The baldest of Shaker prose turned to purest poetry
when Susanna dipped it in the alembic of her own imagination.
"Labor for the gift of sight!" said Martha, who believed implicitly in spirits
and visions. "Labor this very night."
It must be said for Susanna that she had never ceased laboring in her own way
for many days. The truth was that she felt herself turning from marriage. She
had lived now so long in the society of men and women who regarded it as an
institution not compatible with the highest spiritual development that
unconsciously her point of view had changed; changed all the more because she
had been so unhappy with the man she had chosen. Curiously enough, and
unfortunately enough for Susanna Hathaway's peace of mind, the greater
aversion she felt towards the burden of the old life, towards the irksomeness
of guiding a weaker soul, towards the claims of husband on wife, the stronger
those claims appeared. If they had never been assumed!--Ah, but they had;
there was the rub! One sight of little Sue sleeping tranquilly beside her; one
memory of rebellious, faulty Jack; one vision of John, either as needing or
missing her, the rightful woman, or falling deeper in the wiles of the wrong
one for very helplessness;--any of these changed Susanna the would-be saint,
in an instant, into Susanna the wife and mother.
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