Free The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown Page B

literary society had published a few of her stories in their journals. It wasn’t like high school; they didn’t send copies of everythinghome, and she didn’t think her parents had ever seen those, which was a pity, as they were much better. This was what she wanted, why she longed to be able to leave the parlor and go into the world outside, to write and to publish and to talk to other people with imagination. Nowadays it wasn’t like the unfortunate Brontë sisters, who’d had to publish as men to get any attention. Now women could be reporters and poets and even novelists. But how could she have anything to write about if she never left these four walls? She wanted to be out there, living!
    â€œAgain? Didn’t he come last week?”
    â€œHe did,” her mother said blandly. “I invited him back. I thought you two got on awfully well. And so did he, apparently. He was pleased to accept my invitation when I told him you would be at home.”
    â€œOh, no, Mother.”
    â€œNow, Margie, he’s a perfectly nice man. You said so yourself.”
    â€œI was being polite! Mother, he’s twice my age! And so dreadfully dull. All that talk about government securities or exchange rates or something. I wanted to impale myself on the shrimp fork.”
    â€œMargie, do you always have to be so dramatic?” her mother asked, shaking her head in a disappointed way Margie knew well. She finished pulling the last line of thread out of the hoop, wrapped the loose floss neatly into a bundle, and handed it back to Margie. “I don’t have to remind you that you are in no position to be turning down offers from eligible bachelors.”
    â€œMother,” Margie cried. She felt as if she were sixteen again, being pressed to go to a dance she had no interest in. After her season had ended, her mother had continued making arrangements for Margie to go out: to the symphony, to balls, to parties. There she was either roundly ignored and would find a quiet corner to read in (in which case she might as well have just stayed home), or she was yanked around from group to group by her mother as though she were an exotic new pet who needed showing off. Worse, lately, her mother had taken it upon herselfto invite her father’s single business associates over for dinner, seating them next to Margie as though to judge how they would look as a pair, so Margie was forced to make conversation. And of course all the men her own age were either married or terrible rakes (and sometimes both, she thought, thinking of Anne Dulaney’s husband), so the dinner guests had skewed older and older until they had lit on Mr. Chapman, who was nearly fifty and never married, and who was perfectly genteel, but, as previously mentioned, dreadfully boring (which probably explained the never-married part).
    â€œMother, please don’t make me.” Margie sighed. She hated the way she sounded, young and spoiled, but how could she sound any other way when she was being treated like a child? This was the problem, she thought, with living in this house year after year, locked in this room with her mother, Margie embroidering while her mother tore her stitches out, having the same conversations while they both went quietly mad. She faked headaches on a regular basis so she could sneak upstairs to her room and write or read. Her mother hated how much Margie read; in addition to the frivolity of novels, she complained, squinting at those books all the time was going to ruin Margie’s eyesight.
    Margie wished she could run away. Women lived on their own all the time now. One of the houses at the end of the block had been turned into a boardinghouse; she saw the girls who lived there heading off to work every day in twos and threes, laughing, heads bent close, sharing the secrets of a life she could hardly imagine. Surely they had their own problems, but they also had the freedom to take whatever job they