The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

as you say you would like to. In all likelihood you will anyway. Habit is a strong thing, and I shall awake in the night and miss you from my arms.

“In thinking it all over, this is as good a time as any to split up. I should probably detect subconscious resentments in your attitude toward me which would build up serious counter-resentments in me.

“We could not have continued living on nothing anyway.

“Before I left I committed a last little crime. I cashed a check on a bank where I had no account for the money you will find in the enclosed envelope. This is the case where you must not let your conscience be your guide. I have spent at least five times as much in the saloon where I cashed the check, and they are acquainted with me only through the theatre where I worked last summer. The money will take care of you for a couple of weeks until you return to the hospital.

“Child, don’t be unhappy. Who knows. Perhaps my heart, scarred with the shackles of a hopeless passion will creep back someday like a frightened convict to the scene of its serfdom. Bleeding, torn from contact with an unsympathetic world, it may ask, who knows, that it be permitted once more to take its place in that least anchoritic of cells which you have provided it.

“But don’t build up any hopes. It is best, in fact, that you forget me.

“Your ever devoted swain.”

The next morning a final note came⁠—the last she received from him. It was mailed from the boat.

“When you were here and I was there,
The world did not a feather care,
Now you are there and I am here,
The world is just as cavalier.

“Ah, I had thought the world would fly
Apart, if either you or I
Had left the other; yet it sticks
As though all hearts were made of bricks.

“Strange world, yet I had also thought
That when to each we were as naught,
It would have torn its poles apart,
To mold us in a single heart.

“It didn’t then, it doesn’t now;
The world in fact, I must allow
Is so impervious to us
You’d think it didn’t give a cuss.”

“These thoughts are very helpful, dearest one. Goodbye.”

Monologue

“And the moral of that is,” quoted June as she dug her chin into Adele’s shoulder after the manner of the Duchess, “that women are more interested in men than in ideas. I thought that I was a free and emancipated young woman and I found out that I wasn’t at all, really. I got excited over socialists and the I.W.W.’s, and anarchists and birth controlists and suffragists and if I had not been working on a newspaper and bumped into them all at once, I would have gone on from one to another of them and joined them all, and kept on being fervent for years.

“As it was, I fell in love, happily at an early age, and I’m still in love. And it looks to me that this freedom is just a modernity gown, a new trapping that we women affect to capture the man we want. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but they only prove it.

“I know what I want. It’s Dick and marriage and babies! And I’ll have them yet. Wait and see.”

And the girls got up from the bench where they had been watching the sparrows fluttering around waiting for crumbs from the pockets of the little old ladies’ aprons, and hurried back to the long white wards where the twilight cast blue shadows over the beds and the patients waited for their evening meal.

Endnotes

The words “she asked” are not present in the original printing and have been inferred from the context. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

This paragraph, corresponding to the end of page 51 and the beginning of page 52 in the original printing, was originally misprinted with missing text. A later book quoting this passage has been used to reconstruct the missing text. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

This paragraph is abruptly cut off in the original printing. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

This paragraph was duplicated in the original printing, and the duplicate was excised from this production. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

The words “the club” are not present in the original printing and have been inferred from the context. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

The words “she replied” are not present in the original printing and have been inferred from the context. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

The words “he asked” are not present in the original printing and have been inferred from the context. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

Colophon

The Eleventh Virgin
was published in 1924 by
Dorothy Day.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on a transcription produced by
The Catholic Worker Movement
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
A Summer Girl,
a painting completed in 1896 by
Robert Lewis Reid.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
May 18, 2021, 3:05 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/dorothy-day/the-eleventh-virgin.

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Uncopyright

May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

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