recognize a perfect woman, and so will accept me as a fair counterfeit, while you pass by unknown."
That was more than Peggy could bear. She cast aside decorum and threw her arms around Mistress Modesty and kissed her and cried, assuring her that there was nothing counterfeit about her. But when all the weeping was done, nothing had changed. Peggy was finished in Dekane, and by next morning her trunk was packed.
Everything she had in the world was a gift from Mistress