The Green Bough

The life of Mary Throgmorton viewed as one would scan the chronicles of history impersonally without regard to the conventions is the life of a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would love as Mary Throgmorton loved-suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all might yield as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her sacrifices. But in the latitudinous perspective of Time where everything vanishes to the point of due proportion she must range with that vast army of women who have hungered loved been fed and paid the reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of their hearts.It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow surroundings of her circumstance that her life stands out tragically apart. She becomes then as a monument set up on a high and lonely hill amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon a monument silently claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force have so ungenerously circumscribed.