She rose and was moving away. Amy started up and caught her.
"Aunt Jessica, I've something to tell you!" she cried, her face dyed scarlet
with the sting.
Mrs. Falconer released herself gently and returned to her seat.
"You know what I mean by what I said?" inquired Amy, still confused but
regaining self command rapidly.
"I believe I know: you are engaged to be married."
The words were very faint: they would have reached the subtlest ear with the
suggestiveness of a light dreary wind blowing over a desolation.
"Yes; I am engaged to be married."
Amy affirmed it with a definite stress.
"It is this that has made you a woman?
"It is this that has made me a woman."
After the silence of a moment Mrs. Falconer inquired: "You do not expect to ask my consent--my advice?"
"I certainly do not expect to ask your consent--your advice."
Amy was taking her revenge now--and she always took it as soon as possible.
"Nor your uncle's?"
"Nor my uncle's."
After another, longer silence: "Do you care to tell me how long this engagement has lasted?"
"Certainly!--Since last night."
"Thank you for telling me that. I think I must go back to my work now."
She walked slowly away. Amy sat still, twirling her bonnet strings and
smiling to herself.
This outburst of her new dignity--this initial assertion of her
womanhood--had come almost as unexpectedly to herself as to her aunt. She
had scarcely known it was in herself to do such a thing. Certain
restrictions had been chafing her for a long time: she had not dreamed that
they could so readily be set aside, that she had only to stamp her foot
violently down on another foot and the other foot would be jerked out of the
way. In the flush of elation, she thought of what had just taken place as
her Declaration of Independence. She kept on celebrating it in a sort of
intoxication at her own audacity: "I have thrown off the yoke of the Old Dynasty! Glory for the thirteen
colonies! A Revolution in half an hour! I'm the mother of a new country!
Washington, salute me!"
Then, with perhaps somewhat the feeling of a pullet that has whipped a hen
in a barnyard and that after an interval will run all the way across the
barnyard to attack again and see whether the victory is complete, she rose
and went across the garden, bent on trying the virtue of a final peck.