The Love of a Good Woman

anything I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m probably not going to promise anything anyway. But if you know what he’s talking about you ought to tell me.”
    “It’s just this idea he’s got now,” her mother said. “He’s got an idea that nursing makes a woman coarse.”
    Enid said, “Coarse.”
    Her mother said that the part of nursing her father objected towas the familiarity nurses had with men’s bodies. Her father thought—he had decided—that such familiarity would change a girl, and furthermore that it would change the way men thought about that girl. It would spoil her good chances and give her a lot of other chances that were not so good. Some men would lose interest and others would become interested in the wrong way.
    “I suppose it’s all mixed up with wanting you to get married,” her mother said.
    “Too bad if it is,” said Enid.
    But she ended up promising. And her mother said, “Well, I hope that makes you happy.” Not “makes him happy.” “Makes
you.”
It seemed that her mother had known before Enid did just how tempting this promise would be. The deathbed promise, the self-denial, the wholesale sacrifice. And the more absurd the better. This was what she had given in to. And not for love of her father, either (her mother implied), but for the thrill of it. Sheer noble perversity.
    “If he’d asked you to give up something you didn’t care one way or the other about, you’d probably have told him nothing doing,” her mother said. “If for instance he’d asked you to give up wearing lipstick. You’d still be wearing it.”
    Enid listened to this with a patient expression.
    “Did you pray about it?” said her mother sharply.
    Enid said yes.
    She withdrew from nursing school; she stayed at home and kept busy. There was enough money that she did not have to work. In fact, her mother had not wanted Enid to go into nursing in the first place, claiming that it was something poor girls did, it was a way out for girls whose parents couldn’t keep them or send them to college. Enid did not remind her of this inconsistency. She painted a fence, she tied up the rosebushes for winter. She learned to bake and she learned to play bridge, taking her father’s place inthe weekly games her mother played with Mr. and Mrs. Willens from next door. In no time at all she became—as Mr. Willens said—a scandalously good player. He took to turning up with chocolates or a pink rose for her, to make up for his own inadequacies as a partner.
    She went skating in the winter evenings. She played badminton.
    She had never lacked friends, and she didn’t now. Most of the people who had been in the last year of high school with her were finishing college now, or were already working at a distance, as teachers or nurses or chartered accountants. But she made friends with others who had dropped out before senior year to work in banks or stores or offices, to become plumbers or milliners. The girls in this group were dropping like flies, as they said of each other—they were dropping into matrimony. Enid was an organizer of bridal showers and a help at trousseau teas. In a couple of years would come the christenings, where she could expect to be a favorite godmother. Children not related to her would grow up calling her Aunt. And she was already a sort of honorary daughter to women of her mother’s age and older, the only young woman who had time for the Book Club and the Horticultural Society. So, quickly and easily, still in her youth, she was slipping into this essential, central, yet isolated role.
    But in fact it had been her role all along. In high school she was always the class secretary or class social convener. She was well liked and high-spirited and well dressed and good-looking, but she was slightly set apart. She had friends who were boys but never a boyfriend. She did not seem to have made a choice this way, but she was not worried about it, either. She had been preoccupied with her ambition—to be a missionary, at one embarrassing stage, and then to be a nurse. She had never thought of nursing as just something to do until she got married. Her hope was to be good, and do good, and not necessarily in the orderly, customary, wifely way.
    • • •
    A T New Year’s she went to the dance in the Town Hall. The man who danced with her most often, and escorted her home, and pressed her hand good night, was the manager of the creamery—a man in his forties, never married,