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Title: The Husband's Story: A Novel

Author: David Graham Phillips

Release date: February 15, 2022 [eBook #67406]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Grossett & Dunlap

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by University of California libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HUSBAND'S STORY: A NOVEL ***





  _The_
  HUSBAND’S STORY




  The
  Husband’s Story

  A NOVEL

  BY
  DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

  AUTHOR OF
  THE FASHIONABLE ADVENTURES OF
  JOSHUA CRAIG, OLD WIVES FOR NEW
  THE SECOND GENERATION, ETC.

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  GROSSET & DUNLAP
  PUBLISHERS




  COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
  D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

  _Published September, 1910_

  Printed in the United States of America




THE HUSBAND’S STORY




WHY


Several years ago circumstances thrust me into a position in which it
became possible for the friend who figures in these pages as Godfrey
Loring to do me a favor. He, being both wise and kindly, never misses
a good chance to put another under obligations. He did me the favor.
I gratefully, if reluctantly, acquiesced. Now, after many days, he
collects. When you shall have read what follows, you may utterly reject
my extenuating plea that any and every point of view upon life is
worthy of attention, even though it serve only to confirm us in our
previous ideas and beliefs. You may say that I should have repudiated
my debt, should have refused to edit and publish the manuscript he
confided to me. You may say that the general racial obligation to
mankind--and to womankind--takes precedence over a private and personal
obligation. Unfortunately I happen to be not of the philanthropic
temperament. My sense of the personal is strong; my sense of the
general weak--that is to say, weak in comparison. If “Loring” had
been within reach, I think I should have gone to him and pleaded for
release. But as luck will have it, he is off yachting, to peep about
in the remote inlets and islets of Australasia and the South Seas for
several years.

To aggravate my situation, in the letter accompanying the manuscript,
after several pages of the discriminating praise most dear to a
writer’s heart, he did me the supreme honor of saying that in his
work he had “striven to copy as closely as might be your style and
your methods--to help me to the hearing I want and to lighten your
labors as editor.” I assure him and the public that in any event I
should have done little editing of his curious production beyond such
as a proofreader might have found necessary. As it is, I have done
practically no editing at all. In form and in substance, from title to
finis, the work is his. I am merely its sponsor--and in circumstances
that would forbid me were I disposed to qualify my sponsorship with
even so mild a disclaimer as reluctance.

Have I said more than a loyal friend should? If so, on the other hand,
have I not done all that a loyal friend could?




I


I am tempted to begin with our arrival in Fifth Avenue, New York City,
in the pomp and circumstance befitting that region of regal splendor.
I should at once catch the attention of the women; and my literary
friends tell me that to make any headway with a story in America it is
necessary to catch the women, because the men either do not read books
at all or read only what they hear the women talking about. And I know
well--none knows better--that our women of the book-buying class, and
probably of all classes, love to amuse their useless idleness with
books that help them to dream of wasting large sums of money upon
luxuries and extravagances, upon entertaining grand people in grand
houses and being entertained by them. They tell me, and I believe it,
that our women abhor stories of middle-class life, abhor truth-telling
stories of any kind, like only what assures them that the promptings of
their own vanities and sentimental shams are true.

But patience, gentle reader, you with the foolish, chimera-haunted
brain, with the silly ideas of life, with the ignorance of human
nature including your own self, with the love of sloppy and tawdry
clap trap. Patience, gentle reader. While I shall begin humbly in
the social scale, I shall not linger there long. I shall pass on to
the surroundings of grandeur that entrance your snobbish soul. You
will soon smell only fine perfumes, only the aromas of food cooked by
expensive chefs. You will sit in drawing-rooms, lie in bedrooms as
magnificent as the architects and decorators and other purveyors to
the very rich have been able to concoct. You will be tasting the fine
savors of fashionable names and titles recorded in Burke’s and the
“Almanach de Gotha.” Patience, gentle reader, with your box of caramels
and your hair in curl papers and your household work undone--patience!
A feast awaits you.

There has been much in the papers these last few years about the
splendid families we--my wife and I--came of. Some time ago one of the
English dukes--a nice chap with nothing to do and a quaint sense of
humor--assembled on his estate for a sort of holiday and picnic all the
members of his ancient and proud family who could be got together by
several months of diligent search. It was a strange and awful throng
that covered the lawns before the ducal castle on the appointed day.
There was a handful of fairly presentable, more or less prosperous
persons. But the most of the duke’s cousins, near and remote, were
tramps, bartenders, jail birds, women of the town, field hands male
and female, sewer cleaners, chimney sweeps, needlewomen, curates,
small shopkeepers, and others of the species that are as a stench
unto delicate, aristocratic nostrils. The duke was delighted with his
picnic, pronounced it a huge success. But then His Grace had a sense of
humor and was not an American aristocrat.

All this by way of preparation for the admission that the branch of
the Loring family from which I come and the branch of the Wheatlands
family to which the girl I married belongs were far from magnificent,
were no more imposing then, well, than the families of any of our
American aristocrats. Like theirs, our genealogical tree, most
imposingly printed and bound and proudly exhibited on a special stand
in the library of our New York palace--that genealogical tree, for all
its air of honesty, for all its documentary proofs, worm-eaten and
age-stained, was like an artificial palm bedded in artificial moss.
The truth is, aristocracy does not thrive in America, but only the
pretense of it, and that must be kept alive by constant renewals. Both
here and abroad I am constantly running across traces of illegitimacy,
substitution, and other forms of genealogical flim-flam. But let that
pass. Whoever is or is not aristocratic, certainly Godfrey Loring and
Edna Wheatlands are not--or, rather, _were_ not.

My father kept a dejected little grocery in Passaic, N. J. He did
not become a “retired merchant and capitalist” until I was able to
retire and capitalize him. Edna’s father was-- No, you guess wrong.
Not a butcher, but--an undertaker!... Whew! I am glad to have these
shameful secrets “off the chest,” as they say in the Bowery. He--this
Wheatlands, undertaker to the poor and near-poor of the then village
of Passaic--was a tall, thin man, with snow-white hair and a smooth,
gaunt, gloomy face and the best funeral air I have ever seen. Edna has
long since forgotten him; she has an admirable ability absolutely to
forget anything she may for whatever reason deem it inconvenient to
remember. What an aid to conscience is such a quality! But I have not
forgotten old Weeping Willy Wheatlands, and I shall not forget him. It
was he who loaned me my first capital, the one that-- But I must not
anticipate.

In those days Passaic was a lowly and a dreary village. Its best was
cheap enough; its poorest was wretchedly squalid. The “seat” of the
Lorings and the “seat” of the Wheatlands stood side by side on the
mosquito beset banks of the river--two dingy frame cottages, a story
and a half in height, two rooms deep. We Lorings had no money, for my
father was an honest, innocent soul with a taste for talking what he
thought was politics, though in fact he knew no more of the realities
of politics, the game of pull Dick pull Devil for licenses to fleece
a “free, proud and intelligent people”--he knew no more of that
reality than--than the next honest soul you may hear driveling on that
same subject. We had no money, but “Weeping Willie” had plenty--and
saved it, blessings on him! I hate to think where I should be now,
if he hadn’t hoarded! So, while our straightened way of living was
compulsory, that of the Wheatlands was not. But this is unimportant;
the main point is both families lived in the same humble way.

If I thought “gentle reader” had patience and real imagination--and,
yes, the real poetic instinct--I should give her an inventory of
the furniture of those two cottages, and of the meager and patched
draperies of the two Monday wash lines, as my mother and Edna’s
mother--and Edna, too, when she grew big enough--decorated them, the
while shrieking gossip back and forth across the low and battered board
fence. But I shall not linger. It is as well. Those memories make me
sad--put a choke in my throat and a mist before my eyes. Why? If you
can’t guess, I could not in spoiling ten reams of paper explain it
to you. One detail only, and I shall hasten on. Both families lived
humbly, but we not quite so humbly as the Wheatlands family, because my
mother was a woman of some neatness and energy while Ma Wheatlands was
at or below the do-easy, slattern human average. _We_ had our regular
Saturday bath--in the wash tub. _We_ did not ever eat off the stove.
And while we were patched we were rarely ragged.

In those days--even in those days--Edna was a “scrapper.” They call it
an “energetic and resolute personality” now; it was called “scrappy”
then, and scrappy it was. When I would be chopping wood or lugging
in coal, so occupied that I did not dare pause, she would sit on the
fence in her faded blue-dotted calico, and how she would give it to me!
She knew how to say the thing that made me wild with the rage a child
is ashamed to show. Yes, she loved to tease me, perhaps--really, I
hope--because she knew I, in the bottom of my heart, loved to be teased
by her, to be noticed in any way. And mighty pretty she looked then,
with her mop of yellowish brown hair and her big golden brown eyes
and her little face, whose every feature was tilted to the angle that
gives precisely the most fascinating expression of pretty pertness, of
precocious intelligence, or of devil-may-care audacity. She has always
been a pretty woman, has Edna, and always will be, even in old age, I
fancy. Her beauty, like her health, like that strong, supple body of
hers, was built to last. What is the matter with the generations coming
forward now? Why do they bloom only to wither? What has sapped their
endurance? Are they brought up too soft? Is it the food? Is it the
worn-out parents? Why am I, at forty, younger in looks and in strength
and in taste for life than the youths of thirty? Why is Edna, not five
years my junior, more attractive physically than girls of twenty-five
or younger?

But she was only eight or nine at the time of which I am writing.
And she was fond of me then--really fond of me, though she denied it
furiously when the other children taunted, and though she was always
jeering at me, calling me awkward and homely. I don’t think I was
notably either the one or the other, but for her to say so tended to
throw the teasers off the track and also kept me in humble subjection.
I knew she cared, because when we played kissing games she would never
call me out, would call out every other boy, but if I called any other
girl she would sulk and treat me as badly as she knew how. Also, while
she had nothing but taunts and sarcasms for me she was always to be
found in the Wheatlands’ back yard near the fence or on it whenever I
was doing chores in our back yard.

After two years in the High School I went to work in the railway office
as a sort of assistant freight clerk. She kept on at school, went
through the High School, graduated in a white dress with blue ribbons,
and then sat down to wait for a husband. Her father and mother were
sensible people. Heaven knows they had led a hard enough life to have
good sense driven into them. But the tradition--the lady-tradition--was
too strong for them. They were not ashamed to work, themselves. They
would have been both ashamed and angry had it been suggested to them
that their two boys should become idlers. But they never thought of
putting their daughter to work at anything. After she graduated and
became a young lady, she was not compelled--would hardly have been
permitted--to do housework or sewing. You have seen the potted flower
in the miserable tenement window--the representative of the life that
neither toils nor spins, but simply exists in idle beauty. That potted
bloom concentrates all the dreams, all the romantic and poetic fancies
of the tenement family. I suppose Edna was some such treasured exotic
possession to those toil-twisted old parents of hers. They wanted a
flower in the house.

Well, they had it. She certainly was a lovely girl, far too lovely
to be spoiled by work. And if ever there was a scratch or a stain on
those beautiful white hands of hers, it assuredly was not made by toil.
She took music lessons-- Music lessons! How much of the ridiculous,
pathetic gropings after culture is packed into those two words. Beyond
question, everyone ought to know something about music; we should all
know something about everything, especially about the things that
peculiarly stand for civilization--science and art, literature and
the drama. But how foolishly we are set at it! Instead of learning to
understand and to appreciate music, we are taught to “beat the box” in
a feeble, clumsy fashion, or to screech or whine when we have no voice
worth the price of a single lesson. Edna took I don’t know how many
lessons a week for I don’t know how many years. She learned nothing
about music. She merely learned to strum on the piano. But, after all,
the lessons attained their real object. They made Edna’s parents and
Edna herself and all the neighbors feel that she was indeed a lady.
She could not sew. She could not cook. She hadn’t any knowledge worth
mention of any practical thing--therefore, had no knowledge at all;
for, unless knowledge is firmly based upon and in the practical, it is
not knowledge but that worst form of ignorance, misinformation. She
didn’t know a thing that would help her as woman, wife, or mother. But
she could play the piano!

Some day some one will write something true on the subject of
education. You remember the story of the girl from Lapland who applied
for a place as servant in New York, and when they asked her what she
could do, she said, “I can milk the reindeer.”

I never hear the word education that I don’t think of that girl.
One half of the time spent at school, to estimate moderately, and
nine tenths of the time spent in college class rooms is given to
things about as valuable to a citizen of this world as the Lap girl’s
“education” to a New York domestic. If anyone tells you that those
valueless things are culture, tell him that only an ignorance still
becalmed in the dense mediæval fog would talk such twaddle; tell him
that science has taught us what common sense has always shown, that
there is no beauty divorced from use, that beauty is simply the
perfect adaptation of the thing to be used to the purpose for which it
is to be used. I am a business man, not a smug, shallow-pated failure
teaching in an antiquated college. I abhor the word culture, as I abhor
the word gentleman or the word lady, because of the company into which
it has fallen. So, while I eagerly disclaim any taint of “culture,” I
insist that I know what I’m talking about when I talk of education. And
if I had not been too good-natured, my girl-- But I must keep to the
story. “Gentle reader” wants a story; he--or she--does not want to try
to think.

It was pleasant to my ignorant ears to hear Edna playing sonatas and
classical barcaroles and dead marches and all manner of loud and
difficult pieces. Such sounds, issuing from the humble--and not too
clean--Wheatlands house gave it an atmosphere of aristocracy, put
tone into the whole neighborhood, elevated the Wheatlands family like
a paper collar on the calico shirt of a farm hand. If we look at
ourselves rightly, we poor smattering seekers after a little showy
knowledge of one kind or another--a dibble of French, a dabble of
Latin or Greek, a sputter of woozy so-called philosophy--how like the
paper-collared farm hand we are, how like the Hottentot chief with a
plug hat atop his naked brown body.

But Edna pleased me, fully as much as she pleased herself, and
that is saying a great deal. I wouldn’t have had her changed in
the smallest particular. I was even glad she could get rid of her
freckles--fascinating little beauty spots sprinkled upon her tip-tilted
little nose!

She was not so fond of me in those days. I had a rival. I am leaning
back and laughing as I think of him. Charley Putney! He was clerk in
a largish dry goods store. He is still a clerk there, I believe, and
no doubt is still the same cheaply scented, heavily pomatumed clerkly
swell he was in the days when I feared and hated him. The store used
to close at six o’clock. About seven of summer evenings Charley would
issue forth from his home to set the hearts of the girls to fluttering.
They were all out, waiting. Down the street he would come with his hat
set a little back to show the beautiful shine and part and roach of his
hair. The air would become delicious (!) with bergamot, occasionally
varied by German cologne or lemon verbena. What a jaunty, gay tie!
What an elegant suit! And he wore a big seal ring, reputed to be real
gold--and such lively socks! Down the street came Charley, all the
girls palpitant. At which stoop or front gate would he stop?

Often--only too often--it was at the front gate next ours. How I hated
him!

And the cap of the joke is that Edna nearly married him. In this land
where the social stairs are crowded like Jacob’s Ladder with throngs
ascending and descending, what a history it would make if the grown men
and women of any generation should tell whom they _almost_ married!

Yes, Edna came very near to marrying him. She was a lady. She did not
know exactly what that meant. The high-life novels she read left her
hazy on the subject, because to understand any given thing we must
have knowledge that enables us to connect it with the things we already
know. A snowball would be an unfathomable mystery to a savage living in
an equatorial plain. A matter of politics or finance or sociology or
real art, real literature, real philosophy, seems dull and meaningless
to a woman or to the average mutton-brained man. But if you span the
gap between knowledge of any subject and a woman’s or a man’s ignorance
of that subject with however slender threads of connecting knowledge,
she or he can at once bridge it and begin to reap the new fields. Edna
could not find any thread whatever for the gap between herself and that
fairy land of high life the novels told her about. In those days there
was no high life in Passaic. I suppose there is now--or, at least,
Passaic thinks there is--and in purely imaginary matters the delusion
of possession is equal to, even better than, possession itself. So,
with no high life to use as a measure, with only the instinct that her
white smooth hands and her dresses modeled on the latest Paris fashions
as illustrated in the monthly “Lady Book,” and her music lessons, her
taste for what she then regarded as literature--with only her instinct
that all these hallmarks must stamp her twenty-four carat lady, she
had to look about her for a matching gentleman. And there was Charley,
the one person within vision who suggested the superb heroes of the
high-life novels. I will say to the credit of her good taste that
she had her doubts about Charley. Indeed, if his sweet smell and his
smooth love-making--Charley excelled as a love-maker, being the born
ladies’ man--if the man, or, rather, the boy, himself had not won her
heart, she would soon have tired of him and would have suspected his
genuineness as a truly gentleman. But she fell in love with him.

There was a long time during which I thought the reason she returned
to me--or, rather, let me return to her--was because she fell out of
love with him. Then there was a still longer time when I thought the
reason was the fact that the very Saturday I got a raise to fourteen
a week, he fell from twelve to eight. But latterly I have known the
truth. How many of us know the truth, the down-at-the-bottom, absolute
truth, about why she married us instead of the other fellow? Very few,
I guess--or we’d be puffing our crops and flirting our feathers less
cantily. She took up with me again because he dropped her. It was he
that saved her, not she or I. Only a few months ago, her old mother,
doddering on in senility, with memory dead except for early happenings,
and these fresh and vivid, said: “And when I think how nigh Edny come
to marryin’ up with that there loud-smelling dude of a Charley Putney!
If he hadn’t ’a give her the go by, she’d sure ’a made a fool of
herself--a wantin’ me and her paw to offer him money and a job in the
undertakin’ store, to git him back. Lawsy me! What a narrer squeak fur
Princess Edny!”

Be patient, gentle reader! You shall soon be reading things that will
efface the coarse impression my old mother-in-law’s language and all
these franknesses about our beginnings must have made upon your refined
and cultured nature. Swallow a caramel and be patient. But don’t skip
these pages. If you should, you would miss the stimulating effect of
contrast, not to speak of other benefits which I, probably vainly, hope
to confer upon you.

She didn’t love me. Looking back, I see that for many months she
found it difficult to endure me. But it was necessary that she carry
off--with the neighborhood rather than with me--her pretense of having
cast off Charley because she preferred me. We can do wonders in the
way of concealing wounded pride; we can do equal wonders in the way
of preserving a reputation for unbroken victory. And I believe she
honestly liked me. Perhaps she liked me even more than she liked her
aromatic Charley; for, it by no means follows that we like best where
we love most. I am loth to believe--I do not believe--that at so early
an age, not quite seventeen, she could have received my caresses and
returned them with plausibility enough to deceive me, unless she had
genuinely liked me.

And what a lucky fellow I thought myself! And how I patronized the
perfumed man. And what a thrashing I gave him--poor, harmless, witless
creature!--when I heard of his boastings that he had dropped Edna
Wheatlands because he found Sally Simpson prettier and more _cultured_!

I must have been a railway man born. At twenty-two--no, six months
after my majority--I was jumped into a head clerkship at twelve
hundred a year. Big pay for a youngster in those days; not so bad for
a youngster even in these inflated years. When I brought Edna the news
I think she began to love me. To her that salary was a halo, a golden
halo round me--made me seem a superior person. She had long thought
highly of my business abilities, for she was shrewd and had listened
when the older people talked, and they were all for me as the likeliest
young man of the neighborhood.

“I’ve had another raise,” said I carelessly. We were sitting on her
front porch, she upon the top step, I two steps down.

“Another!” she said. “Why, the last was only two months ago.”

“Yes, they’ve pushed me up to twelve hundred a year--a little more, for
it’s twenty-five per.”

“Gee!” she exclaimed, and I can see her pretty face now--all aglow,
beaming a reverent admiration upon me.

I rather thought I deserved it. But it has ever been one of my vanities
to pretend to take my successes as matters of course, and even to
depreciate them. They say the English invariably win in diplomacy
because they act dissatisfied with what they get, never grumbling so
sourly as when they capture the whole hog. I can believe it. That
has been my policy, and it has worked rather well. Still, any policy
works well if the man has the gift for success. “Twenty-five per,” I
repeated, to impress it still more deeply upon her and to revel in the
thrilling words. “Before I get through I’ll make them pay me what I’m
worth.”

“Do you think you’ll ever be making more than that?” exclaimed she,
wonderingly.

“I’ll be getting two thousand some day,” said I, far more confidently
than I felt.

“Oh--Godfrey!” she said softly.

And as I looked at her I for the first time felt a certain peculiar
thrill that comes only when the soul of the woman a man loves rushes
forth to cling to his soul. In my life I have never had--and never
shall have--a happier moment.

Once more patience, gentle reader! I know this bit of sordidness--this
glow of sentiment upon a vulgar material incident--disgusts your
delicate soul. I am aware that you have a proper contempt for all the
coarse details of life. You would not be _gentle_ reader if you hadn’t.
You would be a plain man or woman, living busily and usefully, and
making people happy in the plain ways in which the human animal finds
happiness. You would not be devoting your days to making soul-food out
of idealistic moonshine and dreaming of ways to dazzle yourself and
your acquaintances into thinking you a superior person.

“Do you know,” said my pretty Edna, advancing her bond at least halfway
toward meeting mine, “do you know, I’ve had an instinct, a presentiment
of this? I was dreaming it when I woke up this morning.”

I’ve observed that every woman in her effort to prove herself “not like
other girls” pretends to some occult or other equally supranatural
quality. One dreams dreams. Another gets spirit messages. A third has
seen ghosts. Another has a foot which sculptors have longed to model.
A fifth has a note in her voice which the throat specialists pronounce
unique in the human animal and occurring only in certain rare birds
and Sarah Bernhardt. I met one not long ago who had several too many
or too few skins, I forget which, and as a result was endowed with
I cannot recall what nervous qualities quite peculiar to herself,
and somehow most valuable and fascinating. In that early stage of
her career my Edna was “hipped” upon a rather commonplace personal
characteristic--the notion that she had premonitions, was a sort of
seeress or prophetess. Later she dropped it for one less tiresome
and overworked. But I recall that even in that time of my deepest
infatuation I wished to hear as little as possible about the occult.
Of all the shallow, foggy fakes that attract ignorant and miseducated
people the occult is the most inexcusable and boring. A great many
people, otherwise apparently rather sensible, seem honestly to believe
in it. But, being sensible, they don’t have anything to do with it.
They treat it as practical men treat the idiotic in the creeds and
the impossible in the moral codes of the churches to which they
belong--that is, they assent and proceed to dismiss and to forget.

However, I was not much impressed by Edna’s attempt to dazzle me with
her skill as a Sibyl. But I was deeply impressed by the awe-inspiring
softness and shapeliness of her hand lying prisoner in mine. And I was
moved to the uttermost by the kisses and embraces we exchanged in the
gathering dusk. “I love you,” she murmured into my ecstatic ear. “You
are so different from the other men round here.”

I dilated with pride.

“So far ahead of them in every way.”

“Ahead of Charley Putney?” said I, jocose but jealous withal.

She laughed with a delightful look of contemptuous scorn in her cute
face. “Oh, _he_!” she scoffed. “He’s getting only eight a week, and
he’ll never get any more.”

“Not if his boss has sense,” said I, thinking myself judicial. “But
let’s talk about ourselves. We can be married now.”

I advanced this timidly, for being a truly-in-love lover I was a little
afraid of her, a little uncertain of this priceless treasure. But she
answered promptly, “Yes, I was thinking of that.”

“Let’s do it right away,” proposed I.

“Oh, not for several weeks. It wouldn’t be proper.”

“Why not?”

She couldn’t explain. She only knew that there was something indecent
about haste in such matters, that the procedure must be slow and
orderly and stately. “We’ll marry the first of next month,” she finally
decided, and I joyfully acquiesced.

Some of my readers--both of the gentle and of the other kind--may
be surprised that a girl of seventeen should be so self-assured, so
independent. They must remember that she was a daughter of the people;
and among the people a girl of seventeen was, and I suppose still is,
ready for marriage, ready and resolved to decide all important matters
for herself. At seventeen Edna, in self-poise and in experience,
judgment and all the other mature qualities, was the equal of the
carefully sheltered girl of twenty-five or more. She may have been
brought up a lady, may have been in all essential ways as useless as
the most admired of that weariful and worthless class. But the very
nature of her surroundings, in that simple household and that simple
community, had given her a certain practical education. And I may say
here that to it she owes all she is to-day. Do not forget this, gentle
reader, as you read about her and as she dazzles you. As you look at
the gorgeous hardy rose do not forget that such spring only from the
soil, develop only in the open.

That very evening we began to look for a home. As soon as we were
outside her front gate she turned in the direction of the better part
of the town. Nor did she pause or so much as glance at a house until
we were clear of the neighborhood in which we had always lived, and
were among houses much superior. I admired, and I still admire, this
significant move of hers. It was the gesture of progress, of ambition.
It was splendidly American. I myself should have been content to settle
down near our fathers and mothers, among the people we knew. I should
no doubt have been better satisfied to keep up the mode of living to
which we had been used all our lives. The time would have come when I
should have reached out for more comfort and for luxury. But it was
natural that she should develop in this direction before I did. She
had read her novels and her magazines, had the cultured woman’s innate
fondness for dress and show, had had nothing but those kinds of things
to think about; I had been too busy trying to make money to have any
time for getting ideas about spending it.

No; while her motive in seeking better things than we had known was in
the main a vanity and a sham, her action had as much _initial_ good in
it as if her motive had been sensible and helpful. And back of the
motive lay an instinct for getting up in the world that has been the
redeeming and preserving trait in her character. It was this instinct
that ought to have made her the fit wife for an ambitious and advancing
man. You will presently see how this fine and useful instinct was
perverted by vanity and false education and the pernicious example of
other women.

“The rents are much higher in this neighborhood,” said I, with a
doubtful but admiring look round at the pretty houses and their
well-ordered grounds.

“Of course,” said she. “But maybe we can find something. Anyway, it
won’t do any harm to look.”

“No, indeed,” I assented, for I liked the idea myself. This better
neighborhood _looked_ more like her than her own, seemed to her lover’s
eyes exactly suited to her beauty and her stylishness--for the “Lady
Book” was teaching her to make herself far more attractive to the eye
than were the other girls over in our part of town. I still puzzle at
why Charley Putney gave her up; the only plausible theory seems to be
that she was so sick in love with him that she wearied him. The most
attractive girl in the world, if she dotes on a young man too ardently,
will turn his stomach, and alarm his delicate sense of feminine
propriety.

As we walked on, she with an elate and proud air, she said: “How
different it smells over here!”

At first I didn’t understand what she meant. But, as I thought of
her remark, the meaning came. And I believe that was the beginning
of my dissatisfaction with what I had all my life had in the way of
surroundings. I have since observed that the sense of smell is blunt,
is almost latent, in people of the lower orders, and that it becomes
more acute and more sensitive as we ascend in the social scale. Up to
that time my ambition to rise had been rather indefinite--a desire
to make money which everyone seemed to think was the highest aim in
life--and also an instinct to beat the other fellows working with me.
Now it became definite. I began to smell. I wanted to get away from
unpleasant smells. I do not mean that this was a resolution, all in
the twinkling of an eye. I simply mean that, as everything must have a
beginning, that remark of hers was for me the beginning of a long and
slow but steady process of what may be called civilizing.

Presently she said: “If we couldn’t afford a house, we might take one
of the flats.”

“But I’m afraid you’d be lonesome, away off from everybody we know.”

She tossed her head. “A good lonesome,” said she. “I’m tired of
_common_ people. I was reading about reincarnations the other day.”

“Good Lord!” laughed I. “What are they?”

She explained--as well as she could--probably as well as anybody could.
I admired her learning but the thing itself did not interest me. “I
guess there must be something in it,” she went on. “I’m sure in a
former life I was something a lot different from what I am now.”

“Oh, you’re all right,” I assured her, putting my arm round her in the
friendly darkness of a row of sidewalk elms.

When we had indulged in an interlude of love-making, she returned to
the original subject. “I wonder how much rent we could afford to pay,”
said she.

“They say the rent ought never to be more per month than the income is
per week.”

“Then we could pay twenty-five a month.”

That seemed to me a lot to pay--and, indeed, it was. But she did not
inherit Weeping Willie’s tightness; and she had never had money to
spend or any training in either making or spending money. That is
to say, she was precisely as ignorant of the main business of life
as is the rest of American womanhood under our ridiculous system of
education. So, twenty-five dollars a month rent meant nothing to her.
“We can’t do anything to-night,” said she. “But I’ve got my days free,
and I’ll look at different places, and when I find several to choose
from we can come in the evening or on Sunday and decide.”

This suited me exactly. We dismissed the matter, hunted out a shady
nook, and sat down to enjoy ourselves after the manner of young
lovers on a fine night. Never before had she given herself freely to
love. I know now it was because never before had she loved me. I was
deliriously happy that night, and I am sure she was too. She no less
than I had the ardent temperament that goes with the ambitious nature;
and now that she was idealizing me into the man who could lead her to
the fairy lands she dreamed of, she gave me her whole heart.

It was the beginning of what was beyond question the happiest period of
both our lives. I have a dim old photograph of us two taken about that
time. At a glance you see it is the picture of two young people of the
working class--two green, unformed creatures, badly dressed and gawkily
self-conscious. But there is a look in her face--and in mine-- To be
quite honest, I’m glad I don’t look like that now. I wouldn’t go back
if I could. Nevertheless-- How we loved each other!--and how happy we
were!

I feel that I weary you, gentle reader. There is in my sentiment too
much about wages and flat rents and the smells that come from people
who work hard and live in poor places and eat badly cooked strong food.
But that is not my fault. It is life. And if you believe that your and
your romancers’ tawdry imaginings are better than life--well, you may
not be so wise or so exalted as you fancy.

The upshot of our inspecting places to live and haggling over prices
was that we took a flat in the best quarter of Passaic--the top and
in those elevatorless days the cheapest flat in the house. We were to
pay forty dollars a month--a stiff rent that caused excitement in our
neighborhood and set my mother and her father to denouncing us as a
pair of fools bent upon ruin. I thought so, myself. But I could have
denied Edna nothing at that time, and I made up my mind that by working
harder than ever at the railway office I would compel another raise.
When I told my mother about this secret resolve of mine, she said:

“If you do get more money, Godfrey, don’t tell Edna. She’s a fool.
She’ll keep your nose to the grindstone all your life if you ain’t
careful. It takes a better money-maker than you’re likely to be to hold
up against that kind of a woman.”

“Oh, she’s like all girls,” said I.

“That’s just it,” replied my mother. “That’s why I ain’t got no use for
women. Look what poor managers they are. Look how they idle and waste
and run into debt.”

“But there’s a lot to be said against the men, too. Saloons, for
instance.”

“And talkin’ politics with loafers,” said my father’s wife bitterly.

“I guess the trouble with men and women is they’re too human,” said I,
who had inherited something of the philosopher from my father. “And,
mother, a man’s got to get married--and he’s got to marry a woman.”

“Yes, I suppose he has,” she grudgingly assented. “Mighty poor
providers most of the men is, and mighty poor use the women make of
what little the men brings home. But about you and Edny Wheatlands--
You ought to do better’n her, Godfrey. You’re caught by her looks and
her style and her education. None of them things makes a good wife.”

“I certainly wouldn’t marry a girl that didn’t have them--all three.”

“But there’s something more,” insisted mother.

“One woman can’t have everything,” said I.

“No, but she can have what I mean--and she’s not much good to a man
without it. If you’re set on marrying her wait till _you’re_ ready,
anyhow. _She_ never will be.”

“What do you mean, mother?”

“Wait till you’ve got money in the savings bank. Wait till you’ve got
used to having money. Then maybe you’ll be able to put a bit on a
spendthrift wife even if you are crazy about her. You’re making a wrong
start with her, Godfrey. You’re giving her the upper hand, and that’s
bad for women like her--mighty bad.”

It was from my mother that I get my ability at business. She and I
often had sensible talks, and her advice started me right in the
railroad office and kept me right until I knew my way. So I did not
become angry at her plain speaking, but appreciated its good sense,
even though I thought her prejudiced against my Edna. However, I had
not the least impulse to put off the marriage. My one wish was to
hasten it. Never before or since was time so leisurely. But the day
dragged itself up at last, and we were married in church, at what
seemed to us then enormous expense. There was a dinner afterward at
which everyone ate and drank too much--a coarse and common scene which
I will spare gentle reader. Edna and I went up to New York City for a
Friday to Monday honeymoon. But we were back to spend Sunday night in
our grand forty-dollar flat. On Monday morning I went to work again--a
married man, an important person in the community.

Never has any height I have attained or seen since equalled the
grandeur of that forty-dollar flat. My common sense tells me that it
was a small and poor affair. I remember, for example, that the bathroom
was hardly big enough to turn round in. I recall that I have sat by the
window in the parlor and without rising have reached a paper on a table
at the other end of the room. But these hard facts in no way interfere
with or correct the flat as my imagination persists in picturing
it. What vistas of rooms!--what high ceilings--what woodwork--and
plumbing!--and what magnificent furniture! Edna’s father, in a moment
of generosity, told her he would pay for the outfitting of the
household. And being in the undertaking business he could get discounts
on furniture and even on kitchen utensils. Edna did the selecting.
I thought everything wonderful and, as I have said, my imagination
refuses to recreate the place as it actually was. But I recall that
there was a brave show of red and of plush, and we all know what that
means. Whether her “Lady Book” had miseducated her or her untrained
eyes, excited by the gaudiness she saw when she went shopping, had
beguiled her from the counsels of the “Lady Book,” I do not know. But I
am sure, as I recall red and plush, that our first home was the typical
horror inhabited by the extravagant working-class family.

No matter. There we were in Arcadia. For a time her restless soaring
fancy, wearied perhaps by its audacious flight to this lofty perch
of red and plush and forty dollars a month, folded its wings and
was content. For a time her pride and satisfaction in the luxurious
newness overcame her distaste and disdain and moved her to keep things
spotless. I recall the perfume of cleanness that used to delight my
nostrils at my evening homecoming, and then the intoxicating perfume of
Edna herself--the aroma of healthy young feminine beauty. We loved each
other, simply, passionately, in the old-fashioned way. With the growth
of intelligence, with the realization on the part of men that her keep
is a large part of the reason in the woman’s mind if not in her heart
for marrying and loving, there has come a decline and decay of the
former reverence and awe of man toward woman. Also, the men nowadays
know more about the mystery of woman, know everything about it, where
not so many years ago a pure woman was to a man a real religious
mystery. Her physical being, the clothes she wore underneath, the
supposedly sweet and clean thoughts, nobler than his, that dwelt in the
temple of her soul--these things surrounded a girl with an atmosphere
of thrilling enigma for the youth who won from her lips and from the
church the right to explore.

All that has passed, or almost passed. I am one of those who believe
that what has come, or, rather, is coming, to take its place is
better, finer, nobler. But the old order had its charm. What a charm
for me!--who had never known any woman well, who had dreamed of her
passionately but purely and respectfully. There was much of pain--of
shyness, fear of offending her higher nature, uneasiness lest I should
be condemned and cast out--in those early days of married life. But
it was a sweet sort of pain. And when we began to understand each
other--to be human, though still on our best behavior--when we found
that we were congenial, were happy together in ways undreamed of, life
seemed to be paying not like the bankrupt it usually is when the time
for redeeming its promises comes but like a benevolent prodigal, like
a lottery whose numbers all draw capital prizes. I admit the truth of
much the pessimists have to say against Life. But one thing I must
grant it. When in its rare generous moments it relents, it does know
how to play the host at the feast--how to spread the board, how to fill
the flagons and to keep them filled, how to scatter the wreaths and
the garlands, how to select the singers and the dancers who help the
banqueters make merry. When I remember my honeymoon, I almost forgive
you, Life, for the shabby tricks you have played me.

Now I can conceive a honeymoon that would last on and on, not in the
glory and feverish joy of its first period, but in a substantial and
satisfying human happiness. But not a honeymoon with a wife who is no
more fitted to be a wife than the office boy is fitted to step in and
take the president’s job. Patience, gentle reader! I know how this
sudden shriek of discord across the amorous strains of the honeymoon
music must have jarred your nerves. But be patient and I will explain.

Except ourselves, every other family in the house, in the neighborhood,
had at least one servant. We had none. If Edna had been at all
economical we might have kept a cook and pinched along. But Edna spent
carelessly all the money I gave her, and I gave her all there was. A
large part of it went for finery for her personal adornment, trash of
which she soon tired--much of it she disliked as soon as it came home
and she tried it on without the saleslady to flatter and confuse. I--in
a good-natured way, for I really felt perfectly good-humored about
it--remonstrated with her for letting everybody rob her, for getting so
little for her money. She took high ground. Such things were beneath
her attention. If I had wanted a wife of that dull, pinch-penny kind
I’d certainly not have married her, a talented, educated woman, bent
on improving her mind and her position in the world. And that seemed
reasonable. Still, the money was going, the bills were piling up, and I
did not know what to do.

And--she did the cooking. I think I have already said that she had
not learned to cook. How she and her mother expected her to get along
as a poor clerk’s wife I can’t imagine. The worst of it was, she
believed she could cook. That is the way with women. They look down on
housekeeping, on the practical side of life, as too coarse and low to
be worthy their attention. They say all that sort of thing is easy, is
like the toil of a day laborer. They say anybody could do it. And they
really believe so. Men, no matter how high their position, weary and
bore themselves every day, because they must, with routine tasks beside
which dishwashing has charm and variety. Yet women shirk their proper
and necessary share of life’s burden, pretending that it is beneath
them.

Edna, typical woman, thought she could cook and keep house because
she, so superior, could certainly do inferior work if she chose. But
after that first brief spurt of enthusiasm, of daily conference with
the “Lady Book’s Complete Housekeeper’s Guide,” the flat was badly
kept--was really horribly kept--was worse than either her home or
mine before we had been living there many months. It took on much the
same odor. It looked worse, as tawdry finery, when mussy and dirty,
is more repulsive than a plain toilet gone back. I did not especially
mind that. But her cooking-- I had not been accustomed to anything
especially good in the way of cooking. Mother was the old-fashioned
fryer, and you know those fryers always served the vegetables soggy. I
could have eaten exceedingly poor stuff without complaining or feeling
like complaining. But the stuff she was soon flinging angrily upon the
slovenly table I could not eat. She ate it, enough of it to keep alive,
and it didn’t seem to do her any harm. How many women have you known
who were judges of things to eat? Do you understand how women continue
to eat the messes they put into their pretty mouths, and keep alive?

I could not eat Edna’s cooking. I ate bread, cold meats and the like
from the delicatessen shop. When the meal happened to be of her own
preparing I dropped into the habit of slipping away after a pretense
at eating, to get breakfast or dinner or supper in a restaurant--the
cheapest kind of restaurant, but I ate there with relish. And never
once did I murmur to Edna. I loved her too well; also, I am by nature a
tolerant, even-tempered person, hating strife, avoiding the harsh word.
In fact, my timidity in that respect has been my chief weakness, has
cost me dear again and again. But----

After ten months of married life Edna fell ill. All you married men
will prick up your ears at that. Why is it that bread winners somehow
contrive to keep on their feet most of the time, little though they
know as to caring for their health, reckless though they are in
eating and drinking? Why is it that married women--unless they have
to work--spend so much time in sick bed or near it? They say we in
America have more than nine times as many doctors proportionately to
population as any other country. The doctors live off of our women--our
idle, overeating, lazy women who will not work, who will not walk,
who are always getting something the matter with them. Of course the
doctors--parasites upon parasites--fake up all kinds of lies, many of
them malicious slanders against the husbands, to excuse their patients
and to keep them patients. But what is the truth?

Edna, who read all the time she was not plotting to get acquainted with
our neighbors--they looked down upon us and wished to have nothing to
do with us--Edna who ate quantities of candy between meals and ate at
meals rich things she bought of confectioners and bakers--Edna fell ill
and frightened me almost out of my senses. I understand it now. But I
did not understand then. I believed, as do all ignorant people--both
the obviously ignorant and the ignorant who pass for enlightened--I
believed sickness to be a mysterious accident, like earthquakes and
lightning strokes, a hit-or-miss blow from nowhere in particular. So I
was all sympathy and terror.

She got well. She looked as well as ever. But she said she was not
strong. “And Godfrey, we simply have got to keep a girl. I’ve borne up
bravely. But I can’t stand it any longer. You see for yourself, the
rough work and the strain of housekeeping are too much for me.”

“Very well,” said I. The bills, including the doctor’s and drug bills,
were piling up. We were more than a thousand dollars in debt. But I
said: “Very well. You are right.” We men do not realize that there
are two distinct and equal expressions of strength. The strength of
bulk, that is often deceptive in that it looks stronger than it is; the
strength of fiber, that is always deceptive in that it is stronger than
it looks. In a general way, man has the strength of bulk, woman the
strength of fiber. So man looks on woman’s appearance of fragility and
fancies her weak and himself the stronger. I looked at Edna, and said:
“Very well. We must have a girl to help.”

I shan’t linger upon this part of my story. I am tempted to linger,
but, after all, it is the commonplace of American life, familiar to
all, though understood apparently by only a few. Why do more than
ninety per cent of our small business men fail? Why are the savings
banks accounts of our working classes a mere fraction of those of the
working classes of other countries? And so on, and so on. But I see
your impatience, gentle reader, with these matters so “inartistic.” We
sank deeper and deeper in debt. Edna’s health did not improve. The girl
we hired had lived with better class people; she despised us, shirked
her work, and Edna did not know how to manage her. If the head of the
household is incompetent and indifferent, a servant only aggravates the
mess, and the more servants the greater the mess. All Edna’s interest
was for her music, her novels, her social advancement, and her dreams
of being a grand lady. These dreams had returned with increased power;
they took complete possession of her. They soured her disposition,
made her irritable, usually blue or cross, only at long intervals
loving and sweet. No, perhaps the dreams were not responsible.
Perhaps--probably--the real cause was the upset state of her health
through the absurd idle life she led. Idle and lonely. For she would
not go with whom she could, she could not go with whom she would.

“I’m sick of sitting alone,” said she. “No wonder I can’t get well.”

“Let’s go back near the old folks,” suggested I. “Our friends won’t
come to see us in this part of the town. They feel uncomfortable.”

“I should think they would!” cried she. “And if they came I’d see to it
that they were so uncomfortable that they would never come again.”

I worked hard. My salary went up to fifteen hundred, to two thousand,
to twenty-five hundred. “Now,” said Edna, “perhaps you’ll get hands
that won’t look like a laboring man’s. How can I hope to make nice
friends when I’ve a husband with broken finger nails?”

Our expenses continued to outrun my salary, but I was not especially
worried, for I began to realize that I had the money-making talent.
Three children were born; only the first--Margot--lived. Looking back
upon those six years of our married life, I see after the first year
only a confused repellent mess of illness, nurses, death, doctors,
quarrels with servants, untidy rooms and clothes, slovenly, peevish
wife, with myself watching it all in a dazed, helpless way, thinking it
must be the normal, natural order of domestic life--which, indeed, it
is in America--and wondering where and how it was to end.

I recall going home one afternoon late, to find Edna yawning
listlessly over some book in a magazine culture series. Her hair hung
every which way, her wrapper was torn and stained. Her skin had the
musty look that suggests unpleasant conditions both without and within.
Margot, dirty, pimply from too much candy, sat on the floor squalling.

“Take the child away,” cried Edna, at sight of me. “I thought you’d
never come. A little more of this and I’ll kill myself. What is there
to live for, anyhow?”

Silent and depressed, I took Margot for a walk. And as I wandered along
sadly I was full of pity for Edna, and felt that somehow the blame was
wholly mine for the wretched plight of our home life.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I was twenty-eight and Edna twenty-three, I had a series of rapid
promotions which landed me in New York in the position of assistant
traffic superintendent. My salary was eight thousand a year.

It so happened--coincidence and nothing else--that those eighteen
months of quick advance for me also marked a notable change in Edna.

There are some people--many people--so obsessed of the know-it-all
vanity that they can learn nothing. Nor are all these people preachers,
doctors, and teachers, gentle reader. Then there is another species
who pretend to know all, who are chary of admitting to learning or
needing to learn anything, however small, yet who behind their pretense
toil at improving themselves as a hungry mouse gnaws at the wall of
the cheese box. Of this species was Edna. As she was fond of being
mysterious about her thoughts and intentions, she never told me what
set her going again after that long lethargy. Perhaps it was some woman
whom she had a sudden opportunity thoroughly to study, some woman who
knew and lived the ideas Edna had groped for in vain. Perhaps it was
a novel she read or articles in her magazines. It doesn’t matter. I
never asked her; I had learned that wild horses would not drag from her
a confession of where she had got an idea, because such a confession
would to her notion detract from her own glory. However, the essential
fact is that she suddenly roused and set to work as she had never
worked before--went at it like a prospector who, after toiling now
hard and now discouragedly for years, strikes by accident a rich vein
of gold. Edna showed in every move that she not hoped, not believed,
but knew she was at last on the right track. She began to take care,
scrupulous care, of her person--the minute intelligent care she has
ever since been expanding and improving upon, has never since relaxed,
and never will relax. Also she began to plan and to move definitely
in the matter of taking care of Margot--to look after her speech, her
manners, her food, her person, especially, perhaps, the last. Margot’s
teeth, Margot’s hair, Margot’s walk, Margot’s feet and hands and skin,
the shape of her nose, the set of her ears--all these things she talked
about and fussed with as agitatedly as about her own self.

Edna became a crank on the subject of food--what is called a crank
by the unthinking, of whom, by the way, I was to my lasting regret
one until a few years ago. For a year or two her moves in this
important direction were blundering, intermittent, and not always
successful--small wonder when there is really no reliable information
to be had, the scientists being uncertain and the doctors grossly
ignorant. But gradually she evolved and lived upon a “beauty diet.”
Margot, of course, had to do the same. She took exercises morning and
night, took long and regular walks for the figure and skin and to put
clearness and brightness into the eyes. I believe she and Margot, with
occasional lapses, keep up their regimen to this day.

The house was as slattern as ever. The diet and comfort and health
of the family bread-winner were no more the subject of thought and
care than--well, than the next husband’s to his wife. She gave some
attention--intelligent and valuable attention, I cheerfully concede--to
improving my speech, manners, and dress. But beyond that the revolution
affected only her and her daughter. Them it affected amazingly. In
three or four months the change in their appearance was literally
beyond belief. Edna’s beauty and style came back--no, burst forth in an
entirely new kind of radiance and fascination. As for little Margot,
she transformed from homeliness, from the scrawny pasty look of bad
health, from bad temper, into as neat and sweet and pretty a little
lady as could be found anywhere.

You, gentle reader, who are ever ready to slop over with some
kind of sentimentality because in your shallowness you regard
sentimentality--not sentiment, for of that you know nothing, but
sentimentality--as the most important thing in the world, just as
a child regards sickeningly rich cake as the finest food in the
world--you, gentle reader, have already made up your mind why Edna
thus suddenly awakened, or, rather, reawakened. “Aha,” you are saying.
“Served him good and right. She found some one who appreciated her.”
That guess of yours shows how little you know about Edna or the Edna
kind of human being. The people who do things in this world, except in
our foolish American novels, do because they must. They may do better
or worse under the influence of love, which is full as often a drag as
a spur. But they do not _do_ because of love. I shall not argue this. I
shrink from gratuitously inviting an additional vial of wrath from the
ladies, who resent being told how worthless they in their indolence and
self-complacence permit themselves to be and how small a positive part
they now play in the world drama. I should have said nothing at all
about the matter, were it not that I wish to be strictly just to Edna,
and she, being wholly the ambitious woman, has always had and still has
a deep horror of scandal, intrigue, irregularity, and unconventionality
of every sort.

It was necessary that we move to a place more convenient to my
business headquarters in New York City. A few weeks after I got the
eight thousand a year, Edna, and little Margot and I went to Brooklyn
to live--took a really charming house in Bedford Avenue, with large
grounds around it. And once more we were happy. It seemed to me we had
started afresh.

And we had.




II


Why did we go to Brooklyn?

By the time Edna and I had been married six years I learned many things
about her inmost self. I was not at all analytic or critical as to
matters at home. I used my intelligence in my own business; I assumed
that my wife had intelligence and that she used it in her business--her
part of our joint business. I believed the reason her part of it went
badly was solely the natural conditions of life beyond her control. A
railroad, a factory could be run smoothly; a family and a household
were different matters. And I admired my wife as much as I loved her,
and regarded her as a wonderful woman, which, indeed, in certain
respects she was.

But I had discovered in her several weaknesses. Some of these I knew;
others I did not permit myself to know that I knew. For example, I
was perfectly aware that she was not so truthful as one might be. But
I did not let myself admit that she was not always unconscious of
her own deviations from the truth. I had gained enough experience of
life to learn that lying is practically a universal weakness. So I
did not especially mind it in her, often found it amusing. I had not
then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to
their husbands about big things and little, and that those women who
profess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirections, such as
omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising.
Self-respect, real personal pride, I have discovered in spite of the
reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern development,
is still in embryo; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are
either the most ignorant of ourselves or the most hypocritical.

But back to my acquaintance with my wife’s character. When I told her
we should have to live nearer my work, my new work, than Passaic, she
promptly said:

“Let’s go to Brooklyn.”

“Why not to New York?” said I. “At least until I get thoroughly
trained, I want to be close to the office.”

“But there’s Margot,” said she. “Margot must have a place to play in.
And we couldn’t afford such a place in New York. I can’t let her run
about the streets or go to public schools. She’d pick up all sorts of
low, coarse associates and habits.”

“Then let’s go to some town opposite--across the Hudson. If we can’t
live on Manhattan Island, and I think you’re right about Margot, why,
let’s live where living is cheap. We ought to be saving some money.”

“I hate these Jersey towns,” said Edna petulantly. “I don’t think
Margot would get the right sort of social influences in them.”

As soon as she said “social influences” I should have understood the
whole business. The only person higher up on the social ladder with
whom Edna had been able to scrape intimate acquaintance in Passaic was
a dowdy, tawdry chatterbox of a woman--I forget her name--who talked
incessantly of the fashionable people she knew in Brooklyn--how she had
gone there a stranger, had joined St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, and had
at once become a social favorite, invited to “the very best houses,
my dear; such lovely homes,” and associated with “the most charming
cultured people,” and so on and on--you know the rest of the humbug.

Now, one of the discoveries about my wife which I but half understood
and made light of, had been that she was mad, literally mad, on the
subject of social climbing. That means she was possessed of the disease
imported into this country from England, where it has raged for upward
of half a century--the disease of being bent upon associating by hook
or by crook with people whose strongest desire seems to be not to
associate with you. This plague does not spare the male population--by
no means. But it rages in and ravages the female population almost to
a woman. Our women take incidental interest or no interest in their
homes, in their husbands, in their children. Their hearts are centered
upon social position, and, of course, the money-squandering necessary
to attaining or to keeping it. The women who are “in” spend all their
time, whatever they may seem to be about, in spitting upon and kicking
the faces of the women who are trying to get “in.” The women who are
trying to get “in” spend their whole time in smiling and cringing
and imploring and plotting and, when it seems expedient, threatening
and compelling. Probe to the bottom--if you have acuteness enough,
which you probably haven’t--probe to the bottom any of the present-day
activities of the American woman, I care not what it may be, and you
will discover the bacillus of social position biting merrily away
at her. If she goes to church or to a lecture or a concert--if she
goes calling or stays at home--if she joins a suffrage movement or a
tenement reform propaganda, or refuses to join--if she dresses noisily
or plainly--if she shuns society or seeks it, if she keeps house or
leaves housekeeping to servants, roaches, and mice--if she cares for or
neglects her children--if she pets her husband or displaces him with
another--no matter what she does, it is at the behest of the poison
flowing through brain and vein from the social-position bacillus. She
thinks by doing whatever she does she will somehow make her position
more brilliant or less insecure, or, having no position at all, will
gain one.

And the men? They pay the bills. Sometimes reluctantly, again eagerly;
sometimes ignorantly, again with full knowledge. The men--they pay the
bills.

Now you know better far than I knew at the time why our happy little
family went to Brooklyn, took the house in Bedford Avenue which we
could ill afford if we were to save any money, and joined St. Mary’s.

A couple of years after we were married my wife stopped me when I was
telling her what had happened at the office that day, as was my habit.
“You ought to leave all those things outside when you come home,” said
she.

She had read this in a book somewhere, I guess. It was a new idea to
me. “Why should I?” said I.

“Home is a place for happiness, with all the sordidness shut out,”
explained she. “Those sordid things ought not to touch our life
together.”

This sounded all right. “It seemed to me,” stammered I, apologetically,
“that my career, the way I was getting on, that our bread and butter--
Well, I thought we ought to kind of talk it over together.”

“Oh, I do sympathize with you,” said, or rather quoted, she. “But my
place is to soothe and smooth away the cares of business. You ought to
try not to think of them at home.”

“But what _would_ I think about?” cried I, much perplexed. “Why, my
business is all I’ve got. It’s the most important thing in the world to
us. It means our living. At least that’s the way the thing looks to me.”

“You ought to think at home about the higher side of life--the
intellectual side.”

“But my business _is_ my intellectual side,” I said. “And I can’t for
the life of me see why thinking about things that don’t advance us and
don’t pay the bills is better than thinking about things that do.” It
seemed to me that this looking on my business as something to be left
on the mud-scraper at the entrance indicated a false idea of it got
somewhere. So I added somewhat warmly: “There’s nothing low or bad
about my business.” And that was the truth at the time.

“I don’t know anything about it,” replied she with the gentle patience
of her superior refinement and education. “And I don’t want to know.
Those things don’t interest me. And I think, Godfrey”--very sweetly,
with her cheek against mine--“the reason husbands and wives often grow
apart is that the husband gives his whole mind to his business and
doesn’t develop the higher side of his nature--the side that appeals to
a woman and satisfies her.”

This touched my sense of humor mildly. “My father gives his mind to one
of those high sides,” said I, “and we nearly starved to death.”

“Your father!” exclaimed she in derisive disgust.

“My father,” said I cheerfully, “he does nothing but read, talk, and
think politics.”

“Politics! _That_ isn’t on the higher side. Women don’t care anything
about _that_.”

“Well, what do they care about?” I inquired.

“About music and literature--and those artistic things.”

“Oh, those things are all right,” said I. “But I don’t see that it
takes any more brains or any better brains to paint a picture or sing a
song or write a novel than it does to run a railroad--or to plan one.
If you’d try to understand business, dear,” I urged, “you might find
it as interesting and as intellectual as anything that doesn’t help us
make a living. Anyhow, I’ve simply got to give my brains to my work.
You go ahead and attend to the higher side for the family. I’ll stick
to the job that butters the bread and keeps the rain off.”

She was patient with me, but I saw she didn’t approve. However, as I
knew she’d approve still less if I failed to provide for her and the
two young ones--there were two at that time--I let the matter drop and
held to the common-sense course. I hadn’t the faintest notion of the
seriousness of that little talk of ours. And it was well I hadn’t, for
to have made her realize her folly I’d have had to start in and educate
her--uneducate her and then reëducate her. I don’t blame the women. I
feel sorry for them. When I hear them talk about the lack of sympathy
between themselves and American men, about the low ideals and the
sordid talk the men indulge in, how dull it is, how different from the
inspiring, cultured talk a woman hears among the aristocrats abroad,
said aristocrats being supported in helpless idleness throughout their
useless lives, often by hard-earned American dollars--when I hear this
pitiful balderdash from fair lips, I grow sad. The American woman
fancies she is growing away from the American man. The truth is that
while she is sitting still, playing with a lapful of the artificial
flowers of fake culture, like a poor doodle-wit, the American man is
growing away from her. She knows nothing of value; she can do nothing
of value. She has nothing to offer the American man but her physical
charms, for he has no time or taste for playing with artificial flowers
when the world’s important work is to be done. So the poor creature
grows more isolated, more neglected, less respected, and less sought,
except in a physical way. And all the while she hugs to her bosom the
delusion that she is the great soul high sorrowful. The world moves;
many are the penalties for the nation or the race or the sex that does
not move with it, or does not move quickly enough. I feel sorry for the
American woman--unless she has a father who will leave her rich or a
husband who will give her riches.

I feel some of my readers saying that I must have been most unfortunate
in the women I have known. Perhaps. But may it not be that those
commiserating readers have been rarely fortunate in their feminine
acquaintances?--or in lack of insight?

Now you probably not only know why we went to Brooklyn, but also
what we did after we got there. I have not forgotten my promise to
gentle reader. I shall not linger many moments in Brooklyn. True, it
is superior to Passaic, at least to the part of Passaic in which I
constrained gentle reader to tarry a minute or two. But it is still far
from the promised heights.

My wife owes a vast deal to Brooklyn. As she haughtily ignores the
debt, would deny it if publicly charged, I shall pay it for her.
Brooklyn was her finishing school. It made her what she is.

In the last year or so we spent in Passaic there had been, as I have
hinted, a marked outward change in all three of us. The least, or
rather the least abrupt, change had been in me. Associated in business
with a more prosperous and better-dressed and better-educated class of
men, I had gradually picked up the sort of knowledge a man needs to fit
himself for the inevitably changing social conditions accompanying a
steady advance in material prosperity. I was as quick to learn one kind
of useful thing as another. And just as I learned how to fill larger
and larger positions and how to make money out of the chances that
come to a man situated where money is to be made, so I learned how to
dress like a man of the better class, how to speak a less slangy and
a less ungrammatical English, how to use my mind in thinking and in
discussing a thousand subjects not directly related to my business.

If my wife had been interested in any of the important things of the
world, I could have been of the greatest assistance to her and she
to me. And we should have grown ever closer together in sympathetic
companionship. But although she had a good mind--a superior mind--she
cared about nothing but the things that interest foolish women and
still more foolish men--for a man who cares about splurge and show and
social position and such nonsense is less excusable, is more foolish,
than a woman of the same sort. Women have the excuse of lack of serious
occupation, but what excuse has a man? Still, she was not idle--not for
a minute. She was, on the contrary, in her way as busy as I. From time
to time she would say to me enigmatically: “You don’t appreciate it,
but I am preparing myself to help you fill the station your business
ability will win us a chance at.” It seemed to me that I was doing
that alone. For what was necessary to fill that station but higher and
higher skill as a man of affairs?

When we had made our entry in Brooklyn and had seated ourselves in
the state in Bedford Avenue which she had decided for, she showed
that she felt immensely proud of herself. We took the house furnished
throughout--nicely furnished in a substantial way, for it had been the
home of one of the old Brooklyn mercantile families.

“It’s good enough to start with,” said she, casting a critical glance
round the sober, homelike dining room. “I shan’t make any changes till
I look about me.”

“We couldn’t be better off,” said I. “Everything is perfectly
comfortable.” And in fact neither she nor I had ever before known what
comfort was. Looking at that house--merely looking at it and puzzling
out the uses of the various things to us theretofore unknown--was about
as important in the way of education as learning to read is to a child.

“It’s good enough for Brooklyn,” said she. She regarded me with her
patient, tender expression of the superior intelligence. “You haven’t
much imagination or ambition, Godfrey,” she went on. “But fortunately
_I_ have. And do be careful not to betray us before the servants I’m
engaging.”

The show part of the house continued to look about as it had when we
took possession. But the living part went to pieces rapidly. We had
many servants. We spent much money--so much that, if I had not been
speculating in various ways, we should have soon gone under. But the
results were miserably poor. My wife left everything to her servants
and devoted herself to her social career. The ex-Brooklyn society woman
at Passaic had not deceived her. No sooner had she joined St. Mary’s
than she began to have friends--friends of a far higher social rank
than she had ever even seen at close range before. They were elegant
people indeed--the wives of the heads of departments in big stores, the
families of bank officers and lawyers and doctors. There were even a
few rather rich people. My wife was in ecstasy for a year or two. And
she improved rapidly in looks, in dress, in manners, in speech, in all
ways except in disposition and character.

Except in disposition and character. As we grow older and rise in the
world, there is always a deterioration both in disposition and in
character. A man’s disposition grows sharper through dealing with,
and having to deal sharply with, incompetence. The character tends
to harden as he is forced to make the unpleasant and often not too
scrupulous moves necessary to getting himself forward toward success.
Also, the way everyone tries to use a successful man makes him more and
more acute in penetrating to the real motives of his fellow beings,
more and more inclined to take up men for what he can get out of them
and drop them when he has squeezed out all the advantage--in brief,
to treat them precisely as they treat him. But the whole object in
having a home, a wife, a family, is defeated if the man has not there
a something that checks the tendencies to cynicism and coldness which
active life not merely encourages but even compels.

There was no occasion for Edna’s becoming vixenish and hard. It was
altogether due to the idiotic and worthless social climbing. She had
a swarm of friends, yet not a single friend. She cultivated people
socially, and they cultivated her, not for the natural and kindly and
elevating reasons, but altogether for the detestable purposes of that
ghastly craze for social position. Edna was bitter against me for a
long time, never again became fully reconciled, because I soon flatly
refused to have anything to do with it.

“They will think there’s something wrong about you, and about me, if
you don’t come with me,” pleaded she.

“I need my strength for my business,” said I. “And what do I care
whether they think well or ill of me? They don’t give us any money.”

“You are _so_ sordid!” cried she. “Sometimes I’m almost tempted to give
up, and not try to be somebody and to make somebodies of Margot and
you.”

“I wish you would,” said I. “Why shouldn’t we live quietly and mind our
own business and be happy?”

“How fortunate it is for Margot that she has a mother with ambition and
pride!”

“Well--no matter. But please do get another cook. This one is, if
anything, worse than the last--except when we have company.”

We were forever changing cooks. The food that came on our table was
something atrocious. I heard the same complaint from all my married
associates at the office, even from the higher officials who were
rich men and lived in great state. They, too, had American wives. In
the markets and shops I saw as I passed along all sorts of attractive
things to eat, and of real quality. I wondered why we never had those
things on our table. Heaven knows we spent money enough. The time came
when I got a clew to the mystery.

One day Edna said: “I’ve been doing my housekeeping altogether by
telephone. I think I’ll stop it, except on rainy days and when I don’t
feel well.”

By telephone! I laughed to myself. No wonder we had poor stuff and
paid the highest prices for it. I thought a while, then to satisfy
my curiosity began to ask questions, very cautiously, for Edna was
extremely touchy, as we all are in matters where in our hearts we know
we are in the wrong. “Do you remember what kind of range we have in our
kitchen?” I asked.

“I?” exclaimed she disgustedly. “Certainly not. I haven’t been down to
the kitchen since we first moved into this house. I’ve something better
to do than to meddle with the servants.”

“Naturally,” said I soothingly. And I didn’t let her see how her
confession amused me. What if a man tried to run his business in that
fashion! And ordering by telephone! Why, it was an invitation to the
tradespeople to swindle us in every way. But I said nothing.

As usually either it was bad weather or Edna was not feeling well, or
was in a rush to keep some social engagement, the ordering for the
house continued to be done by telephone, when it was not left entirely
to the discretion of the servants. One morning it so happened that she
and I left the house at the same time. Said she:

“I’m on my way to do the marketing. It’s a terrible nuisance, and I
know so little about those things. But it’s coming to be regarded as
fashionable for a woman to do her own marketing. Some of the best
families--people with their own carriages and servants in livery--some
of the swellest ladies in Brooklyn do it now. It’s a fad from across
the river.”

“You must be careful not to overtax yourself,” said I.

And I said it quite seriously, for in those days of my innocence I was
worried about her, thought her a poor overworked angel, was glad I had
the money to relieve her from the worst tasks and to leave her free to
amuse herself and to take care of her health! I had not yet started in
the direction of ridding myself of the masculine delusion that woman
is a delicate creature by nature if she happens to be a lady--and of
course I knew my Edna was a lady through and through. It was many a
year before I learned the truth--why ladies are always ailing and why
they can do nothing but wear fine clothes and sit in parlors or in
carriages when they are not sitting at indigestible food, and amuse
themselves and pity themselves for being condemned to live with coarse,
uninteresting American men.

Yes, I was sincere in urging her to take care how she adopted so
laborious a fad as doing her own marketing. She went on:

“If I had a carriage it wouldn’t be so bad.”

She said this sweetly enough and with no suggestion of reproach. Just
the sigh of a lady’s soul at the hardness of life’s conditions. But
I, loving her, felt as if I were somehow to blame. “You shall have a
carriage before many years,” said I. “That’s one of the things I’ve
been working for.”

She gave me a look that made me feel proud I had her to live for. “I
hope I’ll be here to enjoy it,” sighed she.

I walked sad and silent by her side, profoundly impressed and depressed
by that hint as to her feeble health. I know now it was sheer pretense
with her, the more easily to manage me and to cover her shortcomings. I
ought to have realized it then. But what man does? She certainly did
not look ill, for she was not one of those who were always stuffing
themselves at teas and lunches, and talked of a walk of five blocks
as hard exercise! She had learned how to keep health and beauty. What
intelligence it shows, that she was able to grasp so difficult a
matter; and what splendid persistence that she was able to carry out a
mode of life so disagreeable to self-indulgence. If her intelligence
and her persistence could have been turned to use! Presently we were
at the butcher shop. I paused in the doorway while she engaged in her
arduous labor. Here is the conversation:

“Good morning, Mr. Toomey.” (Very gracious; the lady speaking to the
trades person.)

“Good morning, ma’am.” (Fat little butcher touching cracked and
broken-nailed hand to hat respectfully.)

“That lamb you sent yesterday was very tough.”

“Sorry, ma’am. But those kind of things will happen, you know.” (Most
flatteringly humble of manner.)

“Yes, I know. Do your best. I’m sure you try to please. Send me--let me
see--say, two chickens for broiling. You’ll pick out nice ones?”

“Yes, indeed, ma’am. I’ll attend to it myself.”

“And something for the servants. You know what they like.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll attend to it.”

“And you’ll not overcharge, will you?”

“I, ma’am? I’ve been dealing with ladies for twenty years, right here,
ma’am. I never have overcharged.”

“I know. All the ladies tell me you’re honest. I feel safe with you.
Let me see, there were some other things. But I’m in a hurry. The cook
will tell your boy when he takes what I’ve ordered. You’ll be sure to
give me the best?”

“I’d not dare send anything else to _you_, ma’am.” (Groveling.)

A gracious smile, a gracious nod, and Edna rejoined me. Innocent as
I was, and under the spell that blinds the American man where the
American woman is concerned, I could not but be upset by this example
of how our house was run--an example that all in an instant brought
to my mind and enabled me to understand a score, a hundred similar
examples. There was I, toiling away to make money, earning every dollar
by the hardest kind of mental labor, struggling to rise, to make our
fortune, and each day my wife was tossing carelessly out of the windows
into the street a large part of my earnings. I did not know what to do
about it.

Edna’s next stop was at the grocer’s. I had not the courage to halt
and listen. I knew it would be a repetition of the grotesque interview
with the butcher. And she undoubtedly a clever woman--alert, improving.
What a mystery! I went on to my office. That day, without giving my
acquaintances there an inkling of what was in my mind, I made inquiries
into how their wives spent the money that went for food--the most
important item in the spending of incomes under ten or twelve thousand
a year. In every case the wife or the mother did the marketing by
telephone. All the men except one took the ignorance and incompetence
of the management of the household expenses as a matter of course. One
man grumbled a little. I remember he said: “No wonder it’s hard for the
men to save anything. The women waste most of it on the table, paying
double prices for poor stuff. I tell you, Loring, the American woman
is responsible for the dishonesty of American commercial life. They
are always nagging at the man for more and more money to spend, and in
spending it they tempt the merchants, the clerks, their own servants,
everyone within range, to become swindlers and thieves.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said I. “You’re a pessimist. The American woman is all
right. Where’d you find her equal for intelligence and charm?”

“She may be intelligent,” said he. “She doesn’t use it on anything
worth while, except roping in some poor sucker to put up _for_ her and
to put up _with_ her. And she may have charm, but not for a man who has
cut his matrimonial eye teeth.”

I laughed at Van Dyck--that was my grumbling friend’s name. And I soon
dropped the subject from my mind. It has never been my habit to waste
time in thinking about things when the thinking could not possibly
lead anywhere. You may say I ought to have interfered, forced my wife
to come to her senses, compelled her to learn her business. Which
shows that you know little about the nature of the American woman.
If I had taken that course, she would have hated me, she would have
done no better, and she would have scorned me as a sordid haggler over
small sums of money who was trying to spoil with the vulgarities of
commercial life the beauties of the home. No, I instinctively knew
enough not to interfere.

       *       *       *       *       *

But let us take a long leap forward to the day when I became president
of the railroad, having made myself a rich man by judicious gambling
with eight thousand dollars loaned me by father Wheatlands. He was a
rich man, and in the way to become very rich, and he had no heir but
Edna after the drowning of her two brothers under a sailboat in Newark
Bay. Margot was in a fashionable school over in New York. My wife and
I, still a young couple and she beautiful--my wife and I were as happy
as any married couple can be where they let each other alone and the
husband gives the wife all the money she wishes and leaves her free to
spend it as she pleases.

When I told her of my good fortune, and the sudden and large betterment
of our finances, she said with a curious lighting of the eyes, a
curious strengthening of the chin:

“Now--for New York!”

“New York?” said I. “What does that mean?”

“We are going to live in New York,” replied she.

“But we do live in New York. Brooklyn is part of New York.”

“Legally I suppose it is,” replied she. “But morally and æsthetically,
socially, and in every other civilized way, my dear Godfrey, it is part
of the backwoods. I can hardly wait to get away.”

“Why, I thought you were happy here!” exclaimed I, marveling, used
though I was to her keeping her own counsel strictly about the matters
that most interested her. “You’ve certainly acted as if you loved it.”

“I didn’t _mind_ it at first,” conceded she. “But for two or three
years I have _loathed_ it, and everybody that lives in it.”

I was amazed at this last sally. “Oh, come now, Edna,” cried I, “you’ve
got lots of friends here--lots and lots of them.”

I was thinking of the dozen or so women whom she called and who called
her by the first name, women she was with early and late. Women she was
daily playing bridge with-- Bridge! I have a friend who declares that
bridge is ruining the American home, and I see his point, but I think
he doesn’t look deep enough. If it weren’t bridge it would be something
else. Bridge is a striking example, but only a single example, of the
results of feminine folly and idleness that all flow from the same
cause. However, let us go back to my talk with Edna. She met my protest
in behalf of her friends with a contemptuous:

“I don’t know a soul who isn’t _frightfully_ common.”

“They’re the same sort of people we are.”

“Not the same sort that _I_ am,” declared she proudly. “And not the
sort Margot and you are going to be. You’ll see. You don’t know about
these things. But fortunately I do.”

“You don’t seriously mean that you want to leave this splendid old
house----”

“Splendid? It’s hardly fit to live in. Of course, we had to endure it
while we were poor and obscure. But now it won’t do at all.”

“And go away from all these people you’ve worked so hard to get in
with--all these friends--go away among strangers. _I_ don’t mind. But
what would _you_ do? How’d you pass the days?”

“These vulgar people bore me to death,” declared she. “I’ve been
advancing, if you have stood still. Thank God, _I’ve_ got ambition.”

“Heaven knows they’ve never been _my_ friends,” said I. “But I must say
they seem nice enough people, as people go. What’s the matter with ’em?”

“They’re common,” said she with the languor of one explaining when he
feels he will not be understood. “They’re tiresome.”

“I’ll admit they’re tiresome,” said I. “That’s why I’ve kept away from
them. But I doubt if they’re more tiresome than people generally. The
fact is, my dear, people are all tiresome. That’s why they can’t amuse
themselves or each other, but have to be amused--have to hire the
clever people of all sorts to entertain them. Instead of asking people
here to bore us and to be bored, why not send them seats at a theater
or orders for a first-class meal at a first-class restaurant?”

“I suppose you think that’s funny,” said my wife. She had no sense of
humor, and the suggestion of a jest irritated her.

“Yes, it does strike me as funny,” I admitted. “But there’s sense in
it, too.... I’m sure you don’t want to abandon your friends here.
Why make ourselves uncomfortable all over again?” I took a serious
persuasive tone. “Edna, we’re beginning to get used to the more stylish
way of living we took up when we left Passaic and came here to live. Is
it sensible to branch out again into the untried and the unknown? Will
we be any wiser or any happier? You can shine as the big star now in
this circle of friends. You like to run things socially. Here’s your
chance.”

“How could I get any pleasure out of running things socially in St.
Mary’s?” demanded she. “I’ve outgrown it. It seems vulgar and common to
me. It is vulgar and common.”

“What does that mean?” I asked innocently.

“If you don’t understand, I can’t tell you,” replied she tartly.
“Surely you must see that your wife and your daughter are superior to
these people round here.”

“I don’t compare my wife and daughter with other people,” said I. “To
me they’re superior to anybody and everybody else in the world. I often
wish we lived ’way off in the country somewhere. I’m sure we’d be
happier with only each other. We’re putting on too much style to suit
me, even now.”

“I see you living in the country,” laughed she. “You’d come down about
once a week or month.”

I couldn’t deny the truth in her accusation. I felt it ought to have
been that my wife and I were so sympathetic, so interested in the same
things, that we were absorbed in each other. But the facts were against
it. We really had almost nothing in common. I admired her beauty and
also her intelligence and energy, though I thought them misdirected.
She, I think, liked me in the primitive way of a woman with a man. And
she admired my ability to make money, though she thought it rather a
low form of intellectual excellence. However, as she found it extremely
useful, she admired me for it in a way. I have seen much of the
aristocratic temperament that despises money, but I have yet to see an
aristocrat who wasn’t greedier than the greediest money-grubber--and
I must say it is hard to conceive anything lower than the spirit
that grabs the gift and despises the giver. But then, some day, when
thinking is done more clearly, we shall all see that aristocracy and
its spirit is the lowest level of human nature, is simply a deep-seated
survival of barbarism. However, Edna and I appealed to and satisfied
each other in one way; beyond that our congeniality abruptly ended.
Looking back, I see now that talking _with_ her was never a pleasure,
nor was it a pleasure to her to talk _with_ me. I irritated her; she
bored me.

How rarely in our country do you find a woman who is an interesting
companion for a man, except as female and male pair or survey the
prospect of pairing? And it matters not what line of activity the man
is taking--business, politics, literature, art, philanthropy even. The
women are eternally talking about their superiority to the business
man; but do they get along any better with an artist--unless he is
cultivating the woman for the sake of an order for a picture? Is there
any line of serious endeavor in which an American woman is interesting
and helpful and companionable to a man? I can get along very well with
an artist. I have one friend who is a writer of novels, another who
is a writer of plays, a third who is a sculptor. They are interested
in my work, and I in theirs. We talk together on a basis of equal
interest, and we give each other ideas. Can any American woman say the
same? I don’t inquire anticipating a negative answer. I simply put the
question. But I suspect the answer would put a pin in the bubble of
the American woman’s pretense of superior culture. She is fooled by
her vanity, I fear, and by her sex attraction, and by the influence of
the money her despised father or husband gives her. There’s a reason
why America is notoriously the land of bachelor husbands--and that
reason is not the one the women and foreign fortune hunters assert.
The American man lets the case go by default against him, not because
he couldn’t answer, nor yet because he is polite, but _because he is
indifferent_.

But my wife was talking about her projected assault upon New York. “I
really must be an extraordinary woman,” said she. “How I have fought
all these years to raise myself, with you dragging at me to keep me
down.”

“I?” protested her unhappy husband. “Why, dear, I’ve never opposed you
in any way. And I’ve tried to do what I could to help you. You must
admit the money’s been useful.”

“Oh, you’ve never been mean about money,” conceded she. “But you don’t
sympathize with a single one of my ideals.”

“I want you to have whatever you want,” said I. “And anything I can do
to get it for you, or to help you get it, I stand ready to do.”

“Yes, I know, Godfrey, dear,” said she, giving me a long hug and a
kiss. “No woman ever had a more generous husband than I have.”

I naturally attached more importance to this burst of enthusiasm then
than I do now. And it is as well that I was thus simple-minded. How
little pleasure we would get, to be sure, if, when we are praised
or loved by anybody because we do that person a kindness, we paused
to analyze and saw the shallow selfishness of such praise or such
love. After all, it’s only human nature to like those who do as we
ask them and to dislike those who don’t; and I am not quarreling with
human nature--or with any other of the unchangeable conditions of the
universe. My own love for Edna--what was it but the natural result of
my getting what I wanted from her, all I wanted? I really troubled
myself little about her incompetence and extravagance and craze for
social position. No doubt to this day I should be-- But I am again
anticipating.

“Generous? Nonsense,” said I. “It isn’t generous to try to make you
happy. That’s my one chance of being happy myself. A busy man’s got to
have peace at home. If he hasn’t he’s like a soldier attacked rear and
front at the same time.”

“I know you don’t care where we live,” she went on. “And for Margot’s
sake we’ve simply got to move to New York.”

“Oh, you want her to stay at home of nights, instead of living at the
school. Why didn’t you speak of that first?”

“Not at all,” cried she. “How slow you are! No; for the present, even
if we do live in New York, I think it best for Margot to keep on
living at the school. She’s barely started there. I want her training
to be thorough. And while I’m learning as fast as I can, I am not
competent to teach her. I know, of course. But I haven’t had the chance
to practice. So I can’t teach her.”

“Teach her what?” I inquired.

“To be a lady--a practical, expert lady,” replied Edna. “That’s what
she’s going to Miss Ryper’s school for. And when she comes out she’ll
be the equal of girls who have generations of culture and breeding
behind them.”

“God bless me!” cried I, laughing. “This Ryper woman must be a wonder.”

“She is,” declared Edna. “It was a great favor, her letting Margot into
the school.”

“Oh, I remember,” said I. “She couldn’t do it until I got two of the
directors of the road to insist on it. But I guess that was merely a
bluff of hers to squeeze us for a few hundreds extra.”

“Not at all,” Edna assured me. “You are _so_ ignorant, Godfrey. Please
do be careful not to say those coarse things before people.”

“As you please,” said I, cheerfully, for I was used to this kind of
calling down. “All the same, the Ryper lady is hot for the dough.”

Edna shivered. She detested slang--continued to detest and avoid it
even after she learned that it was fashionable. “Miss Ryper guards
her list of pupils as their mothers guard their visiting lists,” said
she. “But now she likes Margot. The dear child has been elected to
the most exclusive fraternity. Every girl in it has to wear hand-made
underclothes and has to have had at least a father, a grandfather, and
a great grandfather.” Edna laughed with pride at her own cleverness
before she went on. “Margot came to me when she was proposed, and cried
as if her little heart would break. She said she didn’t know anything
about her grandfather and great grandfather. But I hadn’t forgotten to
arrange that. I think of everything.”

“Oh, that was easy enough,” said I. “Your grandfather was a tailor and
mine was in the grocery business like father.”

Edna looked round in terror. “Sh!” she exclaimed. “Servants always
listen.” She went to the door--we were in the small upstairs sitting
room--opened it suddenly, looked into the hall, closed the door,
and returned to a chair nearer the lounge on which I was stretched
comfortably smoking.

“What’s the matter?” said I.

“No one was there,” said she. “Haven’t I told you never to speak of--of
those horrible things?”

“But Margot----”

“Margot doesn’t know. She must _never_ know! Poor child, she is so
sensitive, it would make her ill.”

I lapsed into gloomy silence. I had not liked the way Edna had been
acting about her parents and mine ever since we came to Brooklyn. But I
had been busy, and was averse to meddling.

“I gave Margot for the benefit of the girls a genealogy I’ve gotten
up,” she went on. “You know all genealogies are more or less faked, and
I’ve no doubt hers is every bit as genuine as those of half the girls
over there. I fixed ours so that it would take a lot of inquiry to
expose it. And Margot got into the fraternity.”

“Are the hand-made underclothes fake too?” said I.

“Oh, no. _They_ had to be genuine. I’ve never let Margot wear any other
kind since I learned about those things. There’s nothing that gives a
child such a sense of ladylikeness and superiority as to feel she’s
dressed right from the skin out.”

“Well, school’s a different sort of a place from what it was in our
day,” said I. The picture my wife had drawn amused me, but I somehow
did not exactly like it. My mind was too little interested in the
direction of the things that absorbed Edna for me to be able to put
into any sort of shape the thoughts vaguely moving about in the
shadows. “I’ll bet,” I went on, “poor Margot doesn’t have as good a
time as we had.”

“She’d hate that kind of a time,” said Edna.

I laughed and laid my hand in her lap. Her hand stole into it. I
watched her lovely face--the sweet, dreamy expression. “What are you
thinking?” said I softly, hopeful of romance--what _I_ call romance.

“I was thinking how low and awful we used to be,” replied she, “and how
splendidly we are getting away from it.”

I laughed, for I was used to cold water on my romance. “All the same,”
insisted I, “Margot would envy us if she knew.”

“She’d hate it,” Edna repeated. “She’s going to be an improvement on
_us_.”

“Not on you,” I protested.

She looked at me with tender sparkling eyes, the same lovely
light-brown eyes that had fascinated me as a boy. Brown eyes for a
woman, always! But they must not be of the heavy commonplace shades of
brown like a deer’s or a cow’s. They must have light shades in them,
tints verging toward blue or green. Said Edna: “I’m doing my best to
fit myself. And before I get through, Godfrey, I think I’ll go far.”

“Sure you will,” said I, with no disposition to turn the cold douche
on _her_ kind of romance. What an idiot I was about her, to be sure! I
went on: “And I’ll see that you have the money to grease the toboggan
slide and make the going easy.”

She talked on happily and confidingly: “Yes, it’s best to leave Margot
another year as a boarder at Miss Ryper’s. By that time we’ll be
established over in New York, and we’ll have a proper place for her to
receive her friends. And perhaps we’ll have a few friends of our own.”

“Swell friends, eh?”

“Please don’t say swell, dear,” corrected she. “It’s such a common
word.”

“I’ve heard _you_ say it,” I protested.

“But I don’t any more. I’ve learned better. And now I’ve taught you
better.”

“Anything you like. Anybody you like,” said I. When Edna and I were
together, with our hands clasped, I was always completely under her
spell. She could do what she pleased with me, so long, of course, as
she didn’t interfere in my end of the firm. And I may add that she
never did; she hadn’t the faintest notion what I was about. They say
there are thousands of American women in the cities who know their
husbands’ places of business only as street and telephone numbers.
My wife was one of that kind. Oh, yes, from the standpoint of those
who insist that business and home should be separate, we were a model
couple.

“There’s another matter I want to talk over with you, Godfrey,” she
went on.

“That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing,” said I. “It goes so well with
your skin and your hair.”

She was delighted, and was moved to rise and look at herself in the
long mirror. She gave herself an approving glance, but not more
approving than what she saw merited. A long, slim beautiful figure;
a dress that set it off. A lovely young tip-tilted face, the face of
a girl with fresh, clear eyes and skin, the whitest, evenest sharp
teeth--and such hair!--such quantities of hair attractively arranged.

From herself she glanced at me. “No one’d ever think what we came from,
would they?” said she fondly and proudly. “Oh, Godfrey, it makes me
so happy that we _look_ the part. We belong where we’re going. The
good blood away back in the family is coming out. And Margot-- I’ve
always called her the little duchess--and she looks it and feels it.”
Dreamily, “Maybe she will be some day.”

“Why, she’s a baby,” cried I. For I didn’t like to see that my baby was
growing up.

“She’s nearly fourteen,” said Edna. She was looking at herself again.
“Would you ever think _I_ had a daughter fourteen years old?” said
she, making a laughing, saucy face at me.

I got up and kissed her. “You don’t look as old as you did when I
married you,” said I, and it was only a slight exaggeration.

When we sat again, she was snuggled into my lap with her head against
my shoulder. She was immensely fond of being petted. They say this is
no sign of a loving nature, that cats, the least loving of all pets,
are fondest of petting. I have no opinion on the subject.

“What was it you wanted to talk about?” said I. “Money?”

“No, indeed,” laughed she.

“I supposed so, as that’s the only matter in which I have any influence
in this family.”

“Come to think of it,” said she, “it _is_ money--in a way. It’s
about--our parents.” She gave a deep sigh. “Godfrey, they hang over me
like a nightmare!”

Her tragic seriousness amused me. “Oh, cheer up,” said I, kissing her.
“They certainly don’t fit in with our stylishness. But they’re away off
there in Passaic, and bother us as little as we bother them. The truth
is, Edna, we’ve not acted right. We’ve been selfish--spending all our
prosperity on ourselves. Of course, they’ve got everything they really
want, but--well----”

“That’s exactly it,” said she eagerly. “My conscience has been hurting
me. We ought to--to-- It wouldn’t cost much to make them perfectly
comfortable--so they’d not have to work--and could get away from the
grocery--and the--and the”--she hesitated before saying “father’s
business,” as if nerving herself to pronounce words of shame. And when
she did finally force out the evading “father’s business,” it was with
such an accent that I couldn’t help laughing outright.

“Undertaking’s a good-paying business,” said I. “We certainly ought to
be grateful to it. It supplied the eight thousand dollars that gave me
the chance to buy half the rolling mill. And you know the rolling mill
was the start of our fortune.”

“Do you think father could be induced to retire?” she asked.

“Never,” said I. “Your father’s a rich man, for Passaic. He’s got two
hundred thousand at least hived away in tenements that pay from twenty
to thirty-five per cent. And his business now brings in ten to fifteen
thousand a year straight along.”

“You can make _your_ father retire?”

I laughed. “Poor dad! I’ve been keeping him from being retired by the
sheriff. He’s squeezing out a bare living. He’d be delighted to stop
and have all his time for talking politics and religion.”

“You could buy them a nice place a little way out in the country, on
some quiet road. I’m sure your mother and your old maid sister would
love it.”

“Perhaps,” said I. “If it wasn’t _too_ quiet.”

“But it must be quiet. And we’ll induce my father and mother to buy a
place near by.”

“Your father’ll not give up the business.”

“I’ve thought it all out,” said Edna, whose mind was equal to whatever
task she gave it. “You must get some one to offer him a price he simply
can’t refuse, and make a condition that he shall not go into business
again. Aren’t those things done?”

I was somewhat surprised, but not much, at the knowledge of business
this displayed. “Why!--Why!” laughed I. “And you pretend to know
nothing about business!”

She was in a sensible, loving mood that day. So she said with a quiet
little laugh: “I make it a point to know anything that’s useful to me.
I don’t know much about business. Why should I bother with it? I’ve got
confidence in you.”

It was not the first time I had got a peep into her mind and had
seen how she looked on everyone, including me, as a wheel in her
machine, and never interfered unless the wheel didn’t work to suit
her. I laughed delightedly. There was something charmingly feminine,
thought I, about this point of view so upside down. “Yes, I guess your
father’ll jump for the bait you suggest,” said I. “But why disturb him?
He loves his undertaking.”

She shivered.

“And he’ll be miserable idling about.”

“Oh, I guess he’ll get along all right,” said she, with sarcasm and
with truth. “He’ll devote himself to suing his tenants and counting his
money.... Godfrey, you simply must get those people in Passaic out of
our way. I’ve been a little nervous over here, though I knew that none
of these dreadful people we associate with has anything better in the
way of family than us, and some have a lot worse. Oh, it’s _frightful_
to have parents one’s ashamed of!”

I think I blushed. I’m sure I looked away to avoid seeing her
expression. “It’s frightful to be ashamed of one’s parents,” said I.

“Now don’t be hypocritical,” cried she. “You know perfectly well you
are ashamed of your parents, as I am of mine.”

“I’ll admit,” said I, “that if they showed up at the office, I’d be
a bit upset and would feel apologetic. But I’m ashamed of myself for
feeling that way.”

“If you only realized about things,” said she, which was her phrase for
hitting at me as lacking in refined instincts, “you’d not be ashamed of
yourself, but would frankly suffer. They are a disgrace to us.”

“They’re honest people, well meaning, and as good as the best in every
essential way,” said I. “Believe me, Edna, the fault isn’t in them.
It’s in us. Suppose you found some day that Margot was ashamed of you
and me.”

“But she’ll not be,” retorted Edna. “I for one will see to it that she
has no cause to be anything but proud.”

I couldn’t but admit that there were two sides to the problem of our
parents. It was shameful to be ashamed of them. But it was also human.
I couldn’t--and can’t--utterly damn in Edna a fault, a vulgar weakness,
I myself had, and almost everyone I knew. No doubt, gentle reader,
you are scandalized and disgusted. But one of my objects in relating
this whole story is to scandalize and to disgust you. You have had too
much consideration at the hands of writers--you and your hypocritical
virtues and your hysterical nerves. If you are an American, you are
probably far in advance of your parents in worldly knowledge, in
education, in every way except perhaps manly and womanly self-respect.
For along with your progress has come an infection of snobbishness and
toadyism that seems in some mysterious way inseparable from higher
civilization. So be shocked and disgusted with Edna and me, and don’t
turn your hypocritical eyes inward on your own secret thoughts and
actions about your own humble parents. Above all, don’t learn from
this horrifying episode a decenter mode of thinking and feeling--_and_
acting.

“We must get them out of the way before we move to New York,” said
Edna. “Ever since Margot began at Mrs. Ryper’s I’ve been on pins and
needles. You don’t know how malicious fashionable people are. Why, some
of them who have nothing to do might at any time run out to Passaic and
see for themselves.”

Edna was sitting up in my lap, gazing at me with wide harassed-looking
eyes. I burst out laughing. “They might take a camera along, and get
some snapshots,” I suggested.

Edna’s face contracted with horror and her form grew limp and weak.
“My God!” she cried. “So they might. Godfrey, we must attend to it at
once.”




III


I have never been able to come to a satisfactory verdict as to the
intelligence of the human race. Is it stupid, or is it, rather,
sluggish? Is it unable to think, or does it refuse to think? Does it
believe the follies it pretends to believe and usually acts upon, or is
it the victim of its own willful prejudices and hypocrisies? Never have
I decided that a certain man or woman was practically witless, but that
he or she has confounded me by saying or doing something indicating
shrewdness or even wisdom.

The women are especially difficult to judge. Take Edna, for example.

It was impossible to interest her in anything worth while. But as to
the things in which she was interested, none could have thought more
clearly or keenly, or could have acted with more vigor and effect. I
have often made serious blunders--inexcusable blunders--in managing
my own affairs. To go no further, my management of my family would
have convicted me of imbecility before any court not made up of
good-natured, indifferent, woman-worshiping, woman-despising American
husbands. Yes, I have made the stupidest blunders in all creation. But
I cannot recall a single notable blunder made by Edna in the matters
which alone she deemed worthy of her attention. She decided what she
wanted. She moved upon it by the best route, whether devious or direct
or a combination of the two. And she always got it.

You may say her success was due to the fact that her objects were
trivial. But if you will think a moment, you will appreciate that a
thing’s triviality does not necessarily make it easy to attain. As much
energy and skill may be shown in winning a sham battle as in winning a
real. Still, I suppose minds are cast in molds of various sizes, and
one cast in a small mold can deal only with the small. And I guess
that, from whatever cause, the minds of women are of diverse kinds of
smaller molds. Perhaps this is the result of bad education. Perhaps
better education will correct it. I do not know. I can speak only of
what is--of Edna as she is and always has been.

Having made up her mind to fell the genealogical tree, that an
artificial one might be stood up in its place, she lost no time in
getting into action.

It was on the Sunday following our talk--the earliest possible
day--that she took me for the first visit we had made our parents
in nearly three years. We had sent them presents. We had written
them letters. We had received painfully composed and ungrammatical
replies--these received both for Edna and myself at my office, because
she feared the servants would pry into periodically arriving exhibits
of illiteracy. We had written them of coming and bringing Margot with
us. We had received suggestions of their coming to see us, which Edna
had evaded by such excuses as that we were moving or that she or
Margot was not well or that the cook had abruptly deserted. The world
outside Passaic was a vague place to our old fathers and mothers. Their
own immediate affairs kept them busy. So with no sense of deliberate
alienation on their side and small and mildly intermittent sense of it
on our side, the months and the years passed without our seeing one
another.

Edna announced to me the intended visit only an hour before we started.
It was a habit of hers--a clever habit, too--never to take anyone into
her confidence about her plans until the right moment--that is, the
moment when execution was so near at hand that discussion would seem
futile. At a quarter before nine on that Sunday morning she said:

“Don’t dress for church. This is a good day to make that trip to
Passaic.”

“We’ll go by Miss Ryper’s for Margot,” said I. “How the old people will
stare when they see her!”

Edna looked at me as if I had suddenly uncovered unmistakable evidence
of my insanity. Then I who had clean forgot her foolish notions
remembered. “But why not?” I urged. “It will give them so much
pleasure.”

“Trash!” ejaculated she. “They don’t care a rap about her. They can’t,
as they’ve not seen her since she was a baby. And Margot would suffer
horribly. I think it would be wicked to give a sweet, happy young girl
a horrible shock.”

This grotesque view of the effect of the sight of grandparents upon a
grandchild struck me as amusing. But there was no echo of my laughter
in the disgusted face of my wife. I sobered and said: “Yes, it would
give her a shock. We’ve made a mistake, bringing her up in that way.”

“Too late to discuss it now,” said Edna.

“I suppose so,” I could not but agree. “I guess the mischief’s done
beyond repair.”

Said Edna: “Have you any sense of--of them being _your_ father and
mother?”

“Rather,” said I. “My childhood is very vivid to me, and not at all
disagreeable.”

“It seems to me like a bad dream--unreal, and to be forgotten as
quickly as I can.”

She said this with a fine, spiritual look in her eyes, and I must say
that Edna, refined, delicately beautiful, fashionably dressed, speaking
her English with an elegant accent, did not suggest fusty-dusty,
queer-looking Weeping Willie with his hearse and funeral coaches, his
embalming apparatus and general appearance of animated casket, nor yet
fat, sloppy Ma Wheatlands, always in faded wrappers and with holes cut
in her shoes for her bunions.

“Wear your oldest business suit,” said Edna, coming back to earth from
the contemplation of her own elevation and grandeur. “I shall dress as
quietly as I dare. We mustn’t arouse the suspicions of the servants.”

Edna’s fooleries amused me. I didn’t then appreciate the dangers of
tolerating and laughing at the bad habits of a fascinating child.
If I had, little good I’d have accomplished, I suspect. However, I
got myself up as Edna directed, and when I saw how it irritated her
I stopped making such remarks as: “Shall I wear a collar? Hadn’t I
better sneak out the back way and join you at the ferry?” I should
have liked to get some fun out of our doings; that would have taken
at least the saw edge off my feelings of self-contempt. I am not fond
of hypocrisy, yet for that one occasion I should have welcomed the
familiar human shamming and faking in such matters. But Edna would put
the thing through like one of her father’s funerals. As we, in what
was practically disguise, issued forth, she said loudly enough for the
cocking ear of a maid who chanced to be in the front hall:

“Anyhow, the country dust won’t spoil these clothes. I’m so glad it’s
clear. How charming the woods will look.”

Just enough to deceive. Edna expanded upon her cleverness in never
saying too much, because saying too much always started people,
especially servants, to thinking. But she abruptly checked her flow of
self-praise as we seated ourselves in the ferry and she looked about.
There, not a dozen seats away, loomed our cook! Yes, no mistake, it was
our Mary, “gotten up regardless” for a Sunday outing.

“Do you see Mary?” said my wife.

“She’s the most conspicuous female in sight,” said I. “She’s a credit
to us.”

“I must have been mad,” groaned Edna, “to give her a holiday! Always
the way. I never do a generous, kind-hearted thing that I don’t have to
pay for it.”

“I don’t follow you,” said I.

“She hates us,” explained Edna. “Cooks--Irish cooks--invariably hate
the families they draw wages from. She’s dogging us.”

“Nonsense,” said I. “She probably hasn’t even seen us.”

But Edna was not listening; she was contriving. “We must let her leave
the boat ahead of us. Pretend not to see her.”

I obeyed orders. In the Jersey City train shed we, lagging behind, saw
her take a train bound for a different destination from ours. Much
relieved, Edna led the way to the Passaic train. Hardly were we seated
when in at the door of the coach hurried our Mary, excited and blown.
She came beaming down the aisle. Edna saluted her graciously and calmly.

“I got in the wrong train,” said Mary. “It’d never have took me
nowheres near my cousin in Passaic.”

Edna’s composure was admirable. Said I, when Mary had passed on, “Now
what, my dear?”

“You see she _is_ dogging us,” replied Edna. “I’ve not a doubt she
knows all about us.”

“I don’t _think_ she’s got a camera,” said I. “Still, they make them
very small nowadays.”

“We shall have to go on in the train, and return home from the station
beyond,” said Edna.

“Do as you like,” said I. “But as for me, I get off at Passaic and go
to see the old folks.”

“Please stop your joking,” said Edna. “If you had any pride you
couldn’t joke.”

“I am serious,” said I. “I shall go to see mother and father.”

“No doubt her cousin lives in the same part of the slums,” said Edna.
“Oh, it is _hideous_!”

I don’t know what possessed me--whether a fit of indigestion and
obstinacy or a sudden access of sense of decency as I approached my old
home. Whatever it was, it moved me to say: “My dear, this nonsense has
gone far enough. We will do what we set out to do.”

“Not I,” said Edna.

“Then I’ll drop off at Passaic alone, and hire a trap, and give Mary
a seat in it as far as her cousin’s. I’m not proud of my parents, the
more shame to me. But there’s a limit to my ability to degrade myself.”

Edna and I had not lived together all those years without her learning
the tone I use when I will not be trifled with. She did not argue. She
sat silent and pale beside me. When the train stopped at Passaic she
followed me from the car. Mary descended ahead of us and moved off at
as brisk a pace as tight corsets and stiff new shoes would permit, in a
direction exactly opposite that we were to take.

“Aren’t you glad we didn’t go on?” said I, eager to make it up.

She made no reply. She maintained haughty and injured silence until we
were within sight of the houses. Then she said curtly:

“I’ll do the talking about our plans for them.”

“That’ll be best,” said I, most conciliatory.

I had not intended to say this. There had been a half-formed resolution
in my mind to oppose those plans. But her anger roused in me such a
desire to pacify her that I promptly yielded, where, I must in honesty
confess, I was little short of indifferent. American husbands have the
reputation of being the most docile and the worst henpecked men in
the world. All foreigners say so, and our women believe it. In fact,
nothing could be further from the truth. The docility of American
husbands is the good nature of indifference. A friend of mine has the
habit of saying that his most valued and most valuable possession is
his long list of things he cares not a rap about. It is a typically
American and luminous remark. The men of other nations agitate over
trifles, love to have the sense of being master at home--usually their
one and only chance for a free swing at the joyous feeling of being
boss. The American man, absorbed in his important work at office or
factory, and not caring especially about anything else, lets thieving
politicians rule in public affairs, lets foolish, incompetent women
rule in domestic affairs. He has a half-conscious philosophy that he
is shrewd enough, if he attends to his business, to make money faster
than they can take it away from him, and that, if he does not attend to
his business only, he will have nothing either for thieving politician
and spendthrift wife or for himself. If you wish to discover how little
there is in the notion of his docility, meddle with something he really
cares about. Many a political rascal, many a shiftless wife, has done
it and has gotten a highly disagreeable surprise.

Perhaps what I saw had as much to do with my tame acquiescence in my
wife’s projects as my desire to have peace between her and me, when
peace meant yielding what only a vague and feeble filial impulse moved
me to contest. I had what I thought was a clear and vivid memory of my
natal place and Edna’s--how the two houses looked, how small and shabby
they were, how mean their surroundings, how plain their interiors. But
as we drove up I discovered that memory had been pleasantly deceiving
me. Could these squalid hovels, these tiny, hideous boxes set in two
dismal weedy oblongs of unkempt yards--could these be our old homes?
And the bent old laboring man and his wife--we had drawn up in front of
my home--could they be _my_ father and _my_ mother?

A feeling of sickness, of nausea came over me. Not from repulsion for
my parents--thank God, I had not sunk that low. But from abhorrence
of myself, so degraded by the “higher world” into which prosperity
and Edna’s ambitions had dragged me that I could look down upon the
gentle old man and the patient, loving old woman to whom I owed life
and a fair start in the world. My blood burned and my eyes sank as they
greeted me, their homely old hands trembling, their mouths distorted
by emotion and age and missing teeth. I turned away while they were
kissing Edna, for I felt I should hate her and loathe myself if I saw
the expression that must be in her face.

“There are my father and mother!” she cried in a suffocating voice. And
we three Lorings were watching her hurry across the yard and through
the gap in the fence between the two places. My sister came forward.
We kissed each other as awkwardly as two strangers. I looked at her
dazedly. Mary, our cook, was an imposing looking lady beside this
thin-haired, coarse-featured old maid. In embarrassed silence we four
entered the house. I am not tall nor in the least fat, yet I had an
uncontrollable impulse to stoop and to squeeze as I entered the squat
and narrow doorway. That miserable little “parlor!”

As we sat silent my roving glance at last sought my mother’s face. Oh,
the faces, the masks, with which freakish and so often savagely ironic
fate covers and hides our souls, making fair seem foul and foul seem
fair, making beauty repellent and ugliness seem beautiful. Suddenly
through that plain, time- and toil-scarred mask, through those dim,
sunken eyes, I saw her soul--her mother’s heart--looking at me. And the
tears poured into my eyes. “Mother!” I sobbed in a choking voice, and
I put my arms round her and nestled against her heart, a boy again--a
bad boy with a streak of good in him. I felt how proud she--they
all--were of me, the son and brother, who had gone forth and fulfilled
the universal American dream of getting up in the world. I hoped, I
prayed that they would not realize what a poor creature I was, with my
snobbish shame.

There was an awkward, rambling attempt at talk. But we had nothing
to talk about--nothing in common. I happened to think of our not
having brought Margot; how shameful it was, yet how glad I felt, and
how self-contemptuous for being glad. To break that awful silence I
enlarged upon Margot--her beauty, her cleverness.

“She must be like Polly”--my sister’s name was Polly--“like Polly was
at her age,” observed my mother.

I looked at Polly Ann, in whose faded face and withered form--faded and
withered though she was not yet forty, was in fact but seven or eight
years older than I. Like Polly! I could speak no more of Margot, the
delicate loveliness of a rare, carefully reared hot-house exotic. Yes,
exotic; for the girls and the women brought up in the super-refinements
of prosperous class silliness seem foreign to this world--and are.

A few minutes that seemed hours, and Edna came in, her father and
mother limping and hobbling in her train. Edna was sickly pale and her
eyelids refused to rise. I shook hands with old Willie Wheatlands,
hesitated, then kissed the fat, sallow, swinging cheek of my
mother-in-law. Said Edna in a hard, forced voice:

“I’ve explained that Margot isn’t well and that we’ve got to get
back----”

“Mercy me!” cried my mother. “Ain’t you going to stay to supper?”

Supper! It was only half-past twelve. Supper could not be until five or
half-past. We had been there half an hour and already conversation was
exhausted and time had become motionless.

“We intended to,” said Edna. “But Margot wasn’t at all well when we
left. We simply can’t stay away long. We’d not have come, but we felt
we’d never get here if we kept on letting things interfere.”

“You didn’t leave Margy _alone_?” demanded Edna’s mother.

“Almost,” said Edna. “Only a--a servant.”

“Oh, you keep a nurse girl, too,” said Polly. “I thought Edna didn’t
look as if she did any of her own work.”

“Yes, I have a--a girl, in addition to the cook,” replied Edna,
flushing as she thus denied three of her five servants--flushing not
because of the denial, but because in her confession she had almost
forgotten about the numerous excuses based on the cook. “Godfrey has
been doing very well, and we felt we could afford it.”

“Better get rid of her,” advised old Willie sourly. “And of the cook,
too. Servant girls is mighty wasteful.”

“And she’ll teach Margy badness,” said my mother. “Them servants is
full of poison. Even if yer pa’d had money I’d never have allowed no
servant round my children, no more’n a snake in the cradle. I hope
she’s a good Christian, and not a Catholic?”

“She’s all right,” declared Edna nervously. “But we’ll have to be going
soon.”

“Yes; that there girl might git drunk,” said Mrs. Wheatlands.

“And set fire to the house maybe,” said my mother. “I heard of a case
just last week.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” cried Edna, her tones of protest more
like jubilation. “I’ll be wretched until I’m home again.”

Mother told in detail and with rising excitement the story of the
drunken nurse girl who had burned up herself and her charges, a pair
of lovely twins. From that moment our families were anxious for us to
go. The three women could see the girl drunk and the house burning.
The two grandfathers, while less imaginative, were almost as uneasy.
Besides, no doubt our families found us full as tiring as we found them.

“But before we go,” said Edna, in a business-like tone, “there’s one
thing we wanted to talk about. Godfrey has had--that is, he has done
very well in business. And of course our first thought--one of our
first thoughts--was what could we do for you all down here. We hate to
think of your living in this unhealthful part of the town. We want to
see you settled in some healthful place, up in the hills.”

We were watching the faces of our five kinsfolk. We could make nothing
of their expression. It was heavy, dull--mere listening, without a hint
of even comprehension behind.

“We thought you, father, and Mr.--father Loring--might look round and
find a nice farm with a big comfortable house--plenty big enough for
you all--and Godfrey will buy it, and will pay for a man and a woman to
look after you. He has done well, as I said, and he can afford it. In
fact, they’ve made him president of the railroad.”

My father, my mother, and my sister exchanged glances. A long, awed
silence. Old Willie spoke in his squeaky, stingy voice: “I can’t leave
my business. I ain’t footless like Loring there. _My_ business pays.”

“You can sell it,” said Edna. “You know you ought to retire. You were
telling me how bad your health had been.”

“Nobody else couldn’t make nothing like what I make out of it. The men
growing up nowadays ain’t no account. The no-account women with heads
full of foolishness leads ’em off.”

Edna agreed with him, pointed out that he’d have to give up soon
anyhow, appealed to his cupidity for real estate by expanding upon the
size and value of the farm I was willing to give him. She made a strong
impression. The women were converted by the prospect of having help
with the work. My father had long dreamed of a home in the country. He
had not the imagination to picture how he would be bored, away from the
loafers with whom he talked politics and religion. “And,” said Edna,
“you’ll have horses and things to ride in, so you can go where you
please whenever you please.”

We had roused them. We had dazzled them. It was plain that if a
purchaser could be found for the Wheatlands undertaking business, Edna
would carry her point. “Godfrey will look for somebody to take the
business,” said she to her father. “I want you and Father Loring to
start out to-morrow morning, and not stop till you’ve found a farm.”

I understood an uncertain gleam in old Willie’s eyes. “About the
price,” said I, speaking for the first time, “I’m willing to pay
twenty-five thousand down for the place alone, and as I’ll pay cash,
you ought to be able on mortgage to get a farm--or two or three
adjoining farms--that would cost twice that.”

The two families were dumbfounded.

“I know I can trust you, Mr. Wheatlands, to get the money’s worth.”

“Buy a big place,” said Edna, of the unexpected timely shrewdnesses.
“Go back from the main roads where land’s so dear.”

Wheatlands nodded. “That’s a good idea,” said he. “There’ll be plenty
of roads after a while.”

Edna was ready to depart. “Then it’s settled?” said she.

Her father nodded. “I’m willing to see what can be done. But I’d rather
not have Ben Loring along. He’d interfere with a good bargain.”

“Yes, you go alone, Willie,” said my father. “Anyhow, I’ve got to ’tend
store. I can’t afford a boy any more.”

The mention of the, to them, enormous sum of money had put them in a
state of awe as to Edna and me. It saddened me to observe how quickly
the weed of snobbishness, whose seeds are in all human nature, sprang
up and dominated the whole garden. They lost the sense of our blood
kinship with them. They felt that we, able to dispense such splendid
largess, were of a superior order of being. And I saw that my and
Edna’s feeling of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the
feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. In my dealings
with my fellow beings I have often noted this sort of thing--that the
snobbishness of those who look down is a weak and hesitating impulse
which would soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the
snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, “Caste is made by
those who look up, not by those who look down.” That is a great truth,
and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked.

Looking back I see that my own first decisive impulse toward the caste
feeling came that day, came when my people and Edna’s, discovering that
we were rich, began to treat us as lower class treats upper class.

My mother had been scrutinizing me for signs of the majesty of wealth.
“Why don’t you wear a beard, or leastways a mustache, Godfrey?” she
finally inquired. “Then you wouldn’t seem so boyish like.”

“I used to wear a mustache,” said I, “but I cut it off because--I don’t
recall why.”

In fact I did recall. I noted one day that I had a good mouth and
better teeth than most men have. And it came to me how absurd it was
to hang a bunch of hair from my upper lip to trail in the soup and to
embalm the odors of past cigars for the discomfort of my nose. Edna
kept after me for a time to let it grow again. But reading in some
novel she regarded as authoritative that mustaches were “common,” she
desisted. And I found my boyish appearance highly useful. It led men to
underestimate me--a signal advantage in the contests of wit against wit
in which I daily engaged with a view to wrenching a fortune for myself
away from my fellow men.

My mother went on to urge me to make my face look older and more
formidable. Now that she had learned what a grand person I was she
feared others would not realize it. Edna, who, as I have said,
was shrewdness personified where her own interests were involved,
immediately saw the dangerous bearings of this newly aroused vanity
of our kin. “I forgot to caution you,” said she, “not to mention our
prosperity. If we were talked about now, it might be lost entirely.
The only reason Godfrey and I came to you so soon with the news of it
was because we wanted to do something for you right away. And we knew
we could trust you not to get us into trouble. Don’t talk about us. If
you hear people talking, if they ask you questions, pretend you don’t
understand and don’t know. You see, it may be spies from our enemies.”

One glance round that circle of eager faces was enough to convince that
Edna had made precisely the impression she desired. I could see that my
mother and old Weeping Willie, the shrewd of the five--the two to whom
Edna and I owed most by inheritance--were prepared to deny knowing us
if that would aid in safeguarding the precious prosperity. My father
and sister were obviously disappointed that they could not go about
boasting of our magnificence and getting from the neighbors the envy
and respect due the near relations of a plutocrat. But there was no
danger of their being indiscreet; Edna could breathe freely. And when
the two families were tucked away in the midst of a large and secluded
farm, she could tell what genealogical stories she pleased without fear
of being confounded by the truth.

By three o’clock we were back in Brooklyn. Edna felt and looked
triumphant. The crowning of the day’s work had been small but
significant. A heavy rain storm that came up while we were on the way
back must have made the servants think we had cut short our woodland
outing. As we were going to bed that might Edna roused herself from
deep study and broke a long silence with, “I hesitated whether to tell
them you had become president of the road.”

I had noted that seeming slip of hers, so unlike her cautious reticence.

“Then I remembered they’d be sure to see it in the papers,” continued
she. “And I decided it was best to tell and quiet them.”

       *       *       *       *       *

While the old folks were industriously settling themselves in the
New Jersey woods-- Here let me relieve my mind by saying a few words
in mitigation of the unfilial and snobbish conduct of Edna and me. I
admit we deserve nothing but condemnation. I admit I am more to blame
than she because I could have compelled her to act better toward our
families, though of course I could not have changed her feelings--or my
own, for that matter. But, as often happens in this world, the thing
that was in motive shameful turned out well. We and our families had
grown hopelessly apart. Intercourse with them could not but have been
embarrassing and uncomfortable for both sides. When we got them the
farm, got them away from the malarial and squalid part of Passaic into
a healthful region where they lived in much better health and in a
comfort they could appreciate, we did the best possible thing for them,
as well as for ourselves. Do not think for a moment that because I am
ashamed of my snobbish motives I am therefore advocating the keeping
up of irksome and absurd ties merely out of wormy sentimentality. It
has always seemed to me, when we have but the one chance at life, the
one chance to make the best of our talents and opportunities, that
only moral or mental weakness, or both, would waste the one chance in
the bondage of outworn ties. When one has outgrown any association,
lop it off relentlessly, say I. If the living lets the dying cling to
it, the dying does not live but the living dies. If you are associated
with anyone in any way--business, social, ties of affection, whatever
you please--and if you do not wish to lose that one, then keep yourself
alive and abreast of him or her. And if you let yourself begin to decay
and find yourself cut away, whose is the fault, if fault there be?
We--Edna and I--perhaps did not do all we might to make our outgrown
families happy; I say perhaps, though I am by no means sure that we did
not do all that was in our power, for they certainly would have got no
pleasure out of seeing more of two people so uncongenial to them in
every respect. At any rate, we did not leave our families to starve or
to suffer. Hard though my charming, lovely wife was, I cannot conceive
her sinking to that depth. On the whole, I feel that we could honestly
say we took the right course with them. That is, we helped them without
hindering ourselves. We did the right thing, though not in the right
way.

While our families were choosing a farm, were fixing up the buildings
to suit their needs and tastes, were moving themselves from their
ancient haunts, Edna was as industriously busy making far deeper
inroads on the new prosperity. She was planning the conquest of New
York.

Every day in the year many a suddenly enriched family is busy about
the same enterprise. Families from the less fashionable parts of the
city moving to the fashionable parts. Families from other cities and
towns--east, west, north, and south--advancing to social conquest under
the leadership of mammas and daughters tired of shining in obscure,
monotonous, and unappreciative places. There are I forget how many
thousands of millionaires on Manhattan Island; enough, I know, with the
near millionaires and those living like millionaires, to make a city of
three or four hundred thousand, not including servants and parasites.
Not all of these have the fashionable craze; at least, they haven’t
it in its worst form--the form in which it possessed my wife. All the
acute sufferers must find suitable lodgments near Fifth Avenue if not
in it.

Now New York is ever ready to receive and to “trim” the arriving
millionaire. It has all kinds of houses and apartments to meet the
peculiarities of his--or, rather, of his wife’s and daughter’s--notions
of grandeur. It has a multitude of purveyors of furnishings and
decorations likewise designed to catch crude and grandiose tastes. My
wife was busy with these gentry.

“Don’t you think we’d better go a little slow?” said I. “Why not live
in a hotel on Manhattan and look about us?”

I had respect for my wife’s capacity at the woman side of the game;
she had thoroughly drilled me to more than generous appreciation of
it. But at the same time I was not so blinded by her charm for me or
so convinced by her insistent and plausible egotism that I had not
noted certain minor failures of hers due to her ignorance of the art
of spending money. She was clever at learning. But often her vanity
lured her into fancying she knew, when in fact her education in that
particular direction was all miseducation. She dressed much more
giddily in our first years in Brooklyn than she did afterwards. And in
the later years she made still further discoveries as to dress that
resulted in another revolution, away from quietness, not toward the
gaudy but toward smartness--that curious quality which makes a woman’s
toilet conspicuous without the least suggestion of the loud.

However, Edna scorned my suggestion that she make haste slowly. She
had long been engaged in a thorough study of the mode of life in
millionairedom. Newspapers, Sunday supplements, magazines, and society
novels had helped her. She had examined the exteriors of the famous
palaces. She had got into the drawing-rooms and ballrooms of two or
three palaces by way of high-priced charity tickets. She had in one
instance roamed into sitting rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms until caught
and led back by some vigilant and unbribable servant. I wonder if she
ever recalls that adventure now! Probably not. I think I have recorded
her ability absolutely to forget whatever it pleases her not to
remember. She had been educating herself, so when I suggested caution,
she replied:

“Don’t you fret, Godfrey. I know what I’m about. I’ll get what we’ve
got to have.”

And I’ll concede that she did--also, that I thought it overwhelmingly
grand at the time. It was a house in a fashionable side street,
between Madison avenue and Fifth--a magnificent house built for exactly
such a family as mine. That is, it was built entirely for show and not
at all for comfort; it fairly bristled with the luxuries and “modern
conveniences,” but most of them were of the sort that looks comfortable
but is not. The rent was some preposterous sum--thirty-five or forty
thousand a year. We had room enough for the housing of nearly a hundred
people, counting servants as people, which I believe is not the custom.
It was fitted throughout in the fashion which those clever leeches who
think out and sell luxuries have in all ages imposed upon the rich man
because it means money in their pockets. Once in a while you find a
rich man who has the courage to live as he pleases, but most of them
live as the fashion commands. And many of them have no idea that there
is any less comfortless and less foolish way to live. You imagine,
gentle reader, that people with money live in beauty and comfort. You
imagine that you could do it also if you had but the wealth. Believe
me, you deceive yourself. Beyond question a certain amount of money is
necessary to the getting of attractive and comfortable surroundings.
But there is another, an equally indispensable and a far rarer factor.
That factor, gentle reader, is intelligence--knowledge of the resources
of civilization, knowledge of the realities as to comfort, luxury, and
taste.

I am tempted to linger upon the details of the extravagance of that
first big establishment of Edna’s. It was so astounding and so
ridiculous. I saw that she had delivered us and our fortune over
to hordes of crafty, thirsty bloodsuckers--merchants, tradesmen,
servants. But her heart was set upon it, and all other rich people were
living in that same way. “You want to do the right thing by Margot,
don’t you?” said she.

“By you and Margot,” said I. “Go ahead. I guess I can find the money.”

I shan’t here go into the ways I discovered or invented for finding
that money. They were not too scrupulous, but neither were they
commercially dishonorable. I must smile there. Being of an inquiring
and jocose mind I have often tried to find an action that, in the
opinion of the most eminent commercial authorities, was absolutely
dishonorable. Never yet have I found a single action, however wrong
and even criminal in general, that they would not declare in certain
circumstances perfectly honorable. And those “certain circumstances”
could always be boiled down to the one circumstance--needing the money.

I can’t recall exactly how many servants we had to wait on us two, but
it was about thirty-five. I remember hearing my wife say one month that
our meat bill alone was about a thousand dollars. For a time I fancied
we were living more grandly than anyone else in town. But it soon
revealed itself to me that, as things went with “our class,” we were
leading rather a simple life. Certainly nothing we did marked us out
from the others in that region. The sum totals suggested that servants
stood at the front windows all day long tossing money into the street.
But nothing of the kind occurred. You would have said we ate the finest
food in wholesale quantities. Yet never did I get a notably good meal
at my own house. The coffee was always poor. The fruit was below the
average of sidewalk stands. We often had cold-storage fowls and fish
on the table. We paid for the best; I’m sure we paid for it many times
over. We got--what one always gets when the wife is too intellectual
and too busy to attend to her business. But I assure you it was grandly
served. The linen and the dishes were royal, the servants were in
liveries of impressive color and form--though I could have wished that
my wife had been as sensitive to odors as I was, and had compelled
some of those magnificent gentry to do a little bathing. Throughout
the establishment the same superb scale was maintained. We lived like
the rest of the millionaires, neither better nor worse. We lived in
grandeur and discomfort. But my wife was ecstatic, and I was therefore
content. Yes, we were very grand. And, as in Brooklyn, the glasses
came to the table with a certain sour odor not alluring as you lifted
them to drink--the odor that causes an observant man or woman to say,
“Aha--dirty rags in this perfect lady’s kitchen--dirty rags and all
that goes with them.” But only a snarling cynic would complain of these
vulgar trifles. There’s always at least a fly leg in the ointment.

“Didn’t I tell you I knew what I was about?” said Edna triumphantly.

“You did,” said I.

“Haven’t we got what we wanted?”

“We have,” said I, perhaps somewhat abruptly, for I was just then
wondering how the devil we were going to keep it.

“And if it hadn’t been for me,” proceeded she “we’d still be living in
_Brooklyn_!”

“Or in Passaic,” said I.

“Don’t _speak_ of Passaic,” she cried. “I’m trying to forget it.”

“We were very happy then,” said I.

“_I_ was miserable,” retorted she.

“I could find it in my heart to wish we weren’t _always_ attended by
servants,” said I. “I almost never see you alone.”

“What a bourgeois you are,” laughed she. Then--after a thorough glance
round to make sure housekeeper or maid or lackey wasn’t on watch--she
patted my cheek and kissed me, and added: “But you do make me happy.
I’m _so_ proud of you! No matter what I want I’m never afraid to buy
it, for I know you can get all the money you want to.”

I winced. Said I: “I’m afraid you’d not be proud of some of the ways I
get the money.”

She frowned. “Don’t talk business, please,” she said. “You know we
never have in all our married life. You’ve always respected my position
as your wife. All business is low--is mere sordidness.”

“Yes, it’s all low,” said I. “Sometimes I think all living is low as
well. Edna”--I put my arm round her--“don’t you ever feel that we’d be
_really_ happy, that we’d get something genuine out of life--if you and
Margot and I----”

She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “You never will grow up to your
station, darling.”

I said no more. Indeed, it was on hastiest impulse that I had said so
much, an impulse sprung from a mood of depression.

The cause of that mood was a nasty reverse in Wall Street. It had
rudely halted me in my triumphant way toward the security of the man of
many millions. It had set me to wavering uncertainly, with the chances
about even for resuming the march and for tumbling into the abyss of a
discreditable bankruptcy.

There are in New York two well-defined classes of the rich--the
permanently rich and the precariously rich. The permanently rich are
those who by the vastness of their wealth or by the strength of their
business and social connections cannot possibly be dislodged from the
plutocracy. The precariously rich are those who have much money and are
making more, but are not strong enough to survive a series of typhoons,
and are without the support of indissoluble business and social
connections. My friend G----, for example, head of the famous banking
house, associated in business and by marriage with half the permanent
plutocracy, was practically bankrupt in the late panic. Had he been a
man of ordinary position he would have gone into bankruptcy, and, I
more than suspect, into jail. But his fellow plutocrats dared not let
him drop, much as they would have liked to see his arrogance brought
low, much as they longed to divide among themselves his holdings of
gilt-edged securities; if he had gone down it would have made the whole
financial world tremble. He was saved. On the other hand, my friend
J----, richer actually, was ruined, was plucked by his associates, was
finally jailed for doing precisely the things every man of finance did
over and over again in that same period of stress--for, what invariably
happens to moral codes in periods of stress?

I was at that time--but not now, gentle reader, so cheer up and read
on--I was at that time in the class not of the permanently but of the
precariously rich. And through a miscalculation I had laid myself open
to the dangers that lie in wait for the man short of ready cash. The
miscalculation was as to the extravagance of my wife’s undertakings.
She, against my express request, had contracted without consulting or
telling me several enormous bills. It is idle to say she ought not have
done this. I knew her well; I should have been on guard. I had begun
my married life wrong, as the young man very much in love is apt to
do; so, to hold her love and liking, I had to keep on giving her taste
for spending money free rein. If I had not, she would have thought me
small and mean, would have made life at home exceedingly uncomfortable
for me, for I am not of those men who can take from a woman what they
wish whether she wishes to give or not. So the whole fault was mine.
When the storm broke, in the light of its first terrific flash that
illuminated for me every part of my affairs, I discovered that I was
not prepared as I had been imagining. The big bills of my wife were
presented, for the merchants knew I was heavily interested in the
stocks that were tobogganing. Those bills had to be paid, and paid
at once, or it would run like wildfire uptown and down that I was in
difficulties; and when a man is known to be in financial difficulties,
how the birds and beasts of prey from eagles and lions to buzzards and
jackals do come flapping and loping!

There followed several anxious days and nights. On one of those
nights I rose from beside my wife--we still slept together--and went
into the adjoining room. I turned on an electric light and began for
the thousandth time, I dare say, to look at the critical papers and
to grope for the desperate “way out.” I was startled by my wife’s
voice--sleepy, peevish:

“Do turn out that light and come to bed, Godfrey. You know how it
disturbs me for you to get up in the night. And I’ve such a hard day
before me to-morrow with the upholsterers and curtain people.”

I obediently turned off the light. As I was about to throw myself into
bed and draw the covers over me, a broad beam from the moon flooded
the face of a portrait on the opposite wall--the face of my daughter
Margot. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at that face--pure,
sweet, with the same elevated expression her mother had in these days
of refinement and climbing. Said I to Edna:

“Are you asleep, dear?”

“No,” she answered crossly. “I’m waiting for you to quiet down.”

“Then--let me talk to you a few minutes.”

“Oh, please!” she cried, flinging herself to the far edge of the bed.
“You have no consideration for me--none at all.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’m face to face with ruin.”

She did not move or speak, but I could feel her intense attention.

“If I let matters take their course I can save my reputation and my
official position. But for many years we’ll have to live quietly--about
as we did in Brooklyn.”

“I _can’t_ do that,” cried she. “The fall would kill me. You know
how proud I am.... Just as I had everything ready for us to get into
society! Godfrey, how could you! And I thought you were clever at
business.”

I could not see her, nor she me, except in dimmest outline. I said:
“But we’d have each other and Margot. And my salary isn’t so small, as
salaries go.”

“Isn’t there _any_ way to avoid it?” She was sitting up in bed, her
nervous fingers upon my arm. “You must _think_, Godfrey. You mustn’t
play Margot and me this horrible trick. You mustn’t give up so easily.
You must think--think--_think_!”

“I have,” said I. “I’ve not slept for three days and nights. There’s no
way--no honest way.”

“Then there _is_ a way!” she cried.

“But not an honest one.”

She laughed scornfully. “And you pretend to love me! When my life and
Margot’s happiness are at stake you talk like a Sunday-school boy.”

“Yes,” said I. “And I’ve been thinking more or less that way lately for
the first time in years. It wasn’t long after I started when I cut my
business eye teeth. I found out that as the game lay I’d not get far
if I stuck to the old maxims of the copy book and the Sunday school.
Except by accident nobody ever got rich who followed them. To get
rich you’ve got to make a lot of people work for you and work cheap,
and you’ve got to sell what they make as dear as you can. Success in
business means taking advantage of the ignorance or the necessities of
your fellow men, or both.”

“Don’t waste time talking that kind of nonsense,” said she impatiently.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me--or to anybody, I guess. The thing
for you to do is to put your mind on the real thing--how to save your
family and yourself.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” said I. “I’m talking about saving
myself and my family. As I told you, my troubles--the first business
troubles I’ve ever had--have set me to thinking. I’ve not been doing
right all these years. It’s true, everybody does as I’ve been doing.
It’s true I’ve been more generous and more considerate than most men
with opportunities and the sense to see them. But I’ve been doing
wrong.”

I paused, hoping for some sign of sympathy. None came. I went on:

“And I’ve been wondering these last few days if by doing it I haven’t
been ruining myself and my family--not financially, but in more
important ways. Edna, what’s the sense in this life we’re leading? What
will be the end of it all? Is there any decency or happiness in it?
Haven’t we been going backward instead of forward?”

All the time I was talking I could feel she was not listening. When I
finished she said: “Godfrey, what is this way you can escape by?”

“I can sell out my partners in the deals that have gone bad.”

“Perhaps they’re selling _you_ out,” she instantly suggested. “Why, of
course they are doing that very thing!--while _you_ are driveling about
honesty like a backwoods hypocrite of a church deacon.”

“No, they’re not selling me out,” said I.

“How do you know?” cried she.

“I caught them at that trick in a former deal and in the early stages
of this one. And I fixed things so that, while they have to trust me, I
don’t trust them.”

She laughed mockingly. “Godfrey, I think your mind must be going. You
talking about sacrificing your fortune and your wife and your child
for men who’ve tried to ruin you--men who are even now thinking out
some scheme for doing it.... Suppose you saved yourself and let them
go--what then? Wouldn’t you be rich? And when you were secure again
couldn’t you pay them back what they lost if you were still foolish
enough to think it necessary?”

It was not the first time she had astonished me with the depth of her
practical insight--and her skill at logic--when she cared to use her
mind. “I had thought of saving myself and paying back afterwards,” said
I. “But I’m not sure I’d save myself. It’s simply my one chance.”

“Then you’ve got to take that chance,” said she.

“I didn’t expect you to talk like this,” said I. “The only reason I
haven’t spoken of my troubles before was that I feared you’d forbid me
to do what I was being tempted to do.”

And that was the truth about my feeling. I had always heard--and
had firmly believed--that woman was somehow the exemplar of ideal
morality, that it was she who kept men from being worse than they were,
that the evil being done by men pursuing success was done without the
knowledge of their pure, idealist wives and mothers and daughters. I
can’t account for my stupidity in this respect. Had I not on every side
the spectacle that gave the lie to the shallow pretense of feminine
moral superiority? Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite
for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant
demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their
profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and
simply spends; was it not the women, the _ladies_, who were edging on
the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses,
the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy clothing, the costly
jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift
squandering upon the degrading vanities of social position?

I laughed somewhat cynically. “No wonder you’ve always refused to learn
anything about business,” said I. “It’s a habit among big business men
to refuse to know anything as to the details of a large transaction
that can be carried through only by dirty work. If we don’t know, we
can pretend that the dirty work isn’t being done by or for us--isn’t
being done at all.”

“Now you are getting coarse,” said my wife. “Do you know what I think
of you?” I could not see her expression, but the voice always betrays
if there is insincerity, because we do not deal enough with the
blind to learn to deceive perfectly with the voice. Her tones were
absolutely sincere as she answered her own question: “I think it is
cowardly of you to come to me with your business troubles. If you were
brave you’d simply have quietly done whatever was necessary to save
your family. Yes, it is cowardly!”

“I didn’t mean it as cowardice,” said I, admiring but irritated by this
characteristic adroitness. “In the stories and the plays that give such
thrills, the husband, in the crisis and tempted to do wrong, appeals to
his wife. And they are brought closer together, and she helps him to do
right, and everything ends happily.” Again I laughed good-humoredly.
“It doesn’t seem to be turning out that way, does it, dear? My heavenly
picture of you and Margot and me living modestly and making up in love
what we lack in luxury--it doesn’t attract you?”

She said in her patient, superior tone: “I suppose you never will
understand me or my ideals. What you’ve been doing in annoying me
with your business, it’s as if when I was giving a dinner I assembled
my guests and compelled them to watch all the preparations for the
dinner--the killing of the lambs and the fish and the birds, the
cleaning, all those ugly and low things. Bringing business into the
home and the social life, it’s like bringing the kitchen into the
drawing-room.”

The obvious answer to this shallow but plausible and attractive
cleverness of hers did not come to me then. If it had I’d not have
spoken it. For of what use to argue with the human animal, female
or male, about its dearest selfishnesses and vanities? Of what use
to point out to human self-complacence, greediness and hypocrisy
that a “refined” and “cultured” existence of ease and luxury can be
obtained only by the theft and murder of dishonest business--that for
one man to be vastly rich thousands of men must somehow be robbed and
oppressed, even though the rich man himself directly does no robbing
and oppressing? If I have sucking pig for dinner, I kill sucking pig as
surely as if my hand wielded the knife of the butcher. But the human
race finds it convenient and comfortable not to think so. Therefore,
let us not bother our heads about it.

At that period of my career I had not thought things out so thoroughly
as I have since--in these days when events have compelled me to open my
eyes and to see. In my hypocrisy, in my eagerness to save myself, I was
not loth to take refuge behind the advice given by my wife partly in
genuine ignorance of business, partly in pretended ignorance of it.

Said I: “I suppose you’re right. I ought to think only of my family.
Heaven knows, my rascal friends aren’t thinking in my interest. If I
don’t do it, no one will. There’s no disputing that--eh?”

No reply. She was asleep--or, rather, was pretending to be asleep. The
matter had been settled, why discuss it further? Why expose herself
longer than unavoidable to the danger of being unable to be, or to
pretend to be, ignorant of business, of the foundation upon which her
splendid, cultured structure of ambition proudly reared?

Often in her sleep her hand would seek mine, and when it was
comfortably nestled she would give a little sigh of content that
thrilled me through and through. Her hand now stole into mine and the
sigh of content came softly from her lips. “My love,” I murmured,
kissing her cheek before I lay down. How could I for a minute have
considered any course that would have made her unhappy, that might have
lessened, perhaps destroyed, her love for me?




IV


It is hardly necessary to say that I threw overboard my partners and
saved myself. Indeed, I emerged from the crisis--liberally bespattered
with mud, it is true--but richer than when I entered it. Since I was
doing the act that was the supreme proof of my possessing the courage
and the skill for leadership in business--since I was definitely
breaking with the old-fashioned morality--I felt it was the part of
wisdom to do the thing so thoroughly, so profitably, that instead of
being execrated I should be admired. There were attacks on me in the
newspapers; there were painful interviews with my partners--not so
painful to me as they would have been had I not been able to remind
them of their own unsuccessful treacheries and to enforce the spoken
reminder with the documentary proof. But on the whole I came off
excellently well--as who does not that “gets away with the goods?”

In these days of increased intelligence and consequent lessened
hypocrisy, the big business man is the object of only perfunctory
hypocrisies from outraged morality. It has been discovered that the
farmer watering his milk or the grocer using solder-“mended” scales
is as bad as the man who “reorganizes” a railway or manipulates a
stock--is worse actually because the massed mischief of the million
little business rascals is greater than the sensational misdeeds of
the few great rascals. It has been discovered that human nature is
good or bad only according to the opportunities and necessities, not
according to abstract moral standards. And the cry is no longer, “Kill
the scoundrel,” but, “That fellow had the sense to outwit us. We must
learn from him how to sharpen our wits so that we won’t let ourselves
be robbed.” A healthful sign this, that masses of men are ceasing from
twaddle about vague ideals and are educating themselves in practical
horse sense. It may be that some day the honest husbandman will learn
to guard his granary not only against the robber with the sack in the
dark of the morn, but also against the rats and mice who pilfer ten
bushels to every one that is stolen. Of one thing I am certain--until
men learn to take heed in the small, they will remain easy prey in the
large.

Far from doing me harm, my bold stroke was of the greatest
benefit--from the standpoint of material success, and that is the
only point of view I am here considering. It did me as much good with
the world as it has done me with you, gentle reader. For while you
are exclaiming against my wickedness you are in your secret heart
confessing that if I had chosen the ideally honest course, had retired
to obscurity and poverty, you would have approved--and would have lost
interest in me. Why, if I had chosen that ideal course, I doubt not I
should have lost my railway position. My directors would have waxed
enthusiastic over my “old-fashioned honesty,” and would have looked
round for another and shrewder and stronger man to whom to intrust the
management of their railway--which would not pay dividends were it run
along the lines of old-fashioned honesty. The outburst of denunciation
soon spent itself, like a summer storm beating the giant cliffs of a
mountain. Of what use to rage futilely against my splendid immovable
fortune? The attacks, the talk about my bold stroke, the exaggerations
of the size of the fortune I had made, all served to attract attention
to me, to make me a formidable and an interesting figure. I leaped from
obscurity into fame and power--and I had the money to maintain the
position I had won.

       *       *       *       *       *

Long before, indeed as soon as we moved to Manhattan, my wife had
joined fashionable and exclusive Holy Cross Church and had plunged
straightway into its charity work. A highly important part of her
Brooklyn education had been got in St. Mary’s, in learning how to do
charity work and how to make it count socially. Edna genuinely loved
charity work. She loved to patronize, loved to receive those fawning
blessings and handkissings which city poverty becomes adept at giving
the rich it lives off of. The poor family understands perfectly that
the rich visit and help not through mere empty sentimental nonsense of
brotherhood, but to have their vanities tickled in exchange for the
graciousness of their condescending presence and for the money they
lay out. As the poor want the money and have no objection to paying
for it with that cheap and plentiful commodity, cringing--scantily
screening mockery and contempt--rich and poor meet most comfortably in
our cities. Not New York alone, but any center of population, for human
nature is the same, city and country, San Francisco, Bangor--Pekin or
Paris, for that matter.

There is a shallow fashion of describing this or that as peculiarly New
York, usually snobbishness or domestic unhappiness or wealth worship,
dishonest business men or worthless wives. It is time to have done
with such nonsense. New York is in no way peculiar, nor is any other
place, beyond trifling surface differences. New York is nothing but
the epitome of the whole country, just as Chicago is. If you wish
to understand America, study New York or Chicago, our two universal
cities. There you find in one place and in admirable perspective a
complete museum of specimens of what is scattered over three and a
half million square miles. For, don’t forget, New York is not the few
blocks of fashionable district alone. It is four million people of all
conditions, tastes, and activities. And the dominant force of struggle
for money and fashion is no more dominant in New York than it is in
the rest of America. New York is more truly representative of America
than is Chicago, for in Chicago the Eastern and Southern elements are
lacking and the Western element is strong out of proportion.

I was telling of my wife’s blossoming as Lady Bountiful in search
not of a heavenly crown, but of what human Lady Bountiful always
seeks--social position. Charity covers a multitude of sins; the
greatest of them is hypocrisy. I have yet to see a charitable man
or woman or child whose chief and only noteworthy object was not
self-glorification. The people who believe in brotherhood do not go in
for charity. They wish to abolish poverty, whereas charity revels in
poverty and seeks to increase it, to change it from miserable poverty
which might die into comfortable pauperism which can live on, and
fester and breed on, and fawn on and give vanity ever more and more
exquisite titillations. Holy Cross, my wife’s new spiritual guide, was
past master of the pauper-making and pauper-utilizing arts. Its rector
and his staff of slimy sycophants had the small standing army of its
worthy poor trained to perfection. When my wife went down among them,
she returned home with face aglow and eyes heavenly. What a treat those
wretches had given her! And in the first blush of her enthusiasm she
dispensed lavishly, where the older members of the church exacted the
full measure of titillation for every dollar invested and awarded extra
sums only to some novelty in lickspittling or toadeating.

Were I not sure I should quite wear out the forbearance of gentle
reader, I should linger to describe this marvelous charity plant for
providing idle or social-position-hunting rich women with spiritual
pleasures-- I had almost said debaucheries, but that would be intruding
my private and perhaps prejudiced opinion. I have no desire to
irritate, much less shake the faith of, those who believe in Holy Cross
and its “uplift” work. And I don’t suppose Holy Cross does any great
amount of harm. The poor who prostitute themselves to its purposes are
weak things, beyond redemption. As for the rich who waste time and
money there, would they not simply waste elsewhere were there no Holy
Cross?

My wife was, at that time, a very ignorant woman, thinly covered with
a veneer of what I now know was a rather low grade of culture. That
veneer impressed me. It had impressed our Brooklyn friends of St.
Mary’s. But I fancy it must have looked cheap to expert eyes. Where her
surpassing shrewdness showed itself was in that she herself recognized
her own shortcomings. Rare and precious is the vanity that comforts and
sustains without self-deception. She knew she wasn’t the real thing,
knew she had not yet got hold of the real thing. And when she began to
move about, cautiously and quietly, in Holy Cross, she realized that at
last she was in the presence of the real thing.

My big responsibilities, my associations in finance, had been giving
me a superb training in worldly wisdom. I think I had almost as strong
a natural aptitude for “catching on” to the better thing in speech and
manner and in dress as had Edna. It is not self-flattery for me to
say that up to the Holy Cross period I was further advanced than she.
Certainly I ought to have been, for a man has a much better opportunity
than a woman, and one of the essentials of equipment for great affairs
is ability to observe accurately the little no less than the large.
Looking back, I recall things which lead me to suspect that Edna saw my
superiority in certain matters most important to her, and was irritated
by it. However that may be, a few months in Holy Cross and she had
grasped the essentials of the social art as I, or any other masculine
man, never could grasp it. And her veneer of “middle-class” culture
disappeared under a thick and enduring coating of the best New York
manner.

“What has become of _you_?” I said to her. “I haven’t seen you in
weeks.”

“I don’t understand,” said she, ruffling as she always did when she
suspected me of indulging in my coarse and detestable sense of humor.

“Why, you don’t act like yourself at all,” said I. “Even when we’re
alone you give the uncomfortable sense of dressed-up--not as if _you_
were ‘dressed-up,’ but as if _I_ were. I feel like a plowboy before a
princess.”

She was delighted!

“You,” I went on, “are now exactly like the rest of those women in
Holy Cross. I suppose it’s all right to look and talk and act that way
before people. At least, I’ve no objection if it pleases you. But for
heaven’s sake, Edna, don’t spoil our privacy with it. The queen doesn’t
wear her coronation robes all the time.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said she.

“Don’t you?” cried I, laughing. “What a charming fraud you are!” And
I seized her in my arms and kissed her. And she seemed to yield and
to return my caresses. But I was uncomfortable. She would not drop
that new manner. The incident seems trifling enough; perhaps it was
trifling. But it stands out in my memory. It marks the change in our
relationship. I recall it all distinctly--how she looked, how young and
charming and cold, what she was wearing, the delicate simple dress
that ought to have made her most alluring to me, yet made me feel as if
she were indeed alluring, but not for _me_. A subtle difference there,
but abysmal; the difference between the woman who tries to make herself
attractive for the sake of her husband and the woman who makes toilets
in the conscious or half-conscious longing successfully to prostitute
herself to the eyes of the public. I recall every detail of that
incident; yet I have only the vaguest recollection of our beginning to
occupy separate bedrooms. By that time the feeling of alienation must
have grown so strong that I took the radical change in our habits as
the matter of course.

Many are the women, in all parts of the earth, who have sought to climb
into the world of fashion by the broad and apparently easy stairway
of charity. But most of them have failed because they were unaware
of the secret of that stairway, an unsuspected secret which I shall
proceed to point out. It seems, as I have said, a particularly easy
stairway--broad, roomy, with invalid steps. It is, in fact, a moving
stairway so cunningly contrived that she--it is usually she--who
ascends keeps in the same place. She goes up, but at exactly her
ascending rate the stairway goes down. She sees other women making
apparently no more effort than she ascending rapidly, and presently
entering the earthly heaven at the top. Yet there she stands, marking
time, moving not one inch upward, and there she will stand until she
wearies, relaxes her efforts, and finds herself rapidly descending.
But how do the women who ascend accomplish it? I do not know. You must
ask them. I only know the cause of the failure of the women who do
not ascend. If I knew why the others succeeded I should not tell it. I
would not deprive fashionable women of the joy of occupying a difficult
height from which they can indulge themselves in the happiness of
sneering and spitting down at their lowlier sisters. And I have no
sympathy with the aspirations or the humiliations of those lowlier
sisters.

My energetic and aspiring wife presently found herself on this
stairway, with no hint as to its secret, much less as to the way
of overcoming its peculiarity. She toiled daily in Holy Cross. She
subscribed to everything, she helped in everything. She was the proud
recipient of the rector’s loud praises as his “most devoted, least
worldly, most spiritual helper.” But--not an invitation of the kind
she wanted. Everyone was “just lovely” to her. Whenever any charitable
or spiritual matter was to be discussed, no matter how grand and
exclusive the house in which the discussion was to be held, there was
my wife in a place of honor, eagerly consulted--and urged to subscribe.
But nothing unworldly. They understood how spiritual she was, did
those sweet, good people. They knew Saint Edna wished no social
frivolities--no dinners or theater parties, no bridge or dancing.

She was a wise lady. She hid her burning impatience. She smiled
and purred when she yearned to scowl and scratch. She waited, and
prayed for some lucky accident that would swing her across the
invisible, apparently nonexistent but actually impassable dead line.
She had expected snubs and cold shoulders. Never a snub, never a
cold shoulder. Always smiles and gracious handshakings and amiable
familiarities, but those always of the kind that serve to accentuate
caste distinction instead of removing it. For the first time in her
life, I think, she was completely stumped. She could combat obstacles.
She might even have found a way to fight fog. But how ridiculous to
make struggles and thrust out fists when there is nothing but empty,
sunny air!

She held church lunches and dinners at our house--of course, had me on
duty at the dinners. All in vain. The distinction between the spiritual
and the temporal remained in force. The grand people came, acted as if
they were delighted, complimented her on her house, on her hospitality,
went away, to invite her to similar dreary functions at their houses.
And my, how it did cost her! No wonder Holy Cross made a pet of her and
elected me to the board of vestrymen.

Once in a while she would find something in her net, so slyly cast, so
softly drawn. She would have a wild spasm of joy; then the something
would turn out to be another climber like herself. Those climbers
avoided each other as devils dodge the font of holy water. The climber
she would have caught would be one who, ignorant of the intricacies of
New York society, was under the impression that the Mrs. Godfrey Loring
so conspicuous in Holy Cross must be a social personage. They would
examine each other--at a series of joyous entertainments each would
provide for the other, would discover their mutual mistake--and-- You
know the contemptuous toss with which the fisherman rids himself of a
bloater; you know the hysterical leap of the released bloater back into
the water.

But how it was funny! My wife did not take me into her confidence as to
her social struggles. She maintained with me the same sweet, elegant
exterior of spiritual placidity with which she faced the rest of the
world. Nevertheless, in a dim sort of way I had some notion of what
she was about--though, as I was presently to discover, I was wholly
mistaken in my idea of her progress.

“What has happened to Mrs. Lestrange?” I said to her one evening at
dinner. “Is she ill?”

She cast a quick, nervous glance in the direction of the butler. I,
looking at him by way of a mirror, thought I saw upon his aristocratic
countenance a faint trace of that insolent secret glee which fills
servants when their betters are humiliated before them. “Mrs.
Lestrange?” she said carelessly. “Oh, I see her now and then.”

“But you’ve been inseparable until lately,” said I. “A quarrel, I
suppose?”

“Not at all,” said my wife tartly.

And she shifted abruptly to another subject. When I went to the little
study adjoining my sitting room to smoke she came with me. There she
said:

“Please don’t mention Mrs. Lestrange before the servants again.”

“Why, what’s up?” said I. “Did she turn out to be a crook?”

“Heavens, no! How coarse you are, Godfrey. Simply that I was terribly
mistaken in her.”

“She looked like a confidence woman or a madam,” said I. “Didn’t you
tell me she was a howling swell?”

“I thought she was,” said my wife, and I knew something important was
coming; only that theory would account for her admitting she had made
a mistake. “And in a way she was. But they caught her several years
ago taking money to get some dreadful low Western people into society.
Since then she’s asked--she herself--because she’s well connected and
amusing. But she can’t help anyone else.”

“Oh, I see,” said I. “And you don’t feel strong enough socially as yet
to be able to afford the luxury of her friendship.”

“Strong enough!” said Edna with intense bitterness. “I have no position
at all--none whatever.”

I was surprised, for until that moment I had been assuming she was on
or near the top of the wave, moving swiftly toward triumphant success.
“You want too much,” said I. “You’ve really got all there is to get.
At that last reception of yours you had all the heavy swells. My valet
told me so.”

“Reception to raise funds for the orphanage,” said Edna with a vicious
sneer--the unloveliest expression I had ever seen on her lovely
face--and I had seen not a few unlovely expressions there in our many
married years, some of them extremely trying years. “I tell you I am
nobody socially. They take my money for their rotten old charities.
They use me for their tiresome church work--and they do nothing for
me--nothing! How I _hate_ them!”

I sat smoking my cigar and watching her face. It was a wonderfully
young face. Not that she was so old; on the contrary, she was still
young in years. I call her face wonderfully young because it had that
look of inexhaustible, eternal youth which is rare even in the faces
of boys and girls. But that evening I was not thinking so much of her
youth and her beauty as of a certain expression of hardness, of evil
passions rampant--envy and hatred and jealousy, savage disappointment
over defeats in sordid battles.

“Edna,” said I, hesitatingly, “why don’t you drop all that? Can’t you
see there’s nothing in it? You’re tempting the worst things in your
nature to grow and destroy all that’s good and sweet--all that makes
you--and me--happy. People aren’t necessary to us. And if you must have
friends, surely _all_ the attractive people in New York aren’t in that
little fashionable set. Judging from what I’ve seen of them, they’re a
lot of bores.”

“They look bored here,” retorted she. “And no wonder! They come as a
Christian duty.”

I laughed. “Now, honestly, are those fashionable people the best
educated, the best in any way--any real way? I’ve talked with the men,
and the younger ones--the ones that go in for society--are unspeakable
rotters. I wouldn’t have them about.”

Edna’s eyes flashed, and her form quivered in a gust of hysterical
fury--the breaking of long-pent passion, of anger and despair, taking
me as an excuse for vent. “Oh, it’s terrible to be married to a man who
_always_ misunderstands!--one who can’t sympathize!” cried she. It was
a remark she often made, but never before had she put so much energy,
so much bitterness into it.

“What do I misunderstand?” I asked, more hurt than I cared to show.
“Where don’t I sympathize?”

“Let’s not talk about it!” exclaimed she. “If I weren’t a remarkable
woman I’d have given up long ago--I’d give up now.”

Before you smile at her egotism, gentle reader, please remember that
husband and wife were talking alone; also that with a few pitiful
exceptions all human beings think surpassingly well of themselves, and
do not hesitate to express that good opinion privately. I guess there’s
more lying done about lack of egotism and of vanity generally than
about all other matters put together.

Said I: “You are indeed a wonder, dear. In this country one sees many
astonishing transformations. But I doubt if there have been many equal
to the transformation of the girl I married into the girl who’s sitting
before me.”

“And what good has it done me?” demanded she. “How I’ve worked away at
myself--inside and out--and all for nothing!”

“You’ve still got _me_,” said I jovially, yet in earnest too. “Lots of
women lose their husbands. I’ve never had a single impulse to wander.”

In the candor of that intimacy she gave me a most unflattering look--a
look a woman does well not to cast at a man unless she is more
absolutely sure of him than anyone can be of anything in this uncertain
world. I laughed as if I thought she meant that look as a jest; I put
the look away in my memory with a mark on it that meant “to be taken
out and examined at leisure.” But she was absorbed in her chagrin over
her social failure; she probably hardly realized I was there.

“Well, what’s the next move?” inquired I presently.

“You’ve got to help,” replied she--and I knew this was what she had
been revolving in her mind all evening.

“Anything that doesn’t take me away from business, or keep me up too
late to fit myself for the next day.”

“Business--always business,” said she, in deepest disgust. “Do you
_never_ think of anything else?”

“My business and my family--that’s my life,” said I.

“Not your family,” replied she. “You care nothing about them.”

“Edna,” I said sharply, “that is unjust and untrue.”

“Oh, you give them money, if that’s what you mean,” said she
disdainfully.

“And I give them love,” said I. “The trouble is I give so freely that
you don’t value it.”

“Oh, you are a good husband,” said she carelessly. “But I want you to
take an interest.”

“In your social climbing?”

“How insulting you are!” she cried, with flashing eyes. “I am trying to
claim the position we are entitled to, and you speak of me as if I were
one of those vulgar pushers.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I humbly. “I was merely joking.”

“I’ve often told you that your idea of humor was revolting.”

I felt distressed for her in her chagrin and despair. I was ready to
bear almost anything she might see fit to inflict. “What do you want me
to do?” I asked. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Do you need more money?”

“I need help--real help,” said she.

“Money’s god over the realm of fashion, the same as it is over that
of--of religion--of politics--or anything you please. And luckily I’ve
got that little god in my employ, my dear.”

“If you are so powerful,” said she, “put me into fashionable
society--make these people receive me and come to my house.”

“But they do,” I reminded her.

“I mean _socially_,” cried she. “_Can’t_ I make you understand? Why are
business men so dumb at anything else? Compel these people to take me
as one of them.”

“Now, Edna, my dear,” protested I, “be reasonable. How can I do that?”

“Easily, if you’ve got real power,” rejoined she. “It’s been done
often, I’ve found out lately. At least half the leaders in society
got in originally by compelling it. But you, going round among men
intimately--you must know it--must have known all along. If you’d
been the right sort of man I’d not have to humiliate myself by asking
you--by saying these dreadful things.” Her eyes were flashing and her
bosom was heaving. “Women have hated men for less. But I must bear
my cross. You insist on degrading me. Very well. I’ll let myself be
degraded. I’ll say the things a decent man would not ask a woman to
say----”

“Edna, darling,” I pleaded. “Honestly, I don’t understand. You’ll have
to tell me. And it’s not degrading. We have no secrets from each other.
We who love each other can say anything to each other--anything. What
do you wish me to do?”

“Use your power over the men. Frighten them into ordering their wives
to invite us and to accept our invitations. You do business with a lot
of the men, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said I.

“You can benefit or injure them, as you please, can’t you?--can take
money away from them--can put them in the way of making it?”

“Yes,” said I; “to a certain extent.”

“And how do you use this power?”

“In building up great enterprises. I am founding a city just now, for
instance, where there was nothing but a swamp beside a lake, and----”

“In making more and more money for yourself,” she cut in, “you think
only of yourself.”

“And you--what do _you_ think of?” said I.

“Not of myself,” cried she indignantly. “Never of myself. Of Margot.
Of you. Of the family. I am working to build _us_ up--to make _us_
somebody and not mere low money grubbers.”

I did not see it from her point of view. But I was not inclined to
aggravate her excitement and anger.

“Why shouldn’t you use your powers for some unselfish purpose?” she
went on. “Why not try to have higher ambition?”

I observed her narrowly. She was sincere.

“I want you to help me--for Margot’s sake, for your own sake,” she went
on in a kind of exaltation. “Margot is coming on. She’ll be out in less
than three years. We’ve got to make a position for her.”

“I thought, up there at Miss Ryper’s she was----”

“That shows how little interest you take!” cried Edna. “Don’t you know
what is happening? Why, already the fashionable girls at her school are
beginning to shy off from her----”

“Don’t be absurd!” laughed I. “That simply could not be. She’s lovely,
sweet, attractive in every way. Any girls anywhere would be proud to
have her as a friend.”

“How _can_ you be so ignorant of the world!” cried Edna in a frenzy
of exasperation. “Oh, you’ll drive me mad with your stupidity! Can’t
you realize how _low_ fashionable people are. The girls who were
her friends so long as they were all mere children are now taking a
positive delight in snubbing her, because she’s so pretty and will be
an heiress. It gives them a sense of power to treat her as an inferior,
to make her suffer.”

I flung away the cigar and sat up in the chair. “How long has this been
going on?” I demanded.

“Nearly a year,” replied my wife. “It began as soon as she lost her
childishness and developed toward a woman. I’m glad I’ve roused you
at last. So long as she was a mere baby they liked her--invited her
to their children’s parties--came to hers. But now they’re dropping
her. Oh, it’s maddening! They are so sweet and smooth, the vile little
daughters of vile mothers!”

“Incredible!” said I. “Surely not those sweet, well-mannered girls
I’ve seen here at her parties? _They_ couldn’t do that sort of thing.
Why, what do those babies know about social position and such nonsense?”

“What do they know? What _don’t_ they know?” cried Edna, trembling
with rage at her humiliation and at my incredulity. “You _are_ an
innocent! There ought to be a new proverb--innocent as a married man.
Why, nowadays the children begin their social training in the cradle.
They soon learn to know a nurse or a butler from a lady or a gentleman
before they learn to walk. They hear the servants talk. They hear their
parents talk. Except innocent you everyone nowadays thinks and talks
about these things.”

“But Margot--our Margot--she doesn’t know!” I said with conviction.

Edna laughed harshly. “Know? What kind of mother do you think I am? Of
course she knows. Haven’t I been teaching her ever since she began to
talk? Why do you suppose I’ve always called her the little duchess?”

“She suggests a superior little person,” said I, groping vaguely.

“She suggests a superior person because I gave her that name and
brought her up to look and act and feel the part. She expects to be a
real duchess some day--” Edna reared proudly, and her voice rang out
confidently as she added--“and she shall be!”

I stared at her. It seemed to me she must be out of her mind. Oh, I was
indeed innocent, gentle reader.

“I’ve always treated her as a duchess, and have made the servants do
it, and have trained her to treat them as if she were a duchess.” A
proud smile came into her face, transforming it suddenly back to its
loveliness. “The first time I ever read about a duchess--read, knowing
what I was reading about--I decided that I would have a daughter and
that she should be a duchess.”

At any previous time such a sally would have made me laugh. But not
then, for I saw that she meant it profoundly, and for the first time I
was realizing what had been going on in my family, all unsuspected by
me.

“But first,” proceeded Edna, “she shall have the highest social
position in New York. And you must help if I am to succeed.” The
fury burst into her face again. “Those little wretches, snubbing
her!--dropping her! I’ll make them pay for it.”

“Do you mean to tell me that Margot realizes all this?” said I.

“Poor child, she’s wretched about it. Only yesterday she said to me:
‘Mamma, is it true that you and papa are very common, and that we
haven’t anything but a lot of stolen money? One of the girls got mad at
me because I was so good-looking and so proud, and taunted me with it.’”

“Incredible!” said I, dazed.

“She’s horribly unhappy,” Edna went on. “And it cuts her to the heart
to be losing all her dearest friends. I did my duty and taught her
which girls to cultivate, and she was intimate only with the right sort
of New York girls.”

“I expect she has been indiscreet,” said I. “They’ve found out why she
made friends with them and----”

“You will drive me crazy!” cried Edna. “_Can’t_ you understand? All
the mothers and the governesses--all the grown people in respectable
families teach the children. Those mothers who don’t teach it directly
see that it’s taught by the governesses, or else select the proper
friends for their little girls and see that they drop any who aren’t
proper.”

I dropped back in my chair. I was stunned. It seemed to me I had never
heard anything quite so infamous in my life. And as I reflected on what
she had said I wondered that I had not realized it before. I recalled
a hundred significant facts that had come out in talks I had had with
men, women, and children in this fashionable world from which we were
excluded, yet with which we were in constant and close communication.

“The question is, what are _you_ going to do,” proceeded Edna.

I shook my head, probably looking as dazed as I felt.

“What does that headshake mean?” demanded she.

“_You_--taught _Margot_ to be a--a--like those other girls?” said I.

“Oh, you fool!” cried Edna. And in excuse for her, please remember I
had ever been a dotingly bored slave of hers--as uxorious a husband
as you ever saw--and therefore inevitably despised, for women have so
little intelligence that they despise a man who loves them and lets
them rule. “You fool!” she repeated. “Yes, I brought her up like a
lady--taught her to cultivate nice things and nice people. What should
I teach her? To associate with common people? To drop back toward
where we came from--where _you_ belong?”

“Yes, I guess I do,” said I.

Up to that time I had interested myself in only one aspect of human
nature--the aspect that concerned me as a business man. But from that
time I began to study the human animal in all his--and her--aspects.
And it was not long before I learned what that animal is forced to
become when exposed to the powerful thrusts and temptings of wealth
and social position. In our alternations of pride and humility we
habitually take undue credit or give undue blame to ourselves for what
is wholly the result of circumstance. The truth is, we are like flocks
of birds in a high wind. Some of us fly more steadily than others,
some are quite beaten down, others seem almost self-directing; but
all, great and small, weak and strong, are controlled by the wind, and
those who make the best showing are those who adapt themselves most
skillfully to the will of the wind.

At the time when Edna and I were talking I had not become a
philosopher. I was in the primitive stages of development in which most
men and nearly all women remain their whole lives through--the stage in
which you live, gentle reader, with your shallow mistaken notions of
what is and your shallower mistaken notions of what ought to be. So, as
Edna uncovered herself to me, I shrank in horror. It was fortunate--for
her, at least--that I had always trained myself never to make hasty
speeches. My expertness in that habit has probably been the principal
cause of my business success, of my ability to outwit even abler men
than myself. I did not yield to the impulse to burst out against her.
I compressed my lips and silently watched as she lifted the veil over
our family life and revealed to me the truth about it.

“What are you going to do?” she asked impatiently, yet with a certain
uneasiness born no doubt of a something in my manner that made her
vaguely afraid, for while she knew I was her slave and despised me, as
I was to learn, for being so weak before a mere woman, she also knew
that, outside of her domain, I was not her slave nor anybody’s, but
planned and executed at the pleasure of my own will.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said I slowly. “I must think. All
this is new to me.”

“If you haven’t any pride in yourself, or in me,” said she, “still you
surely must have pride for Margot.”

“I think so,” said I.

“If you could know how they have made the poor child suffer!”

I made no reply, nor did I encourage her to talk further. In fact, when
she began again I stopped her with: “I’ve heard enough, my dear. And
I’ve some important business to attend to.”

She, preparing to leave me alone with my papers, came and put her
arms round my neck and pressed her cheek against mine. I think she
was uneasy about the posture of the affair in my mind--feared stupid
commercial I could not appreciate these vital things of life. I suspect
my tranquil reception of her caresses did not tend to allay her
uneasiness. Never before had she failed to interest me in her physical
self; and the only reason she then failed was that in the general
upsetting of all my ideas of what my family life was there had been
tossed up to the surface an undefined suspicion of her sincerity as a
wife. I was not altogether blind as to the relations of men and women,
as to the fact that women often coolly played upon the passions of men
for their own purposes of money getting in its various forms. My wife
was right in her sneer at the innocence of married men. But there are
exceptions, and a woman with a husband intelligent in every way except
in seeing through women would do well to take care how she tempts his
intelligence to shake off its indifference in that respect.

The next morning I was breakfasting alone as usual. No, gentle reader,
I am not girding at my poor wife as you hastily accuse. I am sure I do
not deceive myself when I say I never was of those men who fuss about
trifles. Thank heaven, as soon as we had a servant my wife kept away
from breakfast. It was one of the things I loved her for. If I had
been married to a woman who appeared at breakfast looking lovely and
smiling sweetly, I should have become a bad-tempered tyrant. I want no
sentimentalities in the early-morning hours. I wake up uncomfortable
and sour, and I quarrel with myself and look about for trouble until I
have had something to eat and coffee. Further in the same direction, I
took particular pleasure in my wife’s small personal slovenlinesses,
in her curl papers, in her occasional overlaying of her face with cold
cream and the like, in her careless negligee worn in her own rooms.
There is, I guess, no nature so prodigal that it has not some small
economies. Edna had, probably still has, a fondness for wearing out
thoroughly, in secluded privacy, house dresses, underclothes, and night
gowns.

It took nothing from my delight in her beauty that she was not
invariably beautiful. I’ve rarely seen her lovely early in the morning.
Who is? I should have taken habitual early-morning loveliness as a
personal insult. I’ve seen her homely all day long, and for several
days at a time. She was as attractive to me than as at her most
beautiful. I detest monotony. Thank heaven, she was never monotonous
to look at; one rather expects _mental_ monotony in women unless one
is a fool. I didn’t mind her times of homeliness, because she could be
so far, far the opposite of homely. I did not mind her way of getting
herself up in odds and ends, mussily, but, mind you, never after the
Passaic days unclean--never! I did not mind her dishevelments because,
when she set out to dress, she did it so bang up well. She was born
with a talent for dress; she rapidly developed it into an art. You know
what I mean. You’ve seen the girl with hardly five dollars’ worth of
clothing on her, including the hat, yet making the woman from the best
dressmaker in Paris look a frump.

I never had to join the innumerable and pitiful army of men who give
the woman their money to squander upon bad fits and bad taste, and are
bowed down with shame when they have to issue forth with her. I can
honestly say, and Edna will bear me out, that I gave her money freely.
No doubt the reason in part was I found it so easy to make money that
I was indifferent to extravagance. But the chief reason, I believe,
was Edna’s skill at dress. The woman who is physically alluring to her
husband, and who knows how to dress, rarely has difficulty in getting
money from him, though he be a miser. But, gentle lady reader, can you
in your heart blame a man for grudging his earnings to a woman who
isn’t fit to dress and who doesn’t know how, either?

As I had begun to tell when I interrupted myself, I was breakfasting
alone the morning after that memorable talk with Edna, and Margot came
down to glance in for a smile at me on her way to school.

In theory Margot was still classed as a child, and would be so classed
for two years longer. In fact she was, and had been for two years and
more, a full-fledged young lady. That is the way American children of
the rank for which my wife was training Margot are being brought up
nowadays. She had her own apartment, dressing room and bath, sitting
room, reception room--as many rooms as my wife and I had altogether
when we began married life, and about four times the room. As for
luxury, a comparison would be ridiculous. Also Margot had her own staff
of servants--companion, maid, maid’s assistant--and her own automobile
with chauffeur, used by no one else. It would be hard to find more
helpless creatures than these young aspirants to aristocracy. And they
prided themselves upon their ignorance of the realities, and their
mothers, often with hypocritical pretense of distress, boasted it. At
that time I thought it amusing. The serious side of it was entirely out
of my range. We American men of the comfortable and luxurious classes
are addicted to the habit of regarding our wives and children as
toys, as mere sources of amusement not to be taken seriously. It isn’t
strange that the children should not mind this, but what a commentary
upon the real mentality of the women that they tolerate and encourage
it! Our women are always, with a fine show of earnestness, demanding
that they be taken seriously. But woe unto the man who believes them
in earnest and tries to treat them as his equals instead of as dainty
toys, odalisques. How he will be denounced, hated, and, if proper
alimony can be got, divorced!

Margot’s parties differed in no respect from grown-up parties, except
that there were restrictions in the matter of hours and also as to the
serving of drinks. For, I believe my wife did not follow the extreme
of fashionable custom, but forbade wines and punch at these parties.
In this matter, as in the matter of using slang and in many others,
she held that only people of long-established social position, people
with what is called tradition, could safely make excursions beyond the
bounds of conventionality; that it was safest, wisest for people like
herself to stay well within the bounds, to be prim even, and so to
avoid any possible criticism as vulgar. A very shrewd woman was Edna.
If her intelligence had been equal to her shrewdness and energy, and if
she had possessed a gleam of the sense of humor! However----

In no essential respect did Margot’s routine of life differ from
that of her mother--and her mother’s routine of inane and worthless
time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable
women and apers of fashionable women. Edna did a vast amount of
studying, with and without teachers. It was all shallow and showy.
Margot’s studies were also beneath contempt. I amused myself from time
to time by inquiring--with pretense of gravity--into what they were
teaching her at the Ryper school for the turning out of fashionable
womanhood. Such a mess of trash! She was learning much about social
usages, from how to sit in a carriage--a rare art that, I assure you,
gentle reader--to how to receive guests at a large dinner. She was
studying some of the vulgarities--science, history, literature, and the
like--but in no vulgar way. She would get only the thinnest smatter
of talkable stuff about them--nothing “unsettling,” nothing that
might possibly rouse the mind to think or distract the attention from
the “high” things of life. She was dabbling in music, in drawing, in
several similar costly fripperies. And the sum total of expense!--well,
no wonder Miss Ryper was fast becoming as rich as some of the asteroids
in the plutocracy she adored.

I regarded Margot’s education as a species of joke. It never occurred
to me that our pretty baby had the right to be educated to become a
wife and a mother. And why should it have occurred to me? Where is that
being done? Who is thinking of it? In all the oceans of twaddle about
the elevation of woman where is there a drop of good sense about _real_
education? You say I was criminally negligent as to my daughter’s
education. But how about your own? The truth is, we all still look upon
education as a frill, an ornament. We never think of it, whether for
our sons or for our daughters, as nothing more or less than teaching a
human being how to live. It is high time to end this idiotic ignorant
exaltation of tomfoolery into culture!

Poor Margot! How the little girls in plain clothes--and machine-made
underwear--must have envied her as she swept along in her limousine,
dressed with that enormously costly simplicity which only the rich
can afford. No wonder many of the other girls at the Ryper school
hated her. For, her mother was in one respect unlike most of the
fashionable mothers who are too busy doing things not worth doing to
attend to their children. Her mother gave her loving care, spent many
hours--of anxious thought, no doubt--in planning to make her the most
luxurious, the most helpless, the most envied girl in the school. We
hear unendingly about the good that love does in the world. Not too
much--no, indeed! But at the same time might it not be well if we also
heard about the harm love can do--and does? How many sons and daughters
have been ruined by loving parents! How many husbands have been wrecked
by the flatteries and the assiduities of loving wives! How many wives
have been lured to decay and destruction by the over-indulgent love of
their husbands! What we need in this world is not more sentiment, but
more intelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and crazily
in _both_ directions, gentle reader, unless it has well-balanced
intelligence to guide it.

Margot, smiling in the doorway of the breakfast room, put me at once
into a less somber humor. She was tall and slim--an inch taller than
her mother and with the same supple, well-proportioned figure. She
had her mother’s small, tip-tilted face and luminous eyes, but they
were of an intense dark gray that gave her an expression of poetic
thoughtfulness and mystery. Whiter or more perfectly formed teeth I
have never seen. In former days children’s teeth were neglected. But
my wife, with her peculiar reach for all matters having to do with
appearances, had learned the modern methods of caring for the body when
Margot was still in the period when the body is almost as formable as
sculptor’s clay. Thus Margot’s teeth had been looked after and made
perfect and kept so. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders like a
wonderful changeable veil of golden brown. Often at first glance you
are dazzled by these carefully fed and carefully groomed children of
the rich, only to note at the second glance that the best showing has
been made of precious little in the way of natural charm. But this was
not true of Margot. The longer you looked, and the more attentively,
the finer she seemed to be--like a rare perfect specimen from a
connoisseur’s greenhouses. There’s no doubt about it, Edna did know
the physical side of life. She would have got notable results even had
we been poor. As it was, with all the money she cared to spend, she
performed what looked like miracles.

“Come and kiss me, Margot,” said I.

She obeyed, with a charming air of restrained eagerness that is
regarded as ladylike. “My car is waiting,” said she. “I’m late.”

“Is that Therese”--her maid--“out in the hall waiting to go with you?”

“Yes. Miss Parnell”--her companion--“has a headache, poor creature!”

Margot had caught to perfection the refined, elegant, fashionable tone
of speaking of the servile classes. Though I was in a critical mood
that morning, I was not critical of my beloved little Margot, and her
airs entertained me as much as ever. Said I:

“Sit down, little duchess”--the familiar name slipped out
unconsciously--“and talk to me a few minutes.”

“But I’m shockingly late, papa,” pleaded she.

“No matter. I’ll telephone Miss Ryper, if you wish.” To the butler, who
was serving me: “Sackville, go tell Therese that I’m detaining Miss
Margot. And close the door behind you.”

Sackville retired. Margot seated herself with alacrity. She did not
like her useless school any better than other children like more
or less useful schools. “Are you taking me to the theater Saturday
afternoon, as you promised?” said she. “And do get a box and let me ask
two of the girls.”

“Certainly,” said I. “If I can’t go, Miss Parnell will chaperon you.”

“No, I want you, papa. It’s so nice to have a man.”

“How are you getting on at school? Not with the studies”--I laughed
at the absurdity of calling her fiddle-faddle studies--“but with the
girls?”

Her face clouded. “Has mamma told you?”

“Told me what?”

She hesitated.

“Go on, dear,” said I. “What’s the trouble?”

“Oh, it’s always the same thing,” she sighed, with a grown-up air
that was both humorous and pathetic. “Some of the girls are down on
me--about--about social position. You see, we don’t go _socially_ with
their families.”

“Why should we?” said I. “We don’t know them nor they us. Naturally,
they don’t care anything about us, nor we about them.”

She hung her head. “But I want to go with them,” said she doggedly.

“Why?” said I.

“Because--because--it’s the proper thing to do. If you don’t go with
them everybody looks down on you.” She lifted her head, and her
flashing eyes reminded me of her mother. “It makes me just _wild_ to be
looked down on.”

“I should say so,” said I. “Those little girls at Miss Ryper’s must
be an ill-bred lot. We must take you away from there and put you in a
school with nice girls.”

“Oh, no, father!” she cried in a panic. “Those girls are the
_nicest_--the only nice girls in any school in New York. All the other
schools look up to ours. I’d cry my eyes out in any other school.”

“Why?” said I.

“I’d feel--_low_.” Her eyes had filled and her cheeks were flushed.
“I’d be out of place except among the richest and most aristocratic
girls.”

“But you don’t like them,” said I gently. I began to feel a sensation
of sickness at the heart.

“I _hate_ them!” cried she with passionate energy. “But I want to stay
on there and _make_ them be friendly with me. I’ve got too much pride,
papa, to run away.”

“Pride,” said I, and my tone must have been sad. “That isn’t pride,
dear. You ought to choose your friends by liking. You ought to feel
above girls with such cheap ideas.”

“But I’m not above them,” protested she. “And I couldn’t like any girl
I’d be ashamed to be seen with, unless she were a sort of servant. Oh,
papa, you don’t appreciate how proud I am.”

“Proud of what, dear? Of your parents? Of yourself?”

She hung her head.

“Of what, dear?” I urged.

“It hurts me not to be treated as--as the inside clique of girls in
our secret society treat each other.” She was almost crying. “They
don’t even call me by my first name any more. They speak to me as Miss
Loring--and _so_ politely--exactly as I speak to Miss Parnell or one of
the teachers or a servant. Oh, I’m so proud! I’d love to be like Gracie
Fortescue. She speaks even to Miss Ryper as I would to Miss Parnell.”

My digestion wasn’t any too good, even in those days. My whole
breakfast suddenly went wrong--turned to poison inside me, I suppose.
A hot wave of rage against I knew not whom or what rolled up into my
brain. I pushed away my plate abruptly. “Run along, child,” I said in a
hoarse voice I did not recognize as my own.

She threw her arms round my neck with a gesture and an expression that
made me realize how close a copy of her mother she was. “You wouldn’t
take me away from my school, would you, papa dear?” she pleaded.

“All I want is to make you happy,” said I, patting and stroking that
thick and lovely veil of flowing hair.

She assumed that I meant she was to stay on with the viperous Ryper
brood, and went away almost happy. She had awakened to the fact that
there were fates even worse than being snubbed and addressed like a
teacher or a companion or a servant or some other lower animal--yes,
far worse fates. For instance, not being able to feel that she was,
on whatever degrading terms, at least associated with the adored
fashionables.

That evening when my wife again accompanied me to my study, after
dinner, I said to her:

“I’ve been turning over our talk last night. I haven’t been able to
reach a conclusion as yet, except on one point. I can’t help you
socially in the way you suggested.”

I glanced at her as I said this. She was looking at me. Her pale,
intense expression fascinated me.

“I don’t think you have thought about it fully,” said she slowly.

“Yes,” said I, with my utmost deliberateness; “and my decision is
final.”

She rose, stood beside her chair, rubbing her hand softly along the top
of the back. “Very well,” said she quietly. And she left me alone.




V


In refusing Edna her heart’s desire thus promptly and tersely I had an
object. I assumed she would protest and argue; in the discussion that
would follow some light might come to me, utterly befogged as to what
course to take about my family affairs. I knew something should be
done--something quick and drastic. But what? It was no new experience
to me to be faced with complex and well-nigh impossible situations.
My business life had been a succession of such experiences. And
while I had learned much as to handling them, I had also learned how
dangerous it is to rush in recklessly and to begin action before one
has discovered what to do--and what _not_ to do. The world is full of
Hasty Hals and Hatties who pride themselves on their emergency minds,
on knowing just what to do in any situation the instant it arises; and
fine spectacles they are, lying buried and broken amid the ruins they
have aggravated if not created.

How recover my wife? How rescue my daughter? I could think of no
plan--of no beginning toward a plan. And when Edna, by receiving my
refusal in cold silence, defeated my hope of a possibly illuminating
discussion, I did not know which way to turn.

Why had I refused to help her in the way she suggested? Not on moral
grounds, gentle reader. There I should have been as free from scruple
as you yourself would have been, as you perhaps have been in your
social climbing or maneuvering in your native town, wherever it is.
Nor yet through fear of failure. I did not know the social game, but
I did know something of human nature. And I had found out that the
triumphant class, far from being the gentlest and most civilized, as
its dominant position in civilization would indicate, was in fact the
most barbarous, was saturated with the raw savage spirit of the right
of might. I am speaking of actualities, not of pretenses--of deeds,
not of words. To find a class approaching it in frank savagery of
will and action you would have to descend through the social strata
until you came to the class that wields the blackjack and picks
pockets and dynamites safes. The triumphant class became triumphant
not by refinement and courtesy and consideration, but by defiance of
those fundamentals of civilization--by successful defiance of them.
It remained the triumphant class by keeping that primal savagery
of nature. As soon as any member of it began to grow tame--gentle,
considerate, except where consideration for others would increase his
own wealth and power, became really a disciple of the sweet gospel he
professed and urged upon others--just so soon did he begin to lose his
wealth into the strong unscrupulous hands ever reaching for it--and
with waning wealth naturally power and prestige waned.

No, I did not refuse because I thought the triumphant class would
contemptuously repel any attempt to carry its social doors by assault.
I saw plainly enough that I could compel enough of these society
leaders to receive my wife and daughters to insure their position. You
have seen swine gathered about a trough, comfortably swilling; you have
seen a huge porker come running with angry squeal to join the banquet.
You have observed how rudely, how fiercely he is resented and fought
off by the others. This, until he by biting and thrusting has made a
place for himself; then the fact that he is an intruder and the method
of his getting a place are forgotten, and the swilling goes peacefully
forward. So it is, gentle reader, though it horrifies your hypocrisy to
be told it, so do human beings conduct themselves round a financial or
political or social swill trough. I should have had small difficulty
in biting and kicking a satisfactory place for Edna and Margot at the
social swill trough; I should have had no difficulty at all in keeping
it for them. But----

You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and
dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable
society in the metropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too,
like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great
democracy--and many of the not so comfortable classes as well--because
you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who
refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are “common,”
and for straightway making it your heart’s dearest desire to compel
that person to associate with you. You will be incredulous when I tell
you my sole reason was my hatred and horror of what seemed to me the
degrading, vulgar, and rotten longings that filled my wife and that had
infected my daughter. That hatred and horror had thrown me into a state
of mind I did not dare confess to myself. You are incredulous; but
perhaps you will admit I may be truthful when I explain that the reason
for my moral and sentimental revolt was perhaps in large part my dense
ignorance of the whole society side of life.

No doubt in the Passaic public school of my boyhood there had been as
much snobbishness as there is in Fifth Avenue. But I had somehow never
happened to notice it. It must have been there; it must be elemental
in human nature; how else account for my wife? We hear more about the
snobbishness of Fifth Avenue than we do about the snobbishness of the
tenements. But that is solely because Fifth Avenue is more conspicuous.
Also, Fifth Avenue, supposedly educated, supposedly broadened by
knowledge and taste, has no excuse for petty vanities that belong only
to the ignorant. And if Fifth Avenue were really educated, really had
knowledge and taste, it could not be snobbish. However, my busy life
had never been touched by social snobbishness. I preferred to know
and to associate with men better educated and richer than I, but for
excellent practical reasons--because from such men I could get the
knowledge and the wealth I needed. But I would not have wasted a moment
of my precious time upon the men most exalted in fashionable life--the
ignorant incompetents who had inherited their wealth. They seemed
ridiculous and worthless to me, a man of thought and action.

So, the sudden exposure of my wife’s and my little girl’s disease gave
me a shock hardly to be measured by the man or woman used all his life
to the social craze. It was much as if I had suddenly seen upon their
bared bosoms the disgusting ravages of cancer.

       *       *       *       *       *

As I could not devise any line of action that, however faintly,
promised results, I kept away from home. I absorbed myself in some new
enterprises that filled my evenings, which I spent at my club with the
men I drew into them. At the mention of club, gentle reader, I see your
ears pricking. You are wondering what sort of club _I_ belonged to. I
shall explain.

It was the Amsterdam Club. You may have seen and gawked at its vast and
imposing red sandstone front in middle Fifth Avenue. As you drove by in
the “rubber-neck” wagon, the man with the megaphone may have shouted:
“The Amsterdam Club, otherwise known as the Palace of Plutocracy. The
total wealth of its members is one tenth of the total wealth of the
United States. Every great millionaire in New York City belongs to it.
The reason you see no one in the magnificent windows is because the
plutocrats are afraid of cranks with pistol or bomb.” And you stared
and envied and craned your neck backward as the sight-seeing car rolled
on. A fairly accurate description of my club. But you will calm as I
go on to tell you the inside truth about it. It was built to provide
a club for those rich men of New York who had no social position, and
so could not be admitted to the fashionable clubs. It was not built by
those outcasts for whom it was intended, but by the rich men of the
fashionable world. They did not build it out of pity nor yet out of
generosity, but for freedom and convenience.

You must know that the rich, both the fashionables and the excludeds,
are intimately associated in business. Now, in the days before the
Amsterdam Club, if a rich fashionable wished to talk business out of
office hours with a rich unfashionable, he had to take him to his
home or to his club, one or the other. You will readily appreciate
that either course involved disagreeable complications. The rich
unfashionable would say: “Why am I not invited to this snob’s house
_socially_? Why does not this hound see that I am elected to his
elegant club? I’ll teach this wrinkle-snout how to spit at me.
I’ll slip a stiletto into his back, damn him.” As the number of
rich unfashionables increased, as the number of stealthy financial
stilettoings for social insult grew and swelled, the demand for a
“way out” became more clamorous and panicky. The final result was
the Amsterdam Club--perhaps by inspiration, perhaps by accident. And
so it has come to pass that now, when a rich fashionable wishes to
talk finance with a rich pariah, he does not have to run the risk of
defiling his home or his exclusive club. With the gracious cordiality
wherefor aristocracy is famed in song and story, he says: “Let us go
to _our_ club”--for, the rich fashionables see to it that every rich
pariah is elected to the Amsterdam immediately he becomes a person of
financial consequence. And I fancy that not one in ten of the rich
pariah members dreams how he is being insulted and tricked. All, or
nearly all, imagine they are elected by favor of the great fashionable
plutocrats to about the most exclusive club in New York. Also, not one
in a dozen of the fashionable members appreciates how he is degrading
himself--for, to my quaint mind, the snob degrades only himself.

Well! Not many months after we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan I
was elected to the Amsterdam--I, in serene ignorance of the trick
that was being played upon me by my sponsors, associates in large
financial deals and members of several exclusive really fashionable
clubs. They pulled regretful faces as they talked of the “long waiting
lists at most of the clubs.” They brightened as they spoke of the
Amsterdam--“the finest and, take it all round, the most satisfactory
of the whole bunch, old man. And we believe we’ve got pull enough to
put you in there pretty soon. We’ll work it, somehow.” If I had known
the shrivel-hearted trick behind their genial friendliness, I should
not have minded, should probably have laughed. For, human littlenesses
do not irritate me; and I have a vanity--I prefer to call it a
pride--that lifts me out of their reach. I am of the one aristocracy
that is truly exclusive, the only one that needs no artificial
barriers to keep it so. But I shall not bore you, gentle reader, by
explaining about it. You are interested only in the aristocracies of
rank and title and wealth that are nothing but the tawdry realization
of the tawdry fancies of the yokel among his kine and the scullery
maid among her pots. For, who but a tossed-up yokel or scullery maid
would indulge in such vulgarities as sitting upon a gold throne or
living in a draughty, cheerless palace or seeking to make himself
more ridiculous by aggravating his littleness with a title, like the
ass in the lion’s skin? Did it ever occur to you, gentle reader, that
aristocracy is essentially common, essentially vulgar? To a large
vision the distinction between king and carpenter, between the man with
a million dollars and the million men with one dollar looks trivial and
unimportant. Only a squat and squinting soul in a cellar and blinking
through the twilight could discover agitating differences of rank
between Fifth Avenue and Grand Street, between first floor front and
attic rear, between flesh ripening to rot in silk and flesh ripening
to rot in cotton. To an infinitesimal insect an infinite gulf yawns
between the molecules of a razor’s edge.

I often found my club a convenience, for in those busiest days of my
financial career I had much private conferring--or conspiring, if you
choose. Never had I found it so convenient as when for the first time
there was pain and shrinking at the thought of going home, of seeing
my wife and Margot. My Margot! When she was a baby how proudly I had
wheeled her along the sidewalks of Passaic in the showy perambulator
we bought for her--and the twenty-five dollars it cost loomed mighty
big even to Edna. And in Brooklyn, what happy Sundays Edna and I had
had with her, when I would hire a buggy at the livery stable round the
corner and we would go out for the day to some Long Island woods; or
when we would take her down to the respectable end of Coney Island to
dig in the sand and to wade after the receding tide. My Margot! No
longer mine; never again to be mine.

One evening I had an appointment at the Amsterdam with a Western
millionaire, Charles Murdock, whom I had interested in a Canada railway
to tap a Hudson Bay spruce forest. He was having trouble with his
wife and something of it had come out in the afternoon newspapers. At
the last moment his secretary--who, by the way, afterwards married
the divorced Mrs. Murdock--telephoned that Murdock could not keep
his engagement to dine. I looked about for some one to help me eat
the dinner I had ordered. There are never many disengaged men in the
Amsterdam. The fashionable rich come only when they have business with
the pariahs. The pariahs prefer their own houses or the barrooms and
cafés of the big hotels. I therefore thought myself lucky when I found
Bob Armitage sulking in a huge leather chair and got him to share my
dinner. Armitage was one of my railway directors. He had helped me
carry through the big stroke that made me, had joined in half a dozen
of my enterprises in all of which I had been successful. There was no
man of my acquaintance I knew and liked so well as Armitage. Yet it had
so happened that we had never talked much with each other, except about
business.

It promised to be a silent dinner. He was as deep in his thoughts as
I was in mine--and our faces showed that neither of us was cogitating
anything cheerful. On impulse I suddenly said:

“Bob, do you know about fashionable New York society?”

I knew that he did; that is to say, I had often heard he was one of
the heavy swells, having all three titles to fashion--wealth, birth,
and marriage. But I now pretended ignorance of the fact; when you wish
to inform yourself thoroughly on a subject you should always select an
expert, tell him you know nothing and bid him enlighten you from the
alphabet up.

“Why do you ask?” said Armitage. “Do you want to get in? I had a notion
you didn’t care for society--you and your wife.”

Armitage didn’t go to Holy Cross, but to St. Bartholomew’s. So he had
never known of my wife’s activities, knew only the sort of man I was.

“Oh, I forgot,” he went on. “You’ve a daughter almost grown. I suppose
you want her looked after. All right. I’ll attend to it for you. Your
wife won’t mind my wife’s calling? I’d have sent her long ago--in fact,
I apologize for not having done it. But I hate the fashionable crowd.
They bore me. However, your wife may like them. Women usually do.”

It was at my lips to thank him and decline his offer. Then it flashed
into my mind that perhaps my one hope of getting back my wife and
daughter, of restoring them to sanity, lay in letting them have what
they wanted. Another sort of man might have deluded himself with the
notion that he could set his foot down, stamp out revolt, compel his
family to do as he willed. But I happen not to be of that instinctively
tyrannical and therefore inherently stupid temperament.

Armitage ate in silence for a few moments, then said:

“I’ll have you elected to the Federal Club.”

“This club is all I need,” said I.

He smiled sardonically. I didn’t understand that smile then, because I
didn’t know anything about caste in New York. “You let me look after
you,” said he. “You’re a child in the social game.”

“I’ve no objection to remaining so,” said I.

“Quite right. There’s nothing in it,” said he. “But you must remember
you’re living in a world of rather cheap fools, and they are impressed
by that nothing. On the other side of the Atlantic the social prizes
have a large substantial value. Over here the value’s small. Still it’s
something. You wouldn’t refuse even a trading stamp, would you?”

I laughed. “I refuse nothing,” said I. “I take whatever’s offered me.
If I find I don’t want it, why, what’s easier than to throw it away?”

“Then I’ll put you in the Federal Club. You could have made me do it,
if you had happened to want it. So, why shouldn’t I do it anyhow, in
appreciation of your forbearance? You don’t realize, but I’m doing for
you what about two thirds of the members of this club would lick my
boots to get me to do for them.”

“I had no idea the taste for shoe polish was so general here,” said I.

“It’s a human taste, my dear Loring,” replied he. “It’s as common as
the taste for bread. All the men have it. As for the women they like
nothing so well. Having one’s boots licked is the highest human joy.
Next comes licking boots.”

“You don’t believe that?” said I, for his tone was almost too bitter
for jest.

“You aren’t acquainted with your kind, old man,” retorted he.

“I don’t know the kind you know,” said I. And then I remembered my wife
and my daughter. There must be truth in what Armitage had said; for,
my beautiful wife and my sweet daughter, both looking so proud--surely
they could not be rare exceptions in their insensibility to what seemed
to me elemental self-respect.

“You don’t know your kind,” he went on, “because you don’t indulge in
cringing and don’t encourage it. You’re like the cold, pure-minded
woman who goes through the world imagining it a chaste and austere
place because her very face silences and awes sensuality. You are part
of the small advance guard of a race that is to come.” He grinned
satirically. “Perhaps you’ll drop out in the next few months. We’ll
see.”

When the silence was again broken, it was broken by me. “Do you know a
school kept by a woman named Ryper?” I inquired.

“Sure I do,” replied he. He gave me a shrewd laughing glance. “The
daughter isn’t learning anything?”

“Nothing but mischief,” said I.

“That’s what Ryper’s for. But what does it matter? Why should a woman
learn anything? They’re of no consequence. The less a man has to do
with them the better off he will be.”

“They’re of the highest consequence,” said I bitterly. “They have the
control of the coming generation.”

“And a hell of a generation it’s to be,” cried he, suddenly rousing
from the state of bored apathy in which he seemed to pass most of his
time. “You’ve got me started on the subject that’s a craze with me. I
have only one strong feeling--and that is my contempt for woman--the
American woman. I’m not speaking about the masses. They don’t count.
They never did. They never will. No one counts until he gets some
education and some property. I suppose the women of the masses do as
well as could be expected. But how about the women of the classes
with education and property? Do you know why the world advances so
slowly?--why the upper classes are always tumbling back and everything
has to be begun all over again?”

“I’ve a suspicion,” said I. “Because the men are fools about the women.”

“The sex question!” cried Armitage. “That’s the only question worth
agitating about. Until it’s settled--or begins to be settled--and
settled right, it’s useless to attempt anything else. The men climb
up. The women they take on their backs become a heavier and heavier
burden--and down they both drop--and the children with them. Selfish,
vain, extravagant mothers, crazy about snobbishness, bringing up their
children in extravagance, ignorance and snobbishness--that’s America
to-day!”

“The men are fools about the women, and they let the women make fools
of themselves.”

“The men are fools--but not about the women,” said Armitage. “How much
time and thought for your family have you averaged daily in the last
ten years?”

“I’ve been busy,” said I. “I’ve had to look out for the bread and
butter, you know.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed he, in triumph. “You think you’re fond of your
family. No doubt you are. But the bottom truth is you’re indifferent to
your family. I can prove it in a sentence: You attend to anything you
care about; and you haven’t attended to them.”

I stared at him like a man dazzled by a sudden light--which, in fact, I
was.

“Guilty or not guilty?” said he, laughing.

“Guilty,” said I.

“The American man, too busy to be bothered, turns the American woman
loose--gives her absolute freedom. And what is she? A child in
education, a child in experience, a child in taste. He turns her loose,
bids her do as she likes--and, up to the limit of his ability gives
her all the money she wants. He prefers her a child. Her childishness
rests his tired brain. And he doesn’t mind if she’s a little
mischievous--that makes her more amusing.”

“You are married--have children,” said I, too serious to bother about
tact. “How is it with you?”

He laughed cynically. “Don’t speak of my family,” said he. “I tried the
other way. But I’ve given up--several years ago. What can _one_ do in a
crazy crowd?”

“Not much,” confessed I, deeply depressed.

“The women stampede each other,” he went on. “Besides, no American
woman--none that I know--has been brought up with education enough
to enable her to make a life for herself, even when the man tries to
help her. To like an occupation, to do anything at it, you’ve got
to understand it. Being a husband and father is an occupation, the
most important one in the world for a man. Being a wife and mother is
an occupation--the most important one in the world for a woman. Are
American men and women brought up to those occupations--trained in
them--prepared for them? The most they know is a smatter at the pastime
of lover and mistress--and they’re none too adept at that.”

“I believe,” said I, “that in my whole life I’ve never learned so much
in so short a time.”

“It’ll do you no good to have learned,” rejoined Armitage. “It will
only make you sad or bitter, according to your mood. Or, perhaps some
day you may reach my plane of indifference--and be amused.”

“Nothing is hopeless,” said I.

“The American woman is hopeless,” said he. “Her vanity is
triple-plated, copper-riveted. She’s hopeless so long as the American
man will give her the money to buy flattery at home and abroad; for,
so long as you can buy flattery, you never find out the truth about
yourself. And the American man will give her the money as long as he
can, because it buys him peace and freedom. He doesn’t want to be
bothered with the American woman--except when he’s in a certain mood
that doesn’t last long.”

“There are exceptions,” said I--not clear as to what I meant.

“Yes--there are exceptions,” said he. “There are American men who spend
time with the American woman. And what does she do to them? Look at
the poor asses!--neglecting their business, letting their minds go to
seed. They don’t make her wise. She makes them foolish--as foolish as
herself--and her children.”

You may perhaps imagine into what a state this talk of Armitage’s threw
me. He was talking generalities. But every word he spoke went straight
home to me. He had torn the coverings from my inmost family life, had
exposed its soul, naked and ugly, to my fascinated gaze.

He finished dinner, lighted a cigarette--sat back watching me with a
mysterious smile, half amused, wholly sympathetic, upon his handsome
face, younger than his forty-five years--for he was considerably older
than I. I was hardly more than barely conscious of that look of his, or
of his presence. Suddenly I struck my fist with violence upon the arm
of my chair. And I said:

“I _will_ do something! It is _not_ hopeless!”

He shook his head slowly, at the same time exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“I tried, Godfrey,” said he, “and I had a better chance of success
than you could possibly have. For my wife had been brought up by a
sensible father and mother in a sensible way, and she had been used to
fashionable society all her life and, when I married her, seemed to
have proved herself immune. A few years and--” His cynical smile may
not have been genuine. “She leads the simpletons. But you’ll see for
yourself.”

“When you know what to do, and feel as you do,” said I, “why did you
suggest our going into your society?”

“It isn’t mine,” laughed he. “It’s my wife’s. It doesn’t belong to the
men. It belongs to the women.”

“Into your wife’s society?” persisted I.

“Why did I suggest it? Because I wished to please you, and I know you
like to please your wife. And she’s an American woman--therefore,
society mad. She has her daughter at the Ryper joint, hasn’t she?”

I sat morosely silent.

“Oh, come now! Cheer up!” cried he, with laughing irony. “After all,
you can’t blame the American woman. She has no training for the career
of woman. She has no training for any serious career. She’s got to do
something, hasn’t she? Well, what is there open to her but the career
of lady? That doesn’t call for brains or for education or for taste.
The dressmaker and milliner supply the toilet. The architect and
decorator and housekeeper and staff supply the grand background. Father
or husband supplies the cash. A dip into a novel or book of culture
essays supplies the gibble-gabble. A nice easy profession, is lady--and
universally admired and envied. No, Loring, it isn’t fair to blame her.”

We strolled down Fifth Avenue. After he had watched the stream of
elegant carriages and automobiles, some of the too elegant automobiles
having their interiors brightly lighted that the passersby might not
fail to see the elaborate toilets of the occupants--after he had
observed this procession of extravagance and vanity, with only an
occasional derisive laugh or “Look there! Don’t miss that lady!” he
burst out again in his pleasantly ironical tone:

“How fat the women are getting!--the automobile women! And how the
candy shops are multiplying. Candy and automobiles!--and culture. Let
us not forget culture.”

“No, indeed,” said I grimly. “Let’s not forget the culture.”

“I was telling my wife yesterday,” said Armitage, “what culture is.
It is talking in language that means nothing about things that mean
less than nothing. But watch the ladies stream by, all got up in their
gorgeous raiment and jewels. What have they ever done, what are they
doing, that entitles them to so much more than their poor sisters
scuffling along on the sidewalk here?”

“They’ve talked and are talking about culture,” said I. “And don’t
forget charity.”

“Ah--charity!” cried he gayly. “Thank you. I see we understand each
other.” He linked his arm affectionately in mine. “Charity! It’s
the other half of a lady’s occupation. Charity! Having no fancy for
attending to her own business, she meddles in the business of the
poor, tempting them to become liars and paupers. Your fine lady is a
professional patronizer. She has no usefulness to contribute to the
world. So, she patronizes--the arts with her culture--the poor with
her charity, and the human race with her snobbishness.”

He was so amused by his train of thought that he lapsed into silence
the more fully to enjoy it; for, every thought has its shadings that
cannot be expressed in words yet give the keenest enjoyment. When he
spoke again, it was to repeat:

“And what have these ladies done to entitle them to this luxury? Are
they, perchance, being paid for giving to the world, and for inspiring,
the noble sons and daughters who drive coaches and marry titles?”

“But what do we men do? What do _I_ do--that entitles me to so much
more than that chap perched on the hansom? I often think of it. Don’t
you?”

“Never,” laughed Armitage. “I never claw my own sore spots. There’s
no fun in that. Always claw the other fellow’s. There’s a laugh and
distraction for your own troubles in seeing him wince.”

“Is that why you’ve been clawing mine?” said I.

We were pausing before his big house, at the corner of the Avenue. “If
I have been I didn’t know it,” said he. He glanced up at his windows
with a satirical smile. “This evening I’ve been breaking my rule and
clawing at my own.” He put out his hand. “Let the social business take
its course,” advised he with impressive friendliness. “You and I can’t
make the world over. To fight against the inevitable merely increases
everyone’s discomfort.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said I.

I agreed with his conclusion that it was best to let things alone,
though I reached that conclusion by a different route. I had in mind my
forlorn hope of good results from a homeopathic treatment. I saw how
impossible it was to undo the practically completed training of a grown
girl. I appreciated the absurdity of an attempt radically to change
Edna’s character--an absurdity as great as an attempt to make her a
foot taller or to alter the color of her eyes. The one hope, it seemed
to me--and I still think I was right--was that, when they had social
position, when there should no longer be excuse for fretting lest some
one were thinking them common, they might calm down toward some sort of
sanity.

Bear in mind, please, that at the time I did not have the situation,
nor any idea of it, and of how to deal with it, definitely and clearly
in mind. I was groping, was seeing dimly, was not even sure that I saw
at all. I was like a thousand other busy American men who, after years
of absorption in affairs, are abruptly and rudely awakened to the fact
that there is something wrong at home where they had been flattering
themselves everything was all right.

The things Armitage had said occupied my mind, almost to the exclusion
of my business. The longer I revolved them, the better I understood the
situation at home. I could not but wonder what wretched catastrophe in
his domestic life had made him so insultingly bitter against women. I
felt that he was unfair to them; any judgment that condemned a class
for possessing universal human weakness must be unfair. At the same
time I believed he had excuse for being unfair--the excuse of a man
whose domestic life is in ruins. I began to see toward the bottom of
the woman question--the nature and the cause of the crisis through
which women were passing.

The modern world, as I had read history enough to know, had suddenly
and completely revolutionized the conditions of life. The male sex,
though poorly where at all equipped to meet the new conditions, still
was compelled to meet them after a fashion. A river that for ages has
moved quietly along in a deep bed, all in a night swells to many times
its former size and plays havoc with the surrounding country. That
was a fairly good figure for the new life science and machinery had
suddenly forced upon the human race. The men living in the inundated
region--where floods were unknown, where appliances, even ideas
for combating them did not exist--the men, hastily, hysterically,
incompetently, but with resolution and persistence, because forced by
dire necessity, would proceed to deal with that vast new river. Just so
were the men of our day dealing with the life of steam and electricity,
of ancient landmarks of religion and morality swept away or shifted, of
ancient industrial and social relations turned upside down and inside
out. The men were coping with the situation after a fashion. But the
women?

These unfortunate creatures, faced with the new conditions, were in
their greater ignorance and incapacity and helplessness, trying to
live as if nothing had occurred!--as if the old order still existed.
And the men, partly through ignorance, partly through preoccupation
with the new order, partly through indifference and contempt veiled
as consideration for the weaker sex, were encouraging them in their
fatal folly. Was it strange that the women were deceived, remained
unconscious of their peril? No, it was on the contrary inevitable. When
men, though working away under and at the new conditions, still talked
as if the old conditions prevailed, when preachers still preached that
way, and orators still eulogized the thing that was dead and buried as
if it lived and reigned, when in order to find out the change you had
to disregard the speech, the professions, the confident assertions of
all mankind and observe closely their actions only--when there was this
universal unawareness and unpreparedness, how could the poor women be
condemned?

I could not but admit to myself that in his account of the doings of
the women Armitage was only slightly if at all exaggerating. But with
my more judicial temperament that had won me fortune and leadership
while hardly more than a youth, I could not join him in damning the
women for their folly and idleness and uselessness.

So, the immediate result of Armitage’s talk was a gentler and
thoroughly tolerant frame of mind toward my wife, both as to herself
and as to what she had done to our daughter. After all, I had for wife
only the typical woman--and a rarely sweet and charming example of
the type. And my daughter was no worse, perhaps was better, than the
average girl of her age and position. What did I think I had--or ought
to have--in the way of wife and daughter, anyhow? What was this vague,
sentimental dream of family life? If I were by some magic to find
myself possessed of the sort of family I thought I wanted, wouldn’t I
be more dissatisfied than at present? When I had a wife and a daughter
who _looked_ so well and did nothing but what everyone around me
regarded as right and proper, was I not unjust in my discontent?

I had not seen Edna or Margot for several days before my talk with
Bob Armitage. I did not see Edna for several days afterwards, though
I dined at home every evening and did not go out after dinner. I was
debating how to make overtures toward a reconciliation when she came
into my study. She had an air of coldness and constraint--the air of
the woman who is inflicting severe punishment upon an offending husband
by withholding herself from him. She said:

“Mrs. Robert Armitage has asked me to dine on Thursday evening.”

I replied hesitatingly: “Thursday-- I’ve an engagement for Thursday--a
dinner.”

In her agitation she did not note that I had not finished. Dropping her
coldness, she flashed out fiercely:

“We’ve simply _got_ to accept! It’s our chance. We may not have it
again. It’s what I’ve been waiting for ever since we moved to this
house. And I can’t go alone. Oh, how selfish you are! You never think
of anything but your own comfort. And you can’t or won’t realize any of
the higher things of life for which I’m striving. It is too horrible!”

If any male reader of this story has known a woman who was, up to a
certain time, always able to rouse a strong emotion in him--of love
or anger, of pleasure or pain--a woman toward whom he could not be
lukewarm, and if that reader can recall the day on which he faced that
woman in a situation of stress and found himself calm and patient and
kind toward her----

I was surprised to find that Edna was not moving me. Her loveliness
did not stir a single tiny flame of passion. Her abuse did not excite
resentment or dread. “Just a moment, my dear,” said I with the
tranquillity of a judge. “I was trying to say that I would break my
engagement.”

I saw that she did not believe me but imagined her outburst had
terrified and cowed me into submission. How dispassionately I observed
and judged!

“Accept, if you wish,” I went on. “I like Armitage. We’ve been friends
for years.”

“Why didn’t you tell me so?” demanded she. “Why have you been plotting
against me all this time?”

“You forbade me to speak of business,” said I. “So I have never spoken
of my business friends.”

Her anger against me was almost beyond control. If she had been a lady
born, if she had not had a past to live down, a childhood of vulgar
surroundings and actions, she would have given way and abused like a
fish wife. A lady born dares excesses of passion that a made lady,
with her deep reverence for the ladylike, would shrink from. She said
through clinched teeth:

“I find out that Mrs. Armitage, the leader of the younger set, the
most fashionable woman in New York, has been eager to know me for a
long time. And _you_ have been preventing it!”

“How?” said I, amused, but not showing it.

“She called here the other day. She was as friendly as could be. We
became friends at once. She said that for months she had been at her
husband to get her leave to call on me, but that he and you, between
you, had neglected to arrange it.”

I saw how this notion of the matter delighted her, and that the truth
would enrage her, would make her dislike me more than ever. So, I held
my peace and thought, for the first time, I believe, how tiresome a
woman without a sense of humor could become--how tryingly tiresome.

“She and I are going to do a lot of things together,” continued Edna in
the same intense humorless way. “I always knew that if I got a chance
to talk with one of those women who could appreciate me, I’d have no
further trouble. I knew I was wasting time on those religious fakirs
and frumps, but I was always hoping that through them I’d somehow meet
a woman of my own sort. Now I’ve met her, and something tells me I’ll
have no further trouble.”

“Probably you’re right,” said I.

“How it infuriates me,” she went on, “to think I’d have been spared
all the humiliations and heartaches I’ve suffered, if you had used
your influence with Robert Armitage months--years ago. But no--you
don’t want me to get on. You wanted to stick in the mud. So I had to
suffer--and Margot, too.”

“Well, it’s all right now,” said I, probably as indifferently as I
felt. Why had God seen fit to create women without the sense of humor?
Perhaps to save men from falling altogether under their rule.

“The sufferings of that poor child!” cried Edna. “And the very day
after Mrs. Armitage came, Gracie Fortescue asked her to a party, and
all the girls have taken her up. Gracie Fortescue is a niece of Hilda
Armitage. Her brother married a Fortescue.”

“Really?” said I. “And Margot is happy?”

“No thanks to you,” retorted Edna sourly.

“Well, plunge in, my dear,” said I, beginning to examine the papers
before me on the desk. “Only--spare me as much as possible. I need all
my time and strength for my work.”

“But you’ll have to go with me to dinners, and to the opera
occasionally. I can’t do this thing altogether alone.”

“Say I’m an invalid. Say I’m away. They don’t want me, anyhow. Armitage
doesn’t go with his wife.”

“But that’s different,” cried she in a fever. “_She_ has always had
social position. It doesn’t matter if people do talk scandal about her.
_I_ can’t afford to cause gossip.”

“Why should they gossip? But no matter. I don’t want to worry with
that--that higher life, let us call it. Or to be worried with it. Do
the best you can for me. I’m a man’s man--always have been--always
shall be. If you’ve got to have a man to take you about, dig up one
somewhere. I’m willing to pay him well.”

“Always money!” exclaimed she in deep disgust.

I laughed. “Not a bad thing, money,” said I.

“It would never have got me Mrs. Armitage’s friendship,” said she
loftily.

“You think so?” said I amiably. “All right, if it pleases you.
But--take my advice, my dear--enjoy yourself to the limit with
highfaluting _talk_ about the worthlessness of money and that sort
of rot. But don’t for a minute lose your point of view and convince
yourself.”

“Thank God I’ve got a vein of refinement, of idealism in my nature,”
said Edna. “I wouldn’t have as sordid an opinion of human nature as you
have for anything in the world.”

“You can afford not to have it, my dear,” said I. “So long as I know
the truth, and so make the necessary money to keep us going, you are
free to indulge your lovely delusions. Have your beautiful, unmercenary
friendship with Mrs. Armitage and the other ladies. I’ll continue
to make it financially worth their husbands’ while to encourage the
friendships.”

“I thought so!” cried she. “You believe Mrs. Armitage has taken me up
for business reasons.”

“If you had been some poor woman--” I began mildly.

“Don’t be absurd!” cried my wife. “How could there be an equal and
true friendship between Mrs. Armitage and a woman with none of the
surroundings of a lady, and with no means of gratifying the tastes
of a lady? But that doesn’t mean that Mrs. Armitage is a low, sordid
woman. She has a beautiful nature. Money is merely the background of
high society. It simply gives ladies and gentlemen the opportunity
to set the standards of dress and manners and taste. And of course
they’re careful whom they associate with. Who wants to be annoyed
by adventurers and climbers and all sorts of dreadful mercenary,
self-seeking people?”

“Who, indeed?” said I.

It gently appealed to my sense of the ridiculous, to see my wife thus
changed in a twinkling into a defender and exponent of fashionable
society. It was so deliciously feminine, as fantastically humorless,
her sincere belief in the poppycock she was reeling off--the twaddle
with which Mrs. Armitage had doubtless stuffed her. The sordidness,
the vulgarity, the meanness, the petty cruelty, the snobbishness of
fashionable people--all forgotten in a moment, hastily covered deep
with the gilt and the tinsel of hypocritical virtues. What an amusing
ass the human animal is! How stupidly unconscious of its own motives!
How eagerly it attributes to itself all kinds of high motives for the
ordinary, or scrubby, or downright mean actions--and attributes the
same motives to its fellow asses, to make its own pretenses the more
plausible! An amusing ass--but it would be more amusing if it were not
so monotonously solemn, but laughed at itself occasionally.

However----

The atmosphere of our home now steadily improved. The servants
began to respect us, where they had despised and had scarcely
troubled themselves to conceal their contempt. The cook sent up
more attractive--though I fear even less digestible--dishes. The
butler addressed me with a gratifying servility. The maids developed
unexpected talents, showing acquaintance with the needs and customs
of a fashionable household. The housekeeper’s soul dropped from its
theretofore insolently erect posture to all fours, and she attended
to her duties. Edna became sweet and gracious. Margot grew merry and
affectionate. All the result of Mrs. Armitage. We had been pariahs; we
were of the elect.

I saw and felt the change distinctly at the time. But it is only in
retrospect that I take the full measure--get its full humor--and pathos.

       *       *       *       *       *

That Armitage dinner was _the_ event of Edna’s life. She had been born;
she had married; she had given birth--all memorable and important
occurrences. But this formal début in fashionable society topped
them as the peak tops the foothills. Having seen her quivering and
hysterical excitement when we were leaving the house, I feared a
breakdown. I marveled at her apparent calmness and ease as we entered
the dining room of the Armitages. Never had she looked so well. If Mrs.
Armitage had not been a self-satisfied beauty of the dark type she
might have demolished Edna’s dream in its very realizing. But no doubt
Edna, the shrewd, had duly measured Hilda Armitage and had discovered
that it was safe to make her proud of the woman she had taken under
protection and patronage.

There were but a dozen people in all at the dinner. It did not seem
to be much of an affair. The drawing-room was plain--nothing gaudy,
nothing costly looking. Our own dining room was much grander--to
our then uneducated taste. The guests were--just people--simple,
good-natured mortals, perfectly at their ease and putting us at our
ease. You would have wondered, after five minutes of that company,
how anyone could possibly find any difficulty in getting intimately
acquainted with them. But, as Edna knew at a glance, she and I were in
the midst of the innermost and smallest circle of the many circles one
within another that make up New York fashionable society. If on the
recommendation of the Armitages we should have the good fortune to be
accepted by that circle of circles, that circle within the circles,
there would be nothing of a social nature left for us to conquer in New
York. I was ignorant of all this at the time; had I known, I imagine
I should have remained tranquil. But Edna knew at a glance; she had
been studying these matters for years. It shows what force of character
she had that she conducted herself as if it were the most ordinary and
familiar occasion of her life. She had always said, even away back in
the days of the grand forty-dollars-a-month flat in Passaic, that she
belonged at the social top. She was undoubtedly right. The way she
acted when she arrived there proved it.

You do not often have the chance, gentle reader, to get so well
acquainted with any human being as I have enabled you to get with Edna.
Probably you do not even know yourself so well. Therefore I suspect
that you have a wholly false notion of her--think her in every way much
worse relatively than she was. Through your novels and through the
reports your dim eyes bring to your narrow and shallow mind, you have
acquired certain habits of judging your fellow beings.

You attach inflated importance to their unimportant surface
qualities--physical appearance, pleasant voice and manner--and to their
amiable little hypocrisies of apparent sweetness and generosity and
friendliness. You do not see the real person--the human being. You,
being by training a hypocrite and a believer in hypocrisies, scorn
human beings. Now I prefer them to the sort of people with whom you
and your false literature populate the world. In making you acquainted
with Edna--and the others in my story--I have not introduced you to bad
people, monsters, but to real beings of usual types, probably on the
whole superior to your smug self in all the good qualities. Had you
seen Edna in the Armitage house that evening you would have thought her
as incapable of calculation and snobbishness as--well, as any of the
others in that company whose whole lives were made up of calculation
and snobbishness. She--and they--looked so refined and elevated.
She--and they--talked so high-mindedly. I, who knew almost nothing at
that time except business, was listener rather than talker; and you may
be sure such a man as I, having such ignorance as mine to cover up, had
in years of practice become somewhat adept in that saving art for the
intelligent ignorant. But Edna----

She, the most expert of smatterers, fairly shone. With her beauty and
vivacity, her eloquent eyes and dazzling smile, and exquisite bare
shoulders, to aid her, she created an impression of brilliancy.

“You had a good time?” said I, when we were in the motor for the home
journey.

“I never had as good a time in my life,” she exclaimed, her voice
tremulous with ecstasy. “Did I look well?”

“Never so well,” said I. “And you made a hit.”

“I was careful to cultivate the women,” said she. “I’ve got to get the
women.”

“You’ve got them,” I declared sincerely.

“You’re sure I didn’t make some of them jealous? Did you see any signs?”

“They liked you,” said I.

“I had to play my cards well,” pursued she. “It was a difficult
position. I was far and away the best looking woman there, with the
possible exception of Mrs. Armitage. Did you hear her call me Edna?”

“You and Mrs. Armitage look well together. You are of about the same
figure, and the contrast of coloring is very good.”

“That’s why we took to each other so quickly. Each of us sets off the
other.”

“How did you like Armitage?” I asked.

“Oh, well enough,” said she indifferently. “I hardly noticed him--or
the other men. I had my game to play. The men don’t count in the social
game. It’s the women. I shall be nervous until I find out whether I
really got them. They are such cats!--so mean and sly and jealous. I
_detest_ women!”

“I prefer men, myself,” said I.

“Men!” She laughed scornfully. “I think men are intolerable--American
men. They say foreigners are better. But American men--they know
nothing but dull business or politics. They have no breadth--no
idealism. The women are far superior to the men.”

I laughed. “No doubt you women are too good for us,” said I carelessly.
“We’re grateful that you don’t scorn us too much even to accept our
money.”

“How coarse that is! Don’t spoil the happiest evening of my life.”

We were at home, so she could escape from me. And I, for my part, was
as glad to be quit of her society as she could possibly have been to
get rid of me. I was beginning to realize that her conversation bored
me, that it had always bored me, that it was her sex and only her sex
that interested me. And latterly even this had lost its charm. Why?

I have observed--and perhaps you have observed it, too--that people
of wealth and position, unless they have very striking individuality
indeed, are usually utterly devoid of charm. It is difficult to become
interested in them, to establish any sort of sympathetic current.
And you will notice that fashionable functions are dull, essentially
dull; that the animation is artificial, is supplied from without by an
orchestra or entertainers, and fails to infect the company. It was long
before I discovered the explanation for this. I at first thought it was
the stupidity that comes from a surfeit of the luxuries and pleasures.
But I am now convinced that this familiar explanation is not the true
one; that the true one is the excessive, the really preposterous
self-centeredness of people of rank and wealth. From waking until
sleeping they are surrounded by hirelings and sycophants who think
and talk only of them. Thus the rich man or woman gets into the habit
of concentrating upon self. Now the essence of charm is giving--giving
oneself out in sympathetic interest in one’s fellows. How can people,
all whose faculties are trained to work in upon themselves--how can
they have charm? An egotist, one who _talks_ only of himself, may have
charm because he gives you the impression that he is trying to please
you, that he thinks you so important that he wishes you to be sensible
of his importance. But the egotist who, whatever he _talks_, _thinks_
only of himself--he is not only dull and bored but also a diffuser
of dullness and boredom. And that is how their servants and their
sycophants make the rich and the fashionable so dreary.

I imagine some such effect as this was being produced upon my wife
by her surroundings of luxury. I think that may account for her long
decreasing charm for me. At any rate, soon after she was well launched
on her Elysian sea of fashion--that is to say, soon after she ceased to
have any check of social seeking to restrain her from centering all her
thoughts and actions upon herself, she lost the last bit of her charm
for me. She became radiantly beautiful. Her face took on a serene and
refinedly assured expression that made her extravagantly admired on
every hand. She became gracious to me and almost as sweet as she had
been before we moved to New York. She even let me see that, if I so
desired, she would condescend to be on terms of wifely affection with
me again. But I did not so desire. I liked her. I admired her energy,
her toilets, and, quite impersonally, her aristocratic beauty. But
I was content to be a bachelor, and I was grateful when she began to
relieve me of the tediousness of going about in her train.

My substitute was an architect, Leon MacIlvane by name--a handsome
young fellow of about my wife’s age, though he thought her much
younger, despite Margot’s age and appearance. With his poetic dark eyes
and classic features, and rich, deep voice, MacIlvane had long been
a favorite with the young married women of the Armitage set. He was
indeed a valuable asset. The rich unmarried men were not especially
interesting; also, they were needed by the marriageable girls.
MacIlvane, not a marrying man and never making any mother uneasy by so
much as an interested glance at a daughter intended for a rich husband,
devoted himself to married women.

“I do not care for girls,” he said to me. “They are too colorless.”

“Why bother with women at all?” said I. “Aren’t they all colorless?
What do they know about life? What experience have they had?”

“An intelligent woman’s mind is the complement of an intelligent man’s
mind,” said he, as if this trite old fallacy were a brilliant discovery
of his own making. “Women stimulate me, give me ideas.”

“Oh, I see,” said I practically. “Business. Yes, an architect does deal
chiefly with the women.”

“I didn’t mean that,” said he, showing as much anger as he dared show
the husband of the woman to whom he had attached himself.

“Where’s the harm in it?” said I encouragingly. “You’ve got to make a
living--haven’t you? It’s good sense for a business man to cultivate
his customers.”

He, the poseur and the small man, hated this plain truthful way of
dealing with his profession. Like all chaps of that kidney he thought
only of himself and of appearances, and sought to degrade a noble
profession to the base uses of his vanity. In fact, he had begun with
my wife because of the orders he hoped to get--for, he suspected
that once she looked about her in the fashionable world from the new
viewpoint of a fashionable person, she would want changes in her house
to make it less vividly grand. He believed she would let Hilda Armitage
educate her; and Hilda, unlike most of her friends, liked the quiet
kinds of ostentation and costliness. And he guessed correctly. He was
well paid for undertaking to replace me as escort--so far as I could
be replaced without causing scandal--and, thank heaven, that was very
far in the New York of busy and bored husbands, detesting the gaudy
gaddings their wives loved.

Soon he was serving my wife for other reasons than pay. I saw something
of him from time to time, and I presently began to note a change in his
manner toward me--a formal politeness, an exaggeration of courtesy. I
spoke to Armitage about it. Armitage and I had become the most intimate
of friends--knocked about together in the evenings, were more closely
associated than ever in business.

“Bob,” said I to Armitage, “what ails that ass, MacIlvane? He treats
me as if he were in love with my wife.”

Armitage laughed. “That’s it,” said he. “My wife’s spaniel, Courtleigh,
who writes poetry, treats me the same way. Get any anonymous letters
yet?”

“Two,” said I.

“Servants,” said he. “I suppose you burnt them? You didn’t show them to
your wife?”

“Heavens, no,” replied I. “Why unsettle her? Why upset a pleasant
arrangement? My wife finds MacIlvane useful. I find him invaluable. He
saves me hours of time. He spares me hours of boredom.”

“My feeling about Courtleigh,” said Armitage. “And both those chaps are
comfortably trustworthy.”

“I hadn’t thought of MacIlvane in that way,” said I. “I know my
wife--and that’s enough.”

Armitage reflected with an amused smile on his face. Finally, he
said: “I don’t suppose there ever were since the world began so
thoroughly trustworthy women as these American women of the fashionable
crowd--those that have very rich husbands--and only those, of course,
are really fashionable. They may flirt a little, but never anything
serious--never anything that’d give their husbands an excuse for
throwing them out--and lose them their big houses and big incomes and
social leadership.”

I had not thought of these aspects of the matter. I based my feeling of
security solely on my knowledge of my wife’s intense self-absorption.
All the springs of sentiment--except the shallow spring of highfaluting
talk--had dried up in her. She would listen to MacIlvane’s flatteries
as long as he cared to pour them out. But if he ever tried to get her
to think of _him_, she would feel outraged.

“I suppose,” pursued Armitage, “we’d be tremendously amused if we
could overhear those chaps talking to our wives about us. They don’t
dare presume to the extent of mentioning our names. But they hand
out generalities of roasting--how stupid most American men are, how
superior the women are, what a tragic condescension for a wonderful
American woman to have to live with a man who couldn’t appreciate her.”

I nodded and laughed.

“Nothing a woman loves so much--an American woman with a little
miseducation befogging her mind and fooling her as to its limited
extent--nothing she so dearly loves as to hear that she has a
great intellect and a great soul, complex, mysterious, beyond the
comprehension of the vulgar male clods about her. That’s why they
like foreigners. You ought to watch those foreign chaps flatter our
women--make perfect fools of them.”

But I had no desire to watch women in any circumstances. I had no
active resentment against them as had Armitage. I simply wished to
be let alone, to be free to pursue my ambitions and my ideas of
self-development. I had ceased to feel about Margot. I was merely glad
she was not a boy; for I felt that if she were a boy, I should have
to assert myself and do some drastic and disagreeable--and almost
certainly disastrous--disciplining in my family.

About a year and a half after my wife achieved her ambition, I began to
feel that she was spiritually bearing down upon me in pursuance of some
new secret plan.

During the year and a half she had been playing the fashionable social
game with the strenuous enthusiasm which only a woman--I had almost
said only an American woman--seems able to inject into the pursuit
of objects that are of no consequences whatsoever. And, in spite of
the useful MacIlvane I had been compelled to assist her far more than
was to my liking. I went about enough to get a thorough insight into
fashionableness--and a profound distaste for it. Of the many phases,
ludicrous, repellent, despicable, pitiful, there was one that made a
deep impression upon me. It amazed me to find that the “best” class
of people was, if possible, more vulgarly snobbish than the class
from which I had come--even than the “Brooklyn bounders.” I could
not comprehend--I cannot comprehend--how those who have had the best
opportunities are no more intelligent, no broader of mind than those
who have had no opportunities at all. The ignorance, the narrowness of
the men and women of the comfortable classes!--the laziness of their
minds!--the shallow cant about literature, art and the like! Really,
intelligence, activity of mind, seems confined to the few who are
pushing upward; and the masses of mankind in all classes seem contented
each class with its own peculiar wallow of ignorance.

But to Edna’s secret plan. If you are a married man you will at once
understand what I mean when I speak of having a vague sensation of
being borne down upon. She said nothing; she did nothing. But I knew
she was making ready to ask something to which she believed she could
get my consent only by the use of all her tact and skill and charm--for
she did not know her charms had ceased to charm, but thought them more
potent than ever. I waited with patience and composure; and in due time
she began cautious open approaches.

“Margot is almost ready to come out,” said she.

“Money?” said I, smiling.

She rebuked this coarseness amiably. “_Everybody_ isn’t _always_
thinking of money, dear,” said she.

“But why talk to _me_ about anything else? That’s my only department in
the family.”

She deigned a smile for my pleasantry, then went on in her usual
serious way: “I wish to consult you about her education.”

“Oh--finish as you’ve begun,” said I. “I suppose it’s the best that can
be done for a girl.”

“But I can’t find what I want,” said she, with an expression of sweet
maternal solicitude. “I’ve always been determined Margot should have
the best education any girl in the whole world could get.”

“Go ahead,” said I. “See that she gets it.”

“She shall have the perfect equipment of a lady--of a woman of the
world,” continued Edna, with growing enthusiasm. “She has the beauty to
set it off--and we can afford to give it to her. I am willing to make
any sacrifices that may be necessary.”

I pricked up my ears. I always do when anyone, male or female, uses
that word sacrifice. I know a piece of selfishness is coming.

“As I was saying,” pursued Edna, with the serene look of the
self-confident woman who is taking her husband in firm, strong hands,
“I have been unable to find what I want for her. Mrs. Armitage tells me
I’ll not find it except in Paris.”

“Well--why not go to Paris?” said I.

Did you ever lift an empty box that you thought full and heavy? My wife
looked as if she had just done that exceedingly uncomfortable thing.
“But I don’t see-- I--I-- It would be a terrible sacrifice to have to
go and live in Paris,” stammered she.

“Then don’t do it,” said I.

“But I must think of Margot!” exclaimed she hastily.

“Oh, Margot seems to be stepping along all right. She’ll never miss
what she doesn’t know about.”

“But you must realize, dear, what an education she’d get in Paris. And
I suppose it would do me good, too. It’s a shame that I don’t speak
French. Everyone except me speaks it. They all had French governesses
when they were children.”

“Some of them had--and some hadn’t,” said I. “Armitage has told me
things about your friends that make me suspect they’re doing fully as
much bluffing as we are.”

She winced, and sighed the sigh of the lady patient with a low husband.
“Then you think I ought to go?” said she.

“I think you ought to do as you like,” said I. “I always have thought
so. I always shall.”

“And,” continued she absently, “the society over there must be
charming. Really, I need the education as much as Margot does. I do
surprisingly well, considering what my early opportunities were.”

“I’ve never once heard you give yourself away,” said I.

“I’m not that stupid,” replied she. “But--a while in France--on the
Continent--and in England perhaps----”

“How long would you be gone?” interrupted I, to show her that all this
beating round Robin’s barn was superfluous.

She gave me a coquettish look: “How long could you spare me?”

“I can’t tell till I’ve tried,” said I, with a gallant smile--but with
no move toward her. You women who would be wise, distrust the gallantry
that is content with speech and look.

“You understand,” pursued she, “if I started this thing I’d put it
through--no matter how much I missed you or how homesick I was over
there.”

“You always do put things through,” said I admiringly. “When have you
planned to start?”

“I haven’t planned at all, as yet,” replied she--and I saw she thought
I had set a trap for her, and was delighted with herself for having
dodged it. Certainly never was there a husband with whom indirection
was more unnecessary. Yet she would not realize this, partly because
she had never bothered to discover what manner of man I was, partly
because she had one of those natures that move only by secrecy and
indirection.

“Do you expect me to go over with you?” inquired I.

“I only wish you would!” exclaimed she, but I distrusted her enthusiasm.

“Couldn’t MacIlvane take you over and settle you?”

Her face clouded. Her lip curled slightly. “I don’t like him as I did,”
said she. “I’ve found out he’s ridiculously vain and egotistical.”

I laughed outright.

“What is it?” inquired she, elevating her eyebrows. She had always
disapproved my sense of humor.

“So he’s been making love to you--eh?” said I.

“No, indeed!” cried she, bridling haughtily. “He’d not dare. But I saw
he was beginning to presume in that direction, and I checked him.”

“Oh, he’s harmless,” said I. “Keep friendly with him. He’d be the very
person to settle you in Paris. He lived there several years.”

“It would cause scandal,” said she. “If you can’t go, I can do well
enough alone, I’m sure.”

“I’d only be in the way,” said I. “Let me know when you wish to go, and
I’ll try to arrange it. But I can’t get away for at least three months.”

“That would be too late,” said she. “Margot must be started at once.
She hasn’t any too much time before her coming out. Also, Mrs. Armitage
is sailing in two weeks, and she would be a great help.”

“Then you have decided to sail in two weeks?” said I, adding before
she had time to get beyond a gathering frown of protest, “That suits
me. I’ll make my own plans accordingly.”

And in two weeks they sailed, I watching the big ship creep out of dock
and drop slowly down the river. Armitage and I drove away from the pier
together. We were in such high spirits that we had champagne with our
lunch.




VI


Armitage and I were together every day. He attracted me for the
usual reason of congeniality, and also because he was giving me a
liberal education. I have never cared for books or, with two or three
exceptions, for book men. About both there is for me an atmosphere of
staleness, of tedium. I prefer to get what is in the few worth-while
books through the medium of some clear and original mind--such a mind
as Armitage had. He ought to have been a great man. No, he was a great
man; what I mean to say is that his talents ought to have won his
greatness recognition. He did not lack capacity or energy; he showed a
high degree of both in the management and increase of his fortune. He
lacked that species of vanity, I guess it is, which spurs a man to make
himself conspicuous. Also he had a kind of laziness, and chose to be
active only in the way that was easiest and most agreeable for him--the
making of money.

His father had been rich, and his grandfather; his great grandfather
had been one of the richest men in Revolutionary times. His father
was regarded as a crank because he had imagination, and therefore
despised the conventional ideas of his own generation; to be regarded
as thoroughly sane and sensible, you must be careful to be neither,
but to pattern yourself painstakingly upon the particular form
of feeble-mindedness and conventional silliness current in your
time. Armitage’s father resolved that his son should not have his
individuality clipped and moulded and patterned by college and caste
into the familiar type of upper-class man. So Armitage went to public
school, graduated from it into a factory, then into an office, himself
earned the money to carry out the ambitions for study and travel with
which his father had inspired him.

I think there was nothing worth the knowing about which Armitage had
not accurate essential information--books, plays, pictures, music,
literature, history, economics, science, medicine, law, finance. He
was a good shot and a good horseman, could run an automobile, take it
to pieces, put it together again. He was a practical mechanic and a
practical railroad man. He had a successful model farm. “It doesn’t
take long to learn the essentials about anything,” said he, “if you
will only put your whole mind on it and not let up till you’ve got what
you want. And the trouble with most people--why, they are narrow and
ignorant and incompetent--it isn’t lack of mind, but lack of interest.
They have no curiosity.” Nor was my friend Armitage a smatterer. He
didn’t try to _do_ everything; he contented himself with knowledge, and
_did_ only one thing--made money out of railroads.

When he saw that I really wished to be educated, he amused himself by
educating me. Not in a formal way, of course; but simply talking along,
about whatever happened to come up. I have never known a man to get
anywhere, who did not have an excellent memory. Lack of memory--which
means lack of the habit and power of giving attention--is the cause of
more failures than all other defects put together. If you don’t believe
it, test the failures you know; perhaps you might even test your own
not too successful self. I had an unusual memory; and I don’t think
Armitage or anyone ever told me anything worth knowing that I did not
stick to it and keep it where I could use it instantly.

Several months after his wife and mine departed, we were walking in the
park one afternoon--the usual tramp round the upper reservoir to reduce
or to keep in condition. He said in the most casual way:

“My wife is coming next week, and will get her divorce at once.”

Taking my cue from his manner I showed even less surprise then I felt.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” said I.

“Really?” said he carelessly. “Everyone knows.” He laughed to himself.
“She is to marry Lord Blankenship--the Earl of Blankenship.”

“And the children?” said I.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Her people will look
after them. She has spoiled them beyond repair. I have no interest
in them--nor they in me.” After a little tramping in silence, he
halted and rested his hands on the railing and looked away across the
lakelike reservoir, its surface tossed up into white caps by the
wind. “I loved her when we were married,” said he. “That caused all
the mischief. I let her do as she pleased. She was a fine girl--good
family but poor. She pretended to be in sympathy with my ideas.” His
lip curled in good-humored contempt. “I believed in her enthusiasm.
My father--wonderfully sane old man--warned me she was only after our
money, but I wouldn’t listen. Tried to quarrel with him. He wouldn’t
have it--gave me my way. It’s not strange I believed in her. She looked
all that’s high-minded--and delicate--and what they call aristocratic.
Well, it _is_ aristocratic--the reality of aristocracy.”

“Perhaps she was sincere,” said I, out of the depths of my own
experience, “perhaps she honestly imagined she liked and wanted the
sort of life you pictured. We are all hypocrites, but most of us are
unconscious hypocrites.”

“No doubt she did deceive herself--in part at least,” he admitted. “For
a year or so after our marriage she kept up the bluff. I didn’t catch
on--didn’t find her out--until we began to differ about bringing up the
children. Even then, I loved her so that I let her have her way until
it was too late.”

“But,” said I, “don’t you owe it to them to----”

He interrupted with an impatient, “Didn’t I try? But it was hopeless.
To succeed in this day, I’d have had to take the children away off
into the woods, with the chances that even there the servants I’d
be compelled to have would spoil them--would keep them reminded of
the rotten snobbishness they’ve been taught.” He laughed at me with
mocking irony. “You have a daughter,” said he. “What about her?”

“I was thinking of your boy,” said I.

He frowned and looked away. After a long pause--“Hopeless--hopeless,”
said he. “Believe me--hopeless. The boy is like her. No, I’ll have to
begin all over again.”

I gave an inquiring look.

“Marry again,” explained he. “Another sort of woman, and keep her
and her children away from this world of ours. I’d like to try the
experiment. But--” He laughed apologetically. “I’m afraid I love
the city and its amusements too well. I’m not as determined nor as
ardent as I once was. What does it matter, anyway? So long as we are
comfortable and well amused, why should we bother?” After a silence,
“Another mistake I made--the initial mistake--was in giving her a
fortune. She is almost as well fixed as I am. Don’t make that mistake,
Godfrey.”

“I’ve already done it,” said I. “And I shall never be sorry that I
did. I gave my wife the first large sum I made, and I’ve added to it
from time to time. I wanted her and Margot to be safe, no matter what
happened to me.”

“A mistake,” he said. “A sad mistake. I know how you felt. I felt the
same way. But there’s something worse than the more or less sentimental
aversion to being loved and considered merely for the money they can
get out of you and can’t get without you.”

“Nothing worse,” I declared.

“Yes,” he replied. “It’s worse to give a foolish woman the power to
make a fool of herself, of her children, and of you.”

“That is bad, I’ll admit,” said I. “But the other is worse--at least to
me.”

“You’d refuse to make a child behave itself, through the selfish fear
that it would hate you for doing so.”

I laughed. “You know my weakness, I see,” said I.

“There’s the foolish American husband and father. No wonder all the
classes that ought to be leaders in development and civilization are
leaders only in luxury and folly.”

“Oh, let them have a good time--what they call a good time,” said I.
“As you said a moment ago, it doesn’t matter.”

“If it only were a good time--to be ignorant and snobbish and lazy, to
drive instead of walking, to eat and drink instead of thinking, to be
waited upon instead of getting the education and the happiness that
come from serving others. Don’t laugh at me. After all, while you and
I--all our sort of men--are greedy, selfish grabbers, making thousands
work for us, still we do build up big enterprises, we do set things to
moving, and we do teach men the discipline of regular work by forcing
them to work for us at more or less useful things.”

No doubt you, gentle reader, have fallen asleep over this conversation.
I understand perfectly that it is beyond you; for you have no
conception of the deep underlying principles of the relations of men
and men or men and women. But there may be among my readers a few who
will see interest and importance in this talk with Armitage. It is
time the writers of stories concerned themselves with the realities of
life instead of with the showy and sensational things that obscure or
hide the realities. What would you think of the physiologist who issued
a treatise on physiology with no mention or account of the blood? Yet
you read stories about what purports to be life with no mention or
account of money--this, when in any society money is the all-important
factor. Put aside, if you can, the prejudices of your miseducation and
æsthetics, of your false culture and your false refinement, open your
mind, _think_, and you will see that I am right.

When we were well down toward the end of the Park, Armitage said:
“Pardon me a direct question. Have you and your wife separated?”

“No,” said I. “She has gone abroad to round out Margot’s education--and
her own.”

“You know what that means?”

“In a general way,” replied I. “I’m letting them amuse themselves. They
don’t need me, nor I them. Perhaps when they come back--” I did not
finish my sentence.

He laughed. “That means you don’t really care what happens when they
come back.”

My smile was an admission of the correctness of his guess. We dropped
our domestic affairs and took up the matters that were more interesting
and more important to us.

If you have good sight, unimpaired eyes, you go about assuming--when
you think of it at all--that good sight is the rule in the world and
impaired eyes the exception. But let your sight begin to fail, let
your eyes become darkened, and soon you discover that you are one of
thousands--that good sight is the exception, that almost everyone
has something the matter with his eyes. The reason human beings know
so little about human nature, the reason the sentimental flapdoodle
about human virtues, in the present not very far-advanced stage of
human evolution, is so widely believed and doubt of it so indignantly
denounced as cynicism, lies in the fact that the average human being is
ignorant of the afflictions of his own soul. This would be pleasant and
harmless enough, and to destroy the delusion would be wickedly cruel,
were it not that the only way to cure ailments of whatever sort is to
diagnose them. What hope is there for the man devoured of a fever who
fancies and insists that he is healthy? What hope is there for the man
who eats pleasant-tasting slow poison under the impression that it is
food? What a quaint notion it is that the truth, the sole source of
health and happiness, is bad for some people, chiefly for those sick
unto death through the falsehoods of ignorance and vanity! We humans
are like the animal that claws and bites the surgeon who is trying to
set its broken leg.

But I am wandering a little. Discover that you have any ailment of
body or of soul, and you soon discover how widespread that ailment is.
You do not even appreciate how widespread, incessant, and poignant are
the ravages of death until your own family and friends begin to die
off. I had no notion of the extent of the social or domestic malady
of abandoned husbands and fathers until I became one of that curious
class.

Among the masses there is the great and growing pestilence of abandoned
wives--husbands, worn out by the uncertainties of the laboring man’s
income, and disgusted with the incompetence of their wives and with the
exasperations of the badly brought up children--such husbands flying by
tens of thousands to escape what they cannot cure or endure. Among the
classes, from the plutocracy down to and through the small merchants
and professional men, I now discovered that there was a corresponding
and reversed disease--the abandoned husband.

The husband and father, working hard and presently accumulating enough
for ease in his particular station of life, suddenly finds himself
supporting, with perhaps all the money he can scrape together, a
distant and completely detached family. He mails his money regularly,
and with a fidelity that will appear grotesque, noble, or pitiful
according to the point of view. In return he gets occasional letters
from the loved ones--perfunctory these letters somehow sound, or would
sound to the critical, though they are liberally sprinkled with loving,
even fawning phrases, such as “dear, sweet papa” and “darling husband.”
Where are “the loved ones?” If the family home is in a small town or
country, they are in New York or some other city of America usually. If
the family home is in the city, they are abroad. What are they doing?
Sacrificing themselves! Especially poor wife and mother. She would
infinitely prefer being at home with beloved husband. But she must
not be selfish. She must carry her part of their common burden. While
_he_ toils to provide for the children, _she_ toils in the loneliness
or unhappiness of New York or Paris or Rome or Dresden or Genoa. And
what is she toiling at in those desert places? Why, at educating the
children!

Sometimes it’s music. Sometimes it’s painting. Again it’s “finishing,”
whatever that may mean, or plain, vague “education.” There was a time
when men of any sort could be instantly abashed, silenced and abased by
the mere pronouncing of the word education. That happy day for mental
fakers is nearing its close. Now, at the sound of the sacred word many
a sensible, practical man has the courage to put on a grin. I have been
credited with saying that a revival of the declining child-bearing
among American women might be looked for, now that they have found the
usefulness of children as an excuse for escape from home and husband.
I admit having said this, but I meant it as a jest. However, there
is truth in the jest. I don’t especially blame the women. Why should
they stay at home when they have no sympathy with the things that
necessarily engross the husband? Why stay at home when it bores them
even to see that the servants carry on the house decently? Why stay at
home when they simply show there from day to day how little they know
about housekeeping? Why stay at home when there is an amiable fool
willing to mail them his money, while they amuse themselves gadding
about Europe or some big city of America?

Abandoned wives at the one end of the social scale, abandoned husbands
at the other end. Please note that in both cases the deep underlying
cause is the same--money. Too little money, and the husband flies; too
much money, and it is the wife who breaks up the family.

As soon as I discovered, by being elected to membership, the existence
of the universal order of abandoned husbands I took the liveliest
interest in it. I was eager to learn whether there was another fool
quite so foolish as myself, also whether the other fools were aware of
their own folly. I found that most of them were rather proud of their
membership, indulged in a ludicrous cocking of the comb and waggling of
the wattles when they spoke of “my family over on the other side for a
few years,” or of “my wife, poor woman, exiled in Paris to cultivate my
daughter’s voice,” or of “my invalid wife--she has to live in the south
of France. It’s a sad trial to us both.”

Then--but this came much later--I discovered that these credulous,
money-mailing fools, including myself, were not quite so imbecile, as
a class, as they seemed to be. I discovered that they were secretly,
often unconsciously, glad to be rid of their uncongenial families,
and regarded any money they mailed as money well spent. They toiled
cheerfully at distasteful tasks to get the wherewithal to keep their
loved ones far, far away!

The absence of Edna and Margot was an enormous relief to me. Edna was
constantly annoying me to accompanying her to places to which I did
not care to go. I like the theatre and I rather like some operas,
but when I go to either it is for the sake of the performance. Going
with Edna and her friends meant a tedious social function. We arrived
late; we did not hear the play or the opera. As for the purely social
functions, they were intolerable. Perhaps I should not have been so
unhappy had I been the kind of man who likes to talk for the sake of
hearing his own voice. Women are attentive listeners when the man who
is talking is worth flattering. But I talk only for purpose, and when I
listen I wish it to be to some purpose also. So, Edna, always urging me
to do something distasteful or giving me the sense that she was about
to ask me, or was irritated against me for being “disobliging”--Edna
made me uncomfortable, increasingly uncomfortable as I grew more
intelligent, more critical, more discriminating. As for Margot, I could
not talk with her ten minutes without seeing protrude from her sweet
loveliness some vulgarity of snobbishness. It irritated me to hear her
speak to a servant. I had to rebuke her privately several times for
the tone she used in addressing her governess or my secretary--this
when her mother and all her mother’s friends used precisely the same
repellent “gracious” tone in the same circumstances. I saw that she,
sometimes instinctively, again deliberately tried to hide her real self
from me, that I was making a hypocrite of her. Any sort of frankness or
sympathy between her and me was impossible.

A few weeks after their departure I closed the house. It came to me
that I need endure its discomforts no longer, that I could get rid of
those smelly, dull-witted, low-minded foreign animals, that I need
not endure food sent up from a kitchen as to which I had from time to
time disgusting proofs that it was not clean. I closed the house and
left the mice and roaches and other insects to such short provender
as would be provided by caretaker and family. I took an apartment in a
first-class hotel.

When Armitage got clear of his wife he took the adjoining apartment.
And how comfortable and how cheerful we were!

The women with their incompetence and indifference have about destroyed
the American home. To get good service, to have capable people
assisting you, you must yourself be capable. The incapacity of the
“ladies” has driven good servants out of the business of domestic
service, has left in it only the worthless and unreliable creatures
who now take care of the homes. If you find any part of the laboring
class deteriorating, don’t blame them. To do that is to get nowhere,
is to be unjust and shallow to boot. Instead, look at the employers of
that labor. Every time, you will find the fault is there, just as an
ill-mannered or a bad child means unfaithful parents. The masses of
mankind must have leadership, guidance, example. My experience has been
that they respond when the dominating classes do their duty--that is,
pay proper wages, demand good service, _and know what good service is_.

What a relief and a joy that hotel was! Armitage and I had our own
cook, and so could have the simple dishes we liked. We attended to the
marketing--and both knew what sort of meat and vegetables and fruit to
buy, and were not long trifled with by our butcher, our grocer, and our
dairyman, spoiled though they were by the ladies. And our apartments
were clean--really clean, and after the first few weeks our servants
were contented, and abandoned the evil ways slip-shod mistresses had
got them into. Pushing my inquiries, I found that not only our hotel,
but every first-class hotel in the fashionable district was filled with
the remnants of shattered homes--husbands who had compelled their wives
to give up the expensive and dirty attempts at housekeeping; husbands
who had abandoned their families in country homes or in other cities
and towns and had, surreptitiously or boldly, returned to bachelor
bliss; husbands who had been abandoned by their families, none of these
last cases being more heart-breaking than Armitage’s or my own. The
story ran that he was on the verge of melancholia because his beautiful
wife had cast him off. There was no more truth in this than there would
have been in a tale of my lonely grief. Had it not been for Armitage,
pointing out to me the truth, I might have fancied myself a deserted
unfortunate. It would not have been an isolated instance of a human
being not knowing when he is well off.

       *       *       *       *       *

I did not see my family again until the following spring. Business
compelled me to go abroad, and they had come over to London for the
season.

When I descended from the train at Euston, a little confused by the
strangeness, I saw my wife a few yards down the platform. Beside her
stood a tall, beautiful young woman, whom I did not instantly recognize
as my daughter. Both were dressed with the perfection of taste and of
detail that has made the American woman famous throughout the world. I
like well-dressed women--and well-dressed men, too. I should certainly
have been convicted of poor taste had I not been dazzled by those two
charming examples of fashion and style. They looked like two lovely
sisters, the elder not more than five or six years in advance of the
younger. I was a youthful-looking man, myself--except, perhaps, when
I was in the midst of affairs and took on the air of responsibility
that cannot appear in the face of youth. But no one would have believed
there were so few years between Edna and me. Nor was she in the least
made-up. The youth was genuinely there.

That meeting must have impressed the by-standers, who were observing
the two women with admiring interest. I felt a glow of enthusiasm at
sight of these elegant beauties. I was proud to be able to claim them.
As for them, they became radiant the instant they saw me.

“Godfrey!” cried Edna loudly, rushing toward me.

“Papa--dear old papa!” cried Margot, waving her arms in a pretty
gesture of impatient adoration while her mother was detaining me from
her embrace.

“Well--well!” cried I. “What a pair of girls! My, but you’re tearing it
off!”

They laughed gayly, and hugged and kissed me all over again. For a
moment I felt that I had been missed--and that I had missed them. A
good-looking, shortish and shy young man, dressed and groomed in the
attractive English upper-class way of exquisiteness with no sacrifice
of manliness, was now brought forward.

“Lord Crossley--my husband,” said Edna.

“Pleased, I’m sure,” murmured the young man, giving me his hand with an
awkwardness that was somehow not awkward--or, rather, that conveyed a
subtle impression of good breeding. “Now that you’ve got him--or that
he’s got you,” proceeded he, “I’ll toddle along.”

My wife gave him her hand carelessly. “Until dinner,” she said.

Margot shook hands with him, and nodded and smiled. When he was gone
I observed the carriage near which we were standing--and I knew at
once that it was my wife’s carriage. It was a grand car of state, yet
quiet and simple. I often looked at it afterwards, trying to puzzle
out how it contrived to convey two exactly opposite impressions. I
could never solve the mystery. On the lofty box sat the most perfect
model of a coachman I had seen up to that time. Beside the open door
in the shallow, loftily hung body of the carriage stood an equally
perfect footman. I was soon to get used to that marvelous English
ability at specializing men--a system by which a man intended for a
certain career is arrested in every other kind of growth, except only
that which tends to make him more perfect for his purpose. Observing
an English coachman, or valet or butler or what not, you say, “Here is
a remarkably clever man.” Yet you soon find out that he is practically
imbecile in every other respect but his specialty.

We entered the carriage, I sitting opposite the ladies--and most
uncomfortable I was; for the carriage was designed to show off its
occupants, and to look well in it they had to know precisely how to
sit, which I did not. No one noticed me, however. There was too much
pleasure to be got out of observing Edna and Margot, who were looking
like duchesses out of a storybook. I knew they were delightfully
conscious of the sensation they were making, yet they talked and
laughed as if they were alone in their own sitting room--a trick which
is part of that “education” of which you have heard something, and will
hear still more. The conversation seemed easy. In fact, it was only
animated. It was a fair specimen of that whole mode of life. You have
seen the wonderful peaches that come to New York from South Africa
early in the winter--have delighted in their exquisite perfection of
color and form. But have you ever tasted them? I would as lief eat
sawdust; I would rather eat it--for, of sawdust I should expect nothing.

“That young man is the Marquis of Crossley,” said my wife.

I liked to hear her pronounce a title in private. It gave you the sense
of something that tasted fine--made you envy her the sensation she was
getting. “Who is he?” said I.

Margot laughed naïvely--an entrancing display of white teeth and
rose-lined mouth. “Marquis of Crossley, papa,” she said. “That’s
all--and quite enough it is.”

“I don’t know much about the big men in England,” said I. “He looked
rather young to amount to very much.”

“He’s as old as you are,” said Edna, a flash of ill-humor appearing and
vanishing.

I was astonished. “I thought him a boy,” said I.

“He’s one of the greatest nobles in England--one of the greatest in
Europe,” said Edna--and I saw Margot’s eyes sparkling.

“He seemed a nice fellow,” said I amiably. “How you have grown, Margot!”

“Hasn’t she, though!” cried my wife. “Aren’t you proud of her?”

“I’m proud of you both,” said I. “You make me feel old and dingy.”

“You’ve been working too hard, poor dear,” said Edna tenderly. “If you
only would stay over here and learn the art of leisure.”

“I’m afraid I’d be dismally bored,” said I.

I had heard much about the art of loafing as practiced by Europeans,
and I had not been attracted by what I had heard. It was inconceivable
to me that intelligent grown men could pass their time at things about
equal to marbles and tops. But I suppose I am abnormal, as they allege.
Many men seem to look on mental effort of any kind as toilsome, and
seize the first opportunity to return to the mindless frolickings of
the beasts of the field. To me mental effort is a keen pleasure. And I
must add I can’t help thinking it is to everybody who has real brains.

The conversation would have died in distressing agony had it
not been for the indomitable pluck of my wife. She struggled
desperately--perhaps may even have deceived herself into thinking
that she was glad to see me and that the carriage was the scene of a
happy reunion. But I, who had a thorough training in quickly sizing up
situations, saw the truth--that I was a rank outsider, to both wife and
daughter; that they were strangers to me. I began to debate what was
the shortest time I could decently stop in London.

“We are to be presented at Court next week,” said Edna.

Margot’s eyes were again sparkling. It was the sort of look the
novelists put on the sweet young girl’s face when she sees her lover
coming.

“Yes--next week--next Thursday,” said Edna. “And so another of the
little duchess’s dreams is coming true.”

“Is it exciting?” said I to Margot. Somehow reference to the “little
duchess” irritated me.

“Rather!” exclaimed Margot, fairly glowing with ecstasy. “You put
on the most wonderful dress, and you drive in a long, long line of
wonderful carriages, with all the women in wonderful dresses. And
you go into the palace through lines and lines of gorgeous liveries
and uniforms--and you wait in a huge grand room for an hour or so,
frightened to death--and then you walk into the next room and make the
courtesy you have been practicing for weeks--and you pass on.”

“Good!” cried I. “What then?”

“Why you go home, half dead from the nervous shock. Oh, it’s wonderful!”

It seemed to me--for I was becoming somewhat critical, as is the habit
in moods of irritation--it seemed to me that Margot’s elaborate and
costly education might have included the acquiring of a more extensive
vocabulary. That word wonderful was beginning to get on my nerves.
Still, this was hyper-criticism. A lovely woman does not need a
vocabulary, or anything else but a lovely dress and plenty of money to
provide background. “Yes--it must be--wonderful,” said I.

“We’ve been working at it for weeks, mamma and I,” continued she. “I’m
sure we shall do well. I can hardly wait. Just fancy! I’m to meet the
_king_ and the _queen_!”

I saw that Edna was in the same ecstatic trance. I leaned back and
tried to distract myself with the novelty of London houses and crowds.
It may be you understand the mingling of pity, contempt, anger, and
amusement that filled my breast. If you do not understand, explanation
would merely weary you. I was no longer proud of my beautiful family;
I wished to get away from them, to forget them. Edna and Margot
chatted on and on about the king and queen, about the various titled
people they knew or hoped to know, about the thrills of aristocratic
society. I tried not to listen. After a while I said, with I hope not
unsuccessful attempt at amiability:

“I’m sorry I shan’t be here to witness your triumph.”

Across Edna’s face swept a flash of vivid--I had almost said
vicious--annoyance. “You’re not going before the drawing-room at
Buckingham Palace!” cried she.

“I’ll have to,” said I.

“But you can’t!” protested Margot, tears of vexation in her eyes.
“Everyone will think it’s dreadfully queer.”

“Don’t fret about that, my dear,” replied I lightly. “I know how it is
over here. So long as you’ve got the cash they’ll never ask a question.
We Americans mean money to them--and that’s all.”

“Oh, papa!” cried Margot.

“Don’t put such ideas into the child’s head, Godfrey,” said my wife,
restraining herself in a most ladylike manner.

“She knows,” said I. “So do you. Money is everything with aristocracies
everywhere. They must live luxuriously without work. That can’t be done
without money--lots of money. So aristocrats seriously think of nothing
else, whatever they may talk.”

“You’ll have a better opinion of them when you know them,” said Edna,
once more serene and sweetly friendly.

“I don’t think badly of them,” I replied. “I admire their cleverness.
But you mustn’t ask me to respect them. They hardly expect it. They
don’t respect themselves. If they did, they’d not be stealing, but
working.”

Margot listened with lowered eyes. I saw that she was ashamed of and
for me. Edna concealed her feelings better. She forced an amiable
smile. “I don’t know much about these things,” she said politely.
“But, Godfrey, you mustn’t desert us, at least not until after the
drawing-room. I’ve told our ambassador you’re to be here, and he has
gone to no end of trouble to arrange for you.”

“Howard?” said I. “That pup! I despise him. He’s a rotten old snob.
They tell me his toadyism turns the stomach of even the English. He’s a
disgrace to our country. But I suppose he’s little if any worse than
most of our ambassadors over here. They’ve all bought their jobs to
gratify their own and their wives’ taste for shoe polish.”

This speech so depressed the ladies that their last remnant of vivacity
fled, not to return. You are sympathizing with them, gentle reader,
and they are welcome to your sympathy. We drove in silence the rest
of the way to the hotel in Piccadilly, where they were installed in
pompous luxury and had made equally luxurious provision for me. When I
was alone with my valet I reasoned myself out of the grouchy mood into
which the evidences of my family’s fresh access of folly had thrown
me. To quarrel with them, to be irritated against them, was about as
unreasonable as attacking a black man for not being white. I had long
since realized, as the result of much experience and reflection, that
character is no more to be changed than any other inborn quality.
My wife had been born an aristocrat, and had brought into the world
an aristocratic daughter. She was to be blamed neither for the one
thing nor for the other. And it ill became my pretensions to superior
intellect to gird at her and at Margot. The thing for me to do was to
let them alone--keep away.

At dinner, which was served in our apartment, I took a different tone
with them, and they met me more than half way. So cheered was my lovely
daughter that after dinner she perched on the arm of my chair and
ventured to bring up the dangerous subject. Said she:

“You’re not going to be mean to me and run away, are you, papa?”

Looking at Edna, but addressing Margot, I replied: “Your mother will
tell you that it’s best. We three never can agree in our ideas of
things. I’m an irritation. I spoil your pleasure.”

“No--no, indeed!” cried the girl. “I’ve been looking forward to your
coming. I’ve been telling everybody how handsome and superior you are.
And I want them to see for themselves.”

Most pleasant to hear from such rare prettiness, and most sincerely
spoken.

“So many of the American men in society over here are common,”
proceeded she, “and even those who aren’t so very common somehow seem
so. They are down on their knees before titles, and they act--like
servants. Even Mr. Howard-- He oughtn’t to show his feelings so
plainly. Of course we all feel impressed and honored by being taken up
by real titled people of old families, but it’s such bad form to show,
and it interferes with getting on. When I’m talking to Lord Crossley
about that drawing-room, I act as if it were nothing.”

“I see you are being well educated,” said I, laughing.

“Oh, yes. Mamma and I have worked. We’ve not had an idle moment.”

“I believe you,” said I.

“You _will_ stay, papa--won’t you?”

I shook my head. But it was no longer the positive gesture. My
besetting sin, my good nature, had possession of me. Remember, it was
after dinner, and my beautiful daughter was caressing my cheek and was
pleading in a voice whose modulations had been cultivated by the best
masters in Paris.

“But I don’t want people to think I was deceiving them about my papa.”

“I’m willing to be exhibited to a select few in the next two or three
days,” I conceded. “They will tell the others.”

And with that they had to be content. In the faint hope of inducing me
to change my mind, Edna--the devoid of the sense of humor--took me to
a tailor’s and had me shown pictures and models of the court costume I
would wear. But I remained firm. A sense of humor would have warned her
that a person of my sort would have an aversion to liveries of every
kind, to any costume that stamps a man as one of a class. I am perhaps
foolishly jealous of my own individuality. But I cannot help it. A
king in his robes, a general in his uniform--except in battle where
it’s as necessary and useful as night shirt or pajamas in bed--any
sort of livery seems pitiful and contemptible to me. I will wear the
distinguishing dress of the human race and the male sex, but further
than that classification I refuse to move. Also, what business had I,
citizen of a democracy whose chief idea is the barbarism and silliness
of aristocracy--what business had I going to see a king and a queen?
I should have felt that I was aiding them in the triumph of dragging
democracy at their chariot wheels. No, I would not go to levees and
drawing-rooms. You may say I showed myself an absurd extremist. Well,
perhaps so. But, as it seems to be necessary to go to one extreme
or the other, I prefer the extreme of exaggerated and vainglorious
self-respect.

“The king and queen are no doubt nice people,” said I to Margot. “But
if I meet them, it must be on terms of equality--and for some purpose
less inane than exchanging a few set phrases.”

Edna and Margot seemed to feel that they had, on the whole, a
presentable specimen of male relative to exhibit; for they made the
most of the four days I gave them. Through Hilda Armitage, now Lady
Blankenship, and much freshened up by the more congenial atmosphere,
they had got in with the set that is the least easy of access to
Americans--though, of course, it is not actually difficult for any
American with plenty of money and a willingness to spend and good
guidance in how to spend. And I must admit I enjoyed myself in those
four days. The women were, for the most part, rather slow, though I
recall two who had real intelligence, and I don’t think there was a
single one quite so devoid of knowledge of important subjects as our
boasted “bright” American women. The men were distinctly attractive.
They had information, they had breadth--the thing the upper-class
men of America often lack. Also, they were entirely free from that
ill-at-easeness about their own and their neighbor’s position in
society which makes the American upper classes tiresome and ridiculous.

It amused me to observe the Americans in this environment. Both our
women and our men seemed uneasy, small, pinched. You could distinguish
the American man instantly by his pinched, tight expression of an
upper servant out for a holiday. I could feel the same thing in our
women, but I doubt not their looks and dress and vivacity concealed
it from the Englishmen. Anyhow, women are used to being nothing in
themselves, to taking rank and form from their surroundings. While
with us it seems to be true that the women are wholly responsible for
social position with all its nonsense, the deeper truth is that they
owe everything to the possessions of their fathers or husbands. Without
that backing they would be nothing. Everything must ultimately rest
upon a substantiality. In themselves, unsupported, the women’s swollen
pretensions would vanish into thin air.

Lord Crossley was to have dined with us my first evening in London, but
was prevented by suddenly arising business in the country. Next day
he came to lunch, and I at once saw that he was after Margot hammer
and tongs. I discovered it not by the way he treated her, but by his
attitude toward her mother and me. He seemed a thoroughly satisfactory
young man in every way, and I especially liked his frankness and
simplicity. Edna had devoted a large part of a long sight-seeing tour
with me to an account of his grandeur in the British aristocracy.
Having had experience at that time of the American brand of aristocracy
only, I was ignorant of the European kinds that have the aristocratic
instinct in the most acute form--the ingrowing form. I know now that
our own sort, unpleasant and unsightly though it is, cannot compare in
malignance, in littleness and meanness of soul with the European sort.
Just as the noisy blowhard is a modest fellow and harmless, and on
acquaintance lovable in comparison with the silent, brooding egotist,
just so is the American aristocrat in comparison with the European.
An American aristocrat has been known to forget himself and be human.
I recall no instance of that sort in an European born and bred to the
notion that his flesh and blood are of a subtler material than the
flesh and blood of most men. However, as I was saying, at the time of
my first visit to Europe I knew nothing of these matters, and Lord
Crossley seemed to me a simple, ingenuous young man, most attractively
boyish for his years.

“That chap wants to marry Margot,” said I to Edna when we were alone
later in the afternoon.

“I think so,” said she. “Several young men wish to marry her. But she
is in no hurry. She’s not nineteen yet, and she would like a duke.”

“To be sure,” said I. “But she may not be able to love a duke.”

“I never heard of a girl who wouldn’t love a duke if she got the
chance,” said Edna. “There are only five--English dukes, I mean--who
are eligible. Margot has met three of them--and one, the Duke of
Brestwell, has taken quite a fancy to her.” Carelessly, but with
nervous anxiety underneath, “You wouldn’t have any objection?”

“I? Why?”

“Oh--you are so--so peculiar in some ways.”

“Anyone who pleases Margot will suit me,” said I.

“We were afraid you’d be prejudiced against titles. You’ve been with
that eccentric Mr. Armitage so much--and you always have been against
the sort of things Margot and I like.”

“I’ve no objection to titles,” said I. “In fact, I think Margot will be
happier if she marries a title. You’ve educated her so well that she’ll
never see the man or think of him.”

“How little you know her!” cried Edna, pathetically. “And how unjust
to me your prejudices make you. I’ve brought her up to be all
refinement--all sentiment--all heart. She looks only at the highest and
best.”

“At the duke,” said I.

“Certainly at the duke,” said she. “Her tastes are for the life where a
woman can show her beauty of soul to the best advantage and can do the
most good. There is no career for a woman in America. But over here a
woman married into the aristocracy has a real career.”

“At what?” said I.

“As a recognized social leader. As a leader in charities and all sorts
of good movements.”

“Ah, I see,” said I--and there I stopped, for I had learned not to
argue with my wife--or with anyone else, male or female--when the
subject is sheer twaddle. “Yes, I think Margot would do well to marry
over here and to have a dazzling career. I’m sure she’d never get tired
of this--pardon me--treadmill. I observe that it’s better organized
than the imitation one we have over in ‘the States.’”

“I should say!” cried Edna. “You’ve no idea how cheap and common the
best you have in New York is beside the social life here. I’ve been
here only a year, but already there have been the greatest changes in
me. Don’t you notice?”

“I do,” said I. “And I can honestly say you have changed for the
better. You’ve learned to cover it up.”

She looked inquiringly at me, but I did not care to explain what the
“it” was that she had learned to cover. A slight flush appeared in
her cheeks, and I knew intuitively that she thought I was alluding to
her humble origin. I did not disabuse her mind of this impression.
She would have been angry had I explained that I meant her social
ambitions which I thought vulgar and she thought refined. Both she
and Margot, except in occasional unguarded moments in privacy, had
indeed vastly improved in manners. They had learned the trick of the
aristocrats they associated with--the trick of affecting simplicity and
equality and quietly confident ease. There was a notable difference,
and altogether in their favor, between their manners and the manners
of the former Mrs. Armitage and other American women. Whatever might
justly be said in the way of criticism of my wife, it assuredly could
not be said that she was lacking in agility at “catching on.” Armitage
once said to me, “Your wife is a marvelous woman. I never saw or heard
of her making a break.” This tribute can be appreciated only when you
recall whence she sprung--and how much of her origin remained with
her--necessarily--through all her climbings and soarings.

“You prefer it over here?” said I--we were still driving.

“If it weren’t for you, I’d never go back,” said she.

“For me?” said I. “Oh, don’t bother about me.”

“But I do,” replied she sweetly. And her hand covertly stole into mine
for a moment. “Sometimes I get so homesick, Godfrey, that’s it all I
can do to fight off the impulse to take the first steamer.”

I tried to look as a man should on hearing such pleasant and
praiseworthy sentiments from the wife of his bosom.

“You’ve acted cold and--and reserved with me,” she went on. “I wanted
to come to you last night. But I hadn’t the courage. You are such a
mixture of tenderness and--and aloofness. You have the power to make
even me feel like a stranger.”

“I’m sure I don’t mean to be that way,” said I, thoroughly
uncomfortable.

“Margot was speaking of it,” proceeded Edna. “She said--poor
affectionate child--that she hardly dared put her arms round you and
kiss you. You oughtn’t to repulse the child that way, Godfrey. She
has a tender, loving heart. And she adores you. She and I talk of you
a long time every day. I’d insist on it as a matter of duty--for I’d
not let your child forget you. But I don’t need to insist. She refers
everything to you, and whenever she’s unusually happy, she always says:
‘If papa could only be enjoying this with us!’”

I saw that she had worked herself up into a state of excitement.
My good sense told me that there was no genuineness in either her
affection or Margot’s. But I had no doubt they both thought themselves
genuine. And that was quite enough to give me, the easy-going American
slob of a husband and father, an acute attack of guilty conscience. The
upshot was----

But you who have an impressionable heart and a keen sense of your own
shortcomings can guess what it was. Edna and I resumed the relations
of affectionate husband and wife for the rest of my--brief--stop in
London. I remained several days longer than I had intended--stayed
on because I did not wish to hurt her feelings. And I bought her
and Margot all sorts of jewelry and gew-gaws, largely increased her
personal fortune, did not utter a word that would ruffle either of
them. And I left them convinced that I was going only because business
not to be neglected compelled.

They say that the hypocrite wife is a common occurrence. I wonder if
the hypocrite husband is rare. I wonder if there are not more instances
than this one of the husband and the wife playing a cross game of
hypocrisy, with each fancying the other deceived?

So busy was I with my own laborings to deceive my wife as to the true
state of my feelings toward her that not until I was halfway across
the Atlantic did I happen to think the obvious thought. You, gentle
reader, have not thought it. But perhaps some more intelligent species
of reader has. In mid-Atlantic, I suddenly thought: “Why she--she and
Margot--were playing a game--the same game. For what purpose?”

It was not many months before I found out.




VII


That summer Armitage was spending the week ends out on Long Island
at the country place of his sister, Mrs. Kirkwood. He kept his
yacht in the tiny harbor there and made short cruises in the
Sound and up the New England coast. Naturally I often went with
him. Those parties usually amused me. He knew a dozen interesting
people--working people--such as Boris Raphael, the painter, and his
wife, the architect, the Horace Armstrongs who had been divorced and
remarried, a novelist named Beechman who wrote about the woods and
lived in the wilderness in the Southwest most of the year, Susan Lenox
the actress--several others of the same kind. Then there was his
sister--Mary Kirkwood.

For a reason which will presently appear I have not before spoken of
Mrs. Kirkwood, though I had known her longer than I had known Armitage.
Her husband had been treasurer of the road when I was an under Vice
President. He speculated in the road’s funds and it so happened that,
when he was about to be caught, I was the only man who could save him
from exposure. Instead of asking me directly, he sent his wife to me.
I can see her now as she was that day--pale, haggard, but with that
perfect composure which deceives the average human being into thinking,
“Here is a person without nerves.” She told me the whole story in
the manner of one relating a matter in which he has a sympathetic but
remote interest. She made not the smallest attempt to work upon my
feelings, to move me to pity. “And,” she ended, “if you will help him
cover up the shortage, it will be made good and he will resign. I shall
see to it that he does not take another position of trust.”

“Why didn’t he come to me, himself?” said I. “Why did he send you?”

She looked at me--a steady gaze from a pair of melancholy gray eyes. “I
cannot answer that,” said she.

“I beg your pardon,” stammered I; for I guessed the answer to my
question even as I was asking it. I knew the man--an arrogant coward,
with the vanity to lure him into doing preposterous things and wilting
weakness the instant trouble began to gather. “You wish me to save
him?” I said, still confused and not knowing how to meet the situation.

“I am asking rather for myself,” replied she. “I married him against
my father’s wishes and warning. I have not loved him since the second
month of our marriage. If he should be exposed, I think the disgrace
would kill me.” Her lip curled in self-scorn. “A queer kind of pride,
isn’t it?” she said. “To be able to live through the real shame, and to
shrink only from the false.”

“I’ll do it,” said I, with a sudden complete change of intention. “That
is, if you promise me he will resign and not try to get a similar
position elsewhere.”

“I promise,” said she, rising, to show that she was taking not a moment
more of my time than was unavoidable. “And I thank you”--and that was
all.

I kept my part of the agreement; she kept hers. In about two years she
divorced him because he was flagrantly untrue to her. He married the
woman and supported her and himself on the allowance Mary Kirkwood
made him as soon as her father’s death let her into her share of the
property. When I saw her again--one night at dinner at her brother’s
house, before his wife divorced him--we met as if we were entire
strangers. Neither of us made the remotest allusion to that first
meeting.

Going down to her house with Armitage often and being with her on the
yacht for days together, I became fairly well acquainted with her,
although she maintained the reserve which she did not increase for a
stranger or drop even with her brother. You felt as if her personality
were a large and interesting house, with room after room worth
seeing, most attractive--but that no one ever was admitted beyond the
drawing-room, not for a glimpse.

Don’t picture her as of the somber sort of person. A real tragedy
can befall only a person with a highly sensitive nature. Such
persons always have sense of proportion and sense of humor. They do
not exaggerate themselves; they see the amusing side of the antics
of the human animal. So they do not pull long faces and swathe
themselves in yards of crêpe and try to create an impression of
dark and gloomy sorrow. They do not find woe a luxury; they know it
in its grim horror. They strive to get the joy out of life. So,
looking at Mary Kirkwood, you would never have suspected a secret
of sadness, a blighted life. As her reserve did not come from
self-consciousness--either the self-consciousness of haughtiness or
that of shyness and greenness--you did not even suspect reserve until
you had known her long and had tried in vain to get as well acquainted
with her as you thought you were at first. I imagine that in our talk
in my office about her husband I got further into the secret of her
than anyone else ever had.

One detail I shall put by itself, so important does it seem to me.
She had a keen sense of humor. It was not merely passive, merely
appreciation, as the sense of humor is apt to be in women--where it
exists at all. It was also active; she said droll and even witty
things. When her sense of humor was aroused, her eyes were bewitching.

What did she look like? The women all wish to know this; for, being
fond of the evanescent triumphs over the male which beauty of face
or form gives, and as a rule having experience only of those petty
victories, they fancy that looks are the important factor, the
all-important factor. In fact, the real conquests of women are not won
by looks. Beauty, or, rather, physical charm of some kind, is the lure
that draws the desired male within range. If after pausing a while he
finds nothing more, he is off again.

Perhaps, probably, my experience with Edna has made me more indifferent
to looks than the average man who has never realized his longing to
possess a physically beautiful woman. However that may be, Mary
Kirkwood certainly had no cause to complain that Nature had not
been generous to her in the matter of looks. She was tall, she was
slender. She had a delicate oval face, a skin that was clear and
smooth and dark with the much prized olive tints in it. She had a
beautiful long neck, a great quantity of almost black hair. Her nose
suggested pride, her mouth mockery, her eyes sincerity. She was the
kind of woman who exercises a powerful physical fascination over men,
and at the same time makes them afraid to show their feelings. Women
like that tantalize with visions of what they could and would give
the man they loved, but make each man feel that it would be idle for
him to hope. In character she was very different from her cynical,
mocking brother--was, I imagine, more like her father. Mentally the
resemblance between the brother and sister was strong--but she took
pains to conceal how much she knew, where he found his chief pleasure
in “showing off.” I feel I have fallen pitifully short of doing her
justice in this description. But who can put into words such a subtlety
as charm? She had it--for men. Women did not like her--nor she them. I
state this without fear of prejudicing either women or men against her.
Why is it, by the way, that to say a man does not like men and is not
liked by them is to damn him utterly, while to say that a woman neither
likes nor is liked by her own sex is rather to speak in her favor? You
cry indignantly, “Not true!” gentle reader. But--do _you_ know what is
true and what not true? And, if you did, would you confess it, even to
yourself?

You are proceeding to revenge yourself upon me. You are saying, “_Now_
we know _why_ he was indifferent to his beautiful wife and to his
lovely daughter!--_Now_ we understand that fit of guilty conscience in
London!”

Do you know? Perhaps. I am not sure. I am not conscious of any especial
interest in Mary Kirkwood until after I came back from London. I
had seen her but a few times. We had never talked so long as five
consecutive minutes, and then we had talked commonplaces. Not the
commonplaces of fashionable people, but the commonplaces of intelligent
people. There’s an enormous difference.

The first time my memory records her with the vividness of moving
pictures is, of course, at that meeting in my office. The next time is
a few days after my return from London. I had been surfeited both in
London and on the steamer with the inane amateurs at life, the shallow
elegant dabblers in it, interesting themselves only in coaching,
bridge, and similar pastimes worthy an asylum for the feeble-minded. I
went down to the Kirkwood place with Armitage. As his sister was not in
the house we set out for a walk through the grounds to find her. At the
outer edge of the gardens a workman told us that if we would follow a
path through the swampy woods we could not miss her.

The path was the roughest kind of a trail. Our journey was beset with
swarms of insects, most of them mosquitoes in savage humor. It lay
along the course of a sluggish narrow stream that looked malarious
and undoubtedly was. “Landscape gardening is one of Mary’s fads,”
explained her brother. “She has been planning to tackle this swamp for
several years. Now she is at it.”

In the depths of the morass we came upon her. She was in man’s
clothes--laboring man’s clothes. Her face and neck were protected by
veils, her hands by gloves. She was toiling away with a gang of men at
clearing the ground where the drains were to center in an artificial
lake. Armitage called several times before she heard. Then she dropped
her ax and came forward to meet us. There was certainly nothing of what
is usually regarded as feminine allure about her. Yet never had I seen
a woman more fascinating. There undoubtedly was charm in her face and
in her strong, slender figure. But I believe the real charm of charms
for me was the spectacle of a woman usefully employed. A woman actually
doing something. A woman!

After the greeting she said: “The only way I can get the men to work
in this pesthole is by working with them.” She smiled merrily. “One
doesn’t look so well as in a fresh tennis suit wielding a racket. But I
can’t bear doing things that have no results.”

“My father insisted on bringing us up in the commonest way and with the
commonest tastes,” said Armitage, “and Mary has remained even less the
lady than I am the gentleman.”

As the mosquitoes were tearing us to pieces Mrs. Kirkwood ordered us
back to the house. Before we were out of sight she was leading on her
gang and wielding the ax again. At dinner she appeared in all the
radiance and grace of the beautiful woman with fondness for and taste
in dress. She explained to me her plan--how swamp and sluggish, rotting
brook were to be transformed into a wooded park with a swift, clear
stream and a succession of cascades. I may add, she carried out the
plan, and the results were even beyond what my imagination pictured as
she talked.

This first view of her life in the country set me to observing her
closely--perhaps more closely and from a different standpoint than a
man usually observes a woman. In all she did I saw the same rare and
fascinating imagination--the only kind of imagination worth while. Of
all its stupidities and follies none so completely convicts the human
race of shallowness and bad taste as its notions of what is romantic
and idealistic. The more elegant the human animal flatters itself it
is, the poorer are its ideals--that is, the further removed from the
practical and the useful. So, you rarely find a woman with so much true
poetry, true romance, true imagination as to keep house well. But Mary
Kirkwood kept house as a truly great artist paints a picture, as a
truly great composer creates an opera. In all her house there was not a
trace of the crude, costly luxury that rivals the squalor and bareness
of poverty in repulsiveness to people of sense and taste. But what
comfort! What splendid cooking, what perfection of service. The chairs
and sofas, the beds, the linen, the hundred and one small but important
devices for facilitating the material side of life, and so putting mind
and spirit in the mood for their best-- But I despair of making you
realize. I should have to catalogue, describe, contrast through page
after page. And when I had finished, those who understand what the
phrase art of living means would have read only what they already know,
while those who do not understand that phrase would be convulsed with
the cackling laughter that is the tribute of mush-brain to intellect.

Observing Mary Kirkwood I discovered a great truth about the woman
question: the crudest indictment of the intellect of woman is the
crude, archaic, futile, and unimaginative way in which is carried on
the part of life that is woman’s peculiar work--or, rather, is messed,
muddled, slopped, and neglected. No doubt this is not their fault. But
it soon will be if they don’t bestir themselves. Already there are
American men not a few who apologize for having married as a folly of
their green and silly youth.

So, gentle reader, though my enthusiasm tempts me to describe Mary
Kirkwood’s housekeeping in detail, I shall spare you. You would not
read. You would not understand if you did.

The first time she and I approached the confidential was on an August
evening when we were alone on the upper deck of the yacht. The others
were in the cabin playing bridge. We had been sitting there perhaps an
hour when she rose.

“Don’t go,” said I.

“I thought you wished to be alone,” said she.

“Why did you think that?”

“Your way of answering me. You’ve been almost curt.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t promise to talk if you stay. But I hate to be left
alone with my thoughts.”

“I understand,” said she. And she seated herself beside the rail, and
with my assistance lighted a cigarette.

There was a moon somewhere above the awning which gave us a roof. By
the dim, uncertain light I could make out her features. It seemed to
me she was staying as much on her own account as on mine--because she,
too, wished not to be alone with her thoughts. I had not in a long time
seen her in a frankly serious mood.

“How much better off a man is than a woman,” said I. “A man has his
career to think about, while a woman usually has only herself.”

“Only herself,” echoed she absently. “And if one is able to think,
oneself is an unsatisfactory subject.”

“Extremely,” said I. “Faults, follies, failures.”

For a time I watched the faintly glowing end of her cigarette and the
slim fingers that held it gracefully. Then she said:

“Do you believe in a future life?”

“Does anyone feel _sure_ of any life but this?”

“Then this is one’s only chance to get what one wants--what’s worth
while.”

“What _is_ worth while?” I inquired, feeling the charm of her quiet,
sweet voice issuing upon the magical stillness. “What _is_ worth while?”

She laughed softly. “What one wants.”

“And what do _you_ want?”

She drew her white scarf closer about her bare shoulders, smiled
queerly out over the lazily rippling waters. “Love and children,” she
said. “I’m a normal woman.”

That amused me. “Normal? Why, you’re unique--eccentric. Most women
want money--and yet more money--and yet more money--for more and more
and always more show.”

“You must want the same thing,” retorted she. “You’re too sensible not
to know you can’t possibly do any good to others with money. So you
must want it for your own selfish purposes. It’s every bit as much for
show when you have it tucked away in large masses for people to gape at
as if you were throwing it round as the women do.... If anything, your
passion is cruder than theirs.”

“I think I make money,” said I, “for the same reasons that a hen lays
eggs or a cow gives milk--because I can’t help it; because I can’t do
anything else and must do something.”

“Did you ever try to do anything else?”

“No,” I admitted. Then I added, “I never had the chance.”

“True,” she said reflectively. “A hen can’t give milk and a cow can’t
lay eggs.”

“For some time,” I went on, “I’ve been trying to find something else
to do. Something interesting. No, not exactly that either. I must find
some way of reviving my interest in life. The things I am doing would
be interesting enough if I could be interested in anything at all. But
I’m not.”

She nodded slowly. “I’m in the same state,” said she. “I’ve about
decided what to do.”

“Yes?” said I encouragingly.

“Marry again,” replied she.

I laughed outright. “That’s very unoriginal,” said I. “It puts you in
with the rest of the women. Marrying is all _they_ can think of doing.”

“But you don’t quite understand,” said she. “_I_ want children. I
am thinking of selecting some trustworthy man with good physical
and mental qualities. I have had experience. I ought to be able to
judge--and not being in love with him I shall not be so likely to
make a mistake. I shall marry, and the children will give me love and
occupation. You may laugh, but I tell you the only occupation worthy of
a man or a woman is bringing up children. All the rest--for men as well
as for women--is--is like a hen laying eggs to rot in the weeds....
Bringing up children to develop us, to give us a chance to make them an
improvement on ourselves. That’s the best.”

As the full meaning of what she had said unfolded I was filled with
astonishment. How clear and simple--how true. Why had I not seen this
long ago--why had it been necessary to have it pointed out by another?
“I believe--yes, I’m sure--that’s what I’ve been groping for,” I said
to her.

“I thought you’d understand,” said she, and most flattering was her
tone of pleasure at my obvious admiration.

Thus our friendship was born.

I could not but envy her freedom to seek to satisfy the longing I thus
discovered in my own heart. So strongly did the mood for confidence
possess me that only my long and hard training in self-restraint held
me from the disloyalty of speaking my thoughts. I said:

“It’s dismal to grow old with no ties in the oncoming generation. The
sense of the utter futility of life would weigh more and more heavily.
I’m surprised that you’ve realized it so young.”

“A woman realizes it earlier than a man,” she reminded me. “For a woman
has no career to interfere and prevent her seeing the truth.”

A woman! Rather, a rare occasional Mary Kirkwood. Most women never
looked beyond the gratification of the crudest, easiest vanities and
appetites. “Yes, you are right,” I continued. “You ought to marry--as
soon as you can. The man isn’t important, except in the ways you
spoke of. So far as man and woman love is concerned, that quickly
passes--where it ever exists at all. But the bond of father, mother,
and children is enduring--at least, I’m sure _you_ would make it so.”

We sat lost in thought for some time--I reflecting moodily upon my own
baffled and now seemingly hopeless longing, she probably busy with the
ideas suggested in her next speech.

“The main trouble is money,” said she. “Except for that my husband
would have been all right. When we first met he did not know my family
had wealth. He thought I belonged to another and poor branch. And I
think he cared for me, and would have been the man I sought but for the
money. It roused a dormant side of his nature, and everything went to
pieces.”

“Then, marry a rich man,” I suggested.

She shook her head. “I don’t know a single rich man--except _possibly_
my brother--who isn’t obsessed about money. The rich have a craving to
be richer that’s worse than the desire of the poor to be rich.... I
don’t know what to do. I couldn’t bring up children in the atmosphere
of wealth and caste and show--the sort of atmosphere a man or woman
crazy about money insists on creating. My father was right. He was a
really wise man. I owe to him every good instinct and good idea I have.”

“But you must have seen some man who promised well. I think you
can trust to your judgment. You mustn’t defeat your one chance for
happiness by overcaution.”

Again she was silent for several minutes. Then she said, with a queer
laugh and an embarrassed movement: “I have seen such a man--lately. I
like him. I think I could like him more than a little. I’ve an idea he
might care for me if I’d let him. But--I don’t know.”

I saw that she longed to confide, but wished to be questioned. “Here on
the yacht?” said I.

She nodded.

“Beechman?”

She laughed shyly yet with amusement.

“That was an easy guess,” said I. “He’s the only man of us free to
marry.”

“What do you think of him?”

“The very man I’d say,” replied I. “He’s good to look at--clever,
healthy, and honest. He isn’t money-mad. He could make quite a splurge
with what he has, yet he doesn’t. He is a serious man--does not let
them tempt him into fashionable society or any other kind.”

“What are the objections?” said she. “My father trained us to look for
the rotten spots, as he called them. He said one ought to hunt them out
and examine them carefully. Then if, in spite of them, the thing still
looked good, why there was a chance of its being worth taking.”

“That’s precisely my way of proceeding in business,” said I. “It’s a
pity it isn’t used in every part of life--from marketing up to choosing
a friend or a husband.”

“Well, what are the ‘rotten spots’ in Mr. Beechman?”

“I haven’t looked for them,” said I. “No doubt they’re there, but as
they’re not obvious they may be unimportant.”

“Can’t you think of _any_?”

She was laughing, and so was I. Poor Beechman, down in the cabin
absorbed in bridge, how amazed he’d have been if he could have heard!
In my mind’s eye I was looking him over--a tall, fair man with good
smooth-shaven features.

“He’s getting bald rather rapidly for a man of thirty or thereabouts,”
said I.

“I don’t like baldness,” said she. “But I can endure it.”

“He is distinctly vain of his looks and his strength. But he has cause
to be.”

“All men are physically vain,” said she. “And they can’t help it,
because it is the hereditary quality of the male from fishes and
reptiles up.”

“He’s inclined to be opinionated, and his point of view is narrow.”

“I think I might hope to educate him out of that,” said she. “I can be
tactful.”

“It’s certainly not a serious objection.”

“Any other spots?”

“He has a certain--a certain--lack of vigor. It’s a thing I’ve observed
in all professional men, except those of the first rank, those who are
really men of action.”

She nodded. “I was waiting for that,” said she. “It’s the thing that
has made me hesitate.” She laughed outright. “What a conceited speech!
But I’m exposing myself fully to you.”

“Why not?” said I.

“I am picking him to pieces as if I thought myself perfection. As a
matter of fact, I know he’d fly from me if he saw me as I am.” She
reflected, laughed quietly. “But he never would know me as I am. An
unconventional woman--if she’s sensible--only shows enough of her
variation from the pattern to make herself interesting--never enough to
be alarming.”

“You are unconventional?”

“You didn’t suspect it?”

“No. You smoke cigarettes--but that has ceased to be unconventional.”

“I rather thought you had a favorable opinion of my intelligence,” said
she.

“So I have,” said I. “To be perfectly frank, you seemed to me to have
as good a mind as your brother.”

“That is flattering,” said she, immensely pleased, and with reason.
“Well, if you thought so favorably of my intelligence, how could you
believe me conventional?”

“I see,” said I. “No one who thinks can be conventional.”

“Conventionality,” said she, “was invented to save some people the
trouble of thinking and to prevent others from being outrageous through
trying to think when they’ve nothing to think with.”

“That is worth remembering and repeating,” laughed I. “Personally,
I’m deeply grateful for conventionality. You see, I came up from the
bottom, and I find it satisfactory to be able to refer to the rules in
all the things I knew nothing about.”

“My brother says the most remarkable thing about you--and your wife--
Do you mind my telling you?”

“Go on,” said I.

“He says most people who come up are alternately hopeless barbarians
and hopelessly conventional, but that you took the right course. You
learned to be conventional--learned the rules--before you ventured to
try to make personal variations in them.”

“I’m slow to risk variations,” said I. “Most of the efforts in that
direction are--eccentric. And I detest eccentricity as much as I like
originality.”

“If Mr. Beechman were only a little less conventional!” sighed she.
“I’m afraid he’d be rather--” She hesitated.

“Tiresome?” I ventured to suggest.

“Tiresome,” she assented. “But--there would be the children. Do you
think he’d try to interfere with me there?”

“You’ll never know that until you’ve married him,” said I.

“It’s a pity he has an occupation that would keep him round the house
most of the time,” said she. “That’s a trial to a woman. She’s always
being interrupted when she wishes to be free.”

“You mustn’t expect too much,” said I. “I think the children will be
_your_ children.”

She did not reply in words. But a sudden strengthening of her
expression made me feel that I was getting a glimpse of her father.

We talked no more of Beechman or of any personalities related to this
story. When the bridge party broke up and a supper was served on deck,
she and Beechman sat together. And I gathered from the sounds coming
from their direction that he was making progress. My spirits gradually
oozed away and I sat glumly pretending to listen while Mrs. Raphael
talked to me. Usually she interested me because she talked what she
knew and knew things worth while. But that night I heard scarcely a
word she said. When the party, one by one, began to go below, Mrs.
Kirkwood joined me and found an opportunity to say, aside:

“Won’t you talk with Mr. Beechman--and tell me your honest opinion? You
know I can’t afford to make another mistake. And I’m in earnest.”

I stood silent, smoking and staring out toward the dim Connecticut
shore.

“It wouldn’t be unfair to him,” she urged. “You’re not especially his
friend. I can’t ask anyone else, and I believe in your judgment.”

“If I advised you, I’d be taking a heavy responsibility,” said I.

“I’m not that kind--you know I’m not,” replied she. “I don’t ask
advice, to have some one to blame if things go wrong. Of course, if
there’s a reason why you can’t very well help me-- Maybe you already
know something against him?--something you’ve no right to tell?”

“Nothing,” said I, emphatically. “And I don’t believe there is anything
against him.” Then, on an impulse of fairness and to wipe out the
suspicion of Beechman I had unwittingly created, I said: “Really,
there’s no reason why I shouldn’t size him up and give you my opinion.
I’ll do my best.”

She thanked me with a fine lighting up of the eyes. And the warm
friendly pressure of her hand lingered after she had long been below
and was no doubt asleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

What was my reason for hesitating? You have guessed it, but you think
I do not intend to admit. You are deceived there. I admit frankly. I
felt unable to advise her because I found that I was in love with her,
myself. Yes, I was in love, and for the first time in my life. The
latest time of falling in love is always the first. As we become older
and more experienced, better acquainted with the world, with ourselves,
with what we want and do not want--in a word, as we _grow_, the meaning
of love grows. And each time we love, we see, as we look back over
the previous times, that what we thought was love was in fact simply
educational.

So, when I say I had never loved until I loved Mary Kirkwood, I am
speaking a truth which is worth thinking about. I had reached the
age, the stage of physical and mental development, at which a man’s
capacities are at their largest--at which I could give love and could
appreciate love that was given to me. And I, who could not ask or hope
love from her, gave her all the love I had to give. Gave because I
could not help giving. Who, seeing the best, can help wanting it?

But for my promise to her I should have left the yacht early the
following morning. As it was I stayed on, with my mind made up to keep
my word. Did I stay because of my promise? Did I stay because I loved
her? I do not know. Who can fathom the real motive in such a situation
as that? I can only say that I sought Beechman’s society and did my
best to take his measure. It had been so long my habit to judge men
without regard to my personal feeling about them that, perhaps in spite
of myself, I saw this man as he was, not as I should have liked him
to be. I found that I had underestimated him. I had been prejudiced
by his taking himself too seriously--a form of vanity which I happen
particularly to detest. Also his sense of humor was different from
mine--a fact that had misled me into thinking he had no sense of humor.
I had thought--shall I say hoped?--that I would find him a man she
could respect but could not love. I was forced to abandon this idea.
So far as a man can judge another for a woman, he could succeed with
almost any heart-free woman. I wondered that Mary Kirkwood should be
uncertain about him. I might have drawn comfort from her having done
so, had I not known how she dreaded making a second mistake.

That day and the next, when I was not with him, she was. I shan’t
attempt to tell my emotions. That sort of thing seems absurd to all
the world but the one who is suffering. Besides, the fact that I was a
married man would alienate the sympathies of all respectable readers.
Not that I am yearning for sympathy. Those who have read thus far may
have possibly gathered that I am not one of those who live on sympathy
and wither and die without it. The only sympathy human beings seem able
to give one another, I have discovered, is a species of self-complacent
pity; and while it may not be exactly a stone, it is certainly a most
inferior quality of bread.

The third morning I sought her out. She made a picture of strong, slim
young womanhood to cause the heart--at least, my heart--to ache, as she
leaned against the rail in her blue-trimmed white linen dress showing
her lovely throat. Said I, avoiding her eyes: “I’m off for the shore,
and I wish to report before leaving.”

“Ashore!” she cried. “Why, you were to have gone on to Bar Harbor and
back again.”

“Business--always business.”

“I’m disappointed,” said she, and I saw with a furtive glance that her
face had quite lost its brightness.

“I’m glad of that, at least,” said I with a successful enough attempt
at lightness; for, as I have never been the sort of man in whom
women expect to find sentimentalism, signs of embarrassment or other
agitation would be attributed to any other source before the heart.

“I’ve lost interest in the trip,” she declared.

I forced a smile. “Beechman isn’t going.”

“Oh, that’s different,” said she, with a certain frank impatience.
“You’re the one person I can really talk to.... Can’t you stay?”

I did not let my face betray me. I waited before speaking until I was
sure of my voice. “Impossible,” I said, perhaps rather curtly--for,
mind you, I wished to deal honestly with her, and was not trying to
hint my love while pretending to hide it. I know there is a notion
that love cannot be controlled. But the kind of love that can’t be
controlled is a selfish, greedy appetite and not love at all. When
the man doesn’t control his love the woman may be sure he is thinking
of himself only, of her merely as a possible means of pleasure--is
thinking of her as the hungry hunter thinks of the fine fat rabbit.
Said I:

“Now for my report on Beechman.”

But she would not let me escape. “Why are you short with me?” she
asked. “Have I offended you?”

“No, indeed,” said I. “You’ve been everything that’s kind and friendly.”

“The very idea of losing your friendship frightens me,” she went on.
“I’ve a feeling for you--a feeling of--of intimacy”--she flushed
rosily--“that I have for no one else in the world. Oh, I don’t expect
you to return it. No doubt I seem insignificant to you. Almost anyone
would want your friendship. You are sure you aren’t leaving because you
are bored?”

“Absolutely sure. If I could explain my reason for going you would see
that I must. But I can’t explain. So you’ll be glad to hear that I find
Beechman even more of a man than I thought.”

She looked at me apologetically. “You’ll think me foolish, but since
I’ve begun to try to like him better I’ve been--almost--not liking him.”

I am sure I beamed with delight. For, there are limits--very narrow
ones--to unselfishness in the most considerate love. And I am not
able to pose as more than feebly unselfish. “That isn’t fair to him,”
I said, with more enthusiasm in my words than in my tone. “I’ve been
judging him as carefully as I know how, and I must in honesty say he is
a rare man. You’ll not find many like him.”

“Don’t tell me he’s worthy,” she cried, “or I shall loathe him.”

“And he cares for you,” I said.

“Did he tell you so?”

“I think he would have if I had encouraged him.... I liked the way he
spoke of you, and”--I hesitated, could not hold back the words--“and
I am not easy to please there.” Those words were certainly far from
confession, were the mildest form of indiscretion. Still, so determined
was I to be square, and so guilty did I feel, that they sounded like a
contemptible attempt stealthily to make love to her.

“Thank you,” she said gently. And her suddenly swimming eyes and tender
voice reminded me how alone she was and how bitter her experience had
been and how she deserved happiness.

I felt ashamed of myself. “I hope you will be happy,” I said, perhaps
rather huskily. “Anyone who tried to prevent it would deserve to be
killed.”

She looked at me with such a steady, penetrating gaze that I feared I
had betrayed myself. In fact, I knew I had. I glanced at my watch, put
out my hand. “I hate to go,” I said, in the tone of one man to another.
“But I must.” And as we shook hands, I repeated, “I know you will be
happy.”

She laughed nervously; she, too, had become ill at ease. “You make me
feel engaged,” she said with an attempt at mockery.

As the launch touched the shore I looked back. She was leaning on the
rail, Beechman beside her. He was talking, but I felt sure she was not
listening. As I looked she waved her hand. I lifted my hat and hurried
away. And I learned the meaning of that word desolation.

Do not think, because I have not raved, talked of the moon and stars,
poetized about my soul states, that therefore I did not love her. The
banquet of life spread so richly for me seemed a ghastly mockery. What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
I had lost my soul. I had discovered how I might have been happy,
and at the same time I had discovered that it could never be--never.
And always before me she stood in her radiant youth--intelligent, so
capable, splendidly sincere--the woman I loved, the woman I felt I
could have made love me.

There was my temptation--the feeling, the conviction that I could
win her love. She had confessed to a friendship for me different from
any she had for anyone else in the world. If I were willing to take
advantage of her trust, of her liking, of her longing for love and
of my knowledge of it--if I were to let her see how utterly I loved
her--I could surely win her. There were times when I said to myself:
“You--even as you are--can make her happier than anyone else could. She
would prefer what you can give her to what she will get from Beechman.
Your love gives you the right to make her happy. You are letting
foolish conventional notions blind you to what is really right. If you
had acted in business in that fashion, you would not have got far. Yet
in the supreme crisis of your life you let yourself be frightened off
by a bogy of conventional morality.”

Perhaps I was giving myself sound advice there. I do not know. I
only know that I put the temptation behind me and went to work. The
sentimental readers will not forgive me. So be it. I am a plain man,
rather old-fashioned--prim, I believe it is called--in my ideas, not at
all the ladies’ man. And I did not want to harm her. I loved her.

I went to work. The sort of people who are ever on the lookout for some
excuse for going to pieces, and the world is well sprinkled with them,
eagerly seize on disappointment in love as precisely what they were
seeking. At the risk of being thought cold and hard, I will say that
it is extremely fortunate for Joan that she escaped the Darby who goes
smash for disappointed love of her. If Joan had yielded to him, Darby
would simply have been put to the trouble of finding another pretext
for throwing up his job and taking to drink. I confess it did not occur
to me to give up and fall to boozing and brooding. I should not have
dared do that; for, you see, I was really in love--not with myself, but
with Mary Kirkwood. I went to work. I filled my days and my evenings
with business engagements that compelled both my time and my thought.
I took on an extra secretary. I started to build a railway. I laid out
an addition to the manufacturing city I had founded. I organized a
farm for teaching city slum boys to be farmers. I engaged in several
entirely new mining and manufacturing enterprises. The result was that
when I went to bed, I slept; and when they awakened me in the morning
my brain was at work before my head was well off the pillow. And
still-- You can distract your mind from the aching tooth, but it aches
on.

All this time I was receiving weekly letters from Edna and Margot--long
and loving letters. I read them, and you may possibly imagine I was
filled with shame and remorse. Not at all. My wife and my daughter
had rather exaggerated my vanity. Only vanity could gull a husband
and father in my position into fancying himself the object of such
luxuriant affection as those letters professed. If you have lies to
tell, take my advice and don’t _write_ them. I can’t explain the
mystery, but a lie which, spoken and heard, passes out and passes in
as smoothly as a greased shuttle in its greased groove, becomes a
glaring falsehood when set down in black and white. The only effect of
those letters upon me was to make my sick heart the sadder with the
realization of what I had missed in losing Mary Kirkwood.

And I kept wondering what it was that Edna and Margot were slathering
me for.

       *       *       *       *       *

In September I got the key to the mystery. The necessity of floating
some bonds took me abroad again. I found my family ensconced in
beautiful luxury in an apartment in Paris. You drove out the Champs
Elysées. Not far from the President’s palace you drove in at great
doors--not gates, but doors--in a plain, unpretentious-looking house
wall. You were in a superb garden of whose existence you had no hint
from the street. Magnificent bronze inner doors--powdered and velveted
lackeys--a majestic stairway leading to lofty and gorgeous corridors
and salons. Really my wife, with the aid of those clever European
professors of the aristocratic art, had educated herself amazingly.
On every side there were evidences of her good taste in furniture, in
tapestries, in wall coverings, in pictures. It was not the taste of a
home maker, but it was unquestionably good taste. It was not the sort
of taste I liked, but not to admire it would have been to lack the
sense of harmony in line and color. And let me add in justice to her,
it was her own taste. There is no mistaking the difference between the
luxury that is merely bought and the luxury that is created.

I submitted with what grace I could muster to the exuberant hypocrisies
of that greeting. But I got to business with all speed. “In the note
I found in London you said you had a surprise for me,” I said to Edna.
“What is it?”

“How impatient you are,” laughed she. “Just like a child.”

Whether because the fashions of the day happened to be peculiarly
becoming or because she had actually improved, she now had the
loveliness more exquisite than I had ever seen in woman. No doubt her
piquant face had charm for most people; for me it had none whatever.
I knew too well what lay beneath--or, rather, what was not there, for
like most human beings her defects of character were not so much the
presence of the vices as the lack of the virtues.

“I’ve been waiting for that surprise several months,” said I. “Your
letters and Margot’s showed that some shock was coming.”

“Shock? No, indeed!” And she and Margot laughed gayly. “It isn’t
altogether a surprise,” she went on. “Can’t you guess?”

I looked at Margot. “Ah!” I said. “Margot is engaged.”

Margot ran across the room and kissed me. “Oh, I’m so happy, papa!” she
cried.

“Is it the duke?” I asked.

She made a wry face. “He was horrid!” she said. “I couldn’t _endure_
him.”

“So you had to fall back on the marquis?”

Neither of the women liked this way of putting the matter. It suggested
that I knew the painful truth of the failure of the ducal campaign. But
they were not to be put out of humor. “You liked him yourself, papa,”
said Margot.

I was abstractedly thinking how I had no sense of her being my
daughter or of Edna being my wife. You would say that after all we
three had been through together, from Passaic up, it would be a sheer
impossibility for there ever to be a sense of strangeness between us.
But there is no limit to the power of the human soul to cut itself off;
intimacy is hard to maintain, isolation--alas--is the natural state.
I looked on them as strangers; I could feel that, in spite of their
clever, resolute forcing, in spite of the hypocrisy of love for me
which each doubtless maintained at all times with the other, still they
could scarcely hide their feeling that I was a strange man come in from
the street.

“Yes, I liked Crossley,” said I. “I think he’ll make you a good
husband.”

“He is _mad_ about her!” said Edna. “There was a while this summer when
he thought he had lost her, and he all but went out of his mind.”

To look at her was to believe it; for, a lovelier girl was never
displayed in all her physical perfection by a more discriminating
mother.

“When is the wedding to be?” said I.

There was a brief, surcharged silence--no more than a pause. Then Edna
said indifferently, “As soon as the settlements are arranged.”

“Oh--is he settling something on her?” said I, with pretended
innocence. “I’m glad of that. There’s been too much of the other sort
of thing.”

Margot came to the rescue with a charming laugh. “Poor Hugh!” she said.
“He hasn’t anything but mortgages.”

“Um--I see,” said I glumly--and I observed intense anxiety behind the
smiles in those two pairs of beautiful eyes. “How much have we got to
pay for him?”

Edna looked reproachfully at me. “Margot,” said she, “you’d better go
tell them to serve lunch in fifteen minutes.”

“Nonsense,” said I cheerfully. “Let her stay. What’s the use of this
hypocrisy? She knows he cares no more about her than she cares about
him--that it’s simply a matter of buying and selling. If she doesn’t
know it, if she’s letting her vanity bamboozle her----”

“Godfrey--please!” implored Edna. “Don’t smirch the child’s romance.
She and Hugh love each other. If she were poor, he’d marry her just the
same.”

“Has he offered to go ahead, regardless of settlements?” I asked.

“Of course not, papa,” flashed Margot. “Things aren’t done that way
over here.”

“Oh, yes, they are,” replied I. “Romantic love matches occur every day.
Even royalty throws up its rights, to marry a chorus girl. But when
there’s a fat American goose to pluck and eat, why, they pluck and eat
it. I’m the goose, my dear--not you.”

“You don’t understand,” murmured Margot.

“I wish I didn’t,” said I. “And I wish you didn’t have to understand.
If possible I want to arrange matters with him so that he’ll always
treat you decently.”

“But, Godfrey,” cried Edna in a panic, “you can’t talk money to _him_.”

“Why not?” said I. “He’s _thinking_ money. Why shouldn’t he talk it?”

“He knows nothing about those things, papa----”

I laughed.

“You’ll ruin everything!” cried my wife. “You’ll make us the
laughingstock of Europe!”

“We Americans of the rich class are that already,” replied I.

Edna must have given her daughter some secret signal, for she abruptly
and hastily left the room, closing the door behind her. I shrugged
my shoulders, settled back on the exquisitely upholstered and carved
sofa on which I had seated myself. Looking round I said, “This is a
beautiful room. You’ve certainly arranged a fitting background for
yourself and Margot.”

But she was not listening. She was watching her fingers slowly twist
and untwist the delicate little lace handkerchief. At last she said:
“Godfrey, I’ve never asked a favor of you. I’ve given my whole life to
advancing your interests--to making our child a perfect lady--and to
placing her in a dazzling position.”

“Yes,” said I. “You have worked hard--and you’ve made your tricks.”

“I’ve played my hand well--as you have yours,” said she, accepting my
rather unrefined figure with good grace. “I began to make Margot’s
career before she was born. The first time I saw her little face, I
murmured to myself, ‘Little Duchess.’ Now, you understand why I brought
her up so carefully.”

“Oh,” said I, looking at her with new interest. “That was it?” I who
knew what a futile, purposeless, easily discouraged breed the human
race is could not but admire this woman. If her intelligence had only
been equal to her will, what might she not have accomplished!

“I have never lost sight of it for a moment,” said she. “In the early
days--for a time--when we were seemingly so hopelessly obscure, and
I was too ignorant to learn which way to turn--for a while I was
discouraged. But I never gave up--never! And step by step I’ve trained
her for the grand position as a leader of European society she was one
day to occupy--for, I knew that if she led Europe she would be leader
at home, too. Over there they’re merely a feeble, crude echo of Europe.”

“Socially,” said I.

“That’s all we’re talking about,” replied she. “That’s all there is
worth talking about. What else have you been piling up money for?...
What else?”

I could think of no reply. I was silent. What else, indeed?

“I kept her away from other children,” Edna went on. “After she could
talk I never trusted her to nurses until we could afford fashionable
servants. I got her the right sort of governesses--so that she should
speak French, Italian, and German, and should have a well-bred English
accent for her own language. I even trained her in the children’s
stories she read--had her read only the fairy tales and the other
stories that would fill her mind with ideas of nobility and titles and
the high things of life.”

“The high things of life,” said I.

She made an impressive gesture--she looked like a beautiful young
empress. “Let’s not cant,” said she. “Those _are_ the high things
of life. Ask any person you meet in America--young or old, high or
low--ask him which he’d rather be--a prince, duke, marquis, or a saint,
scientist, statesman. What would he answer?”

I laughed. “That he’d rather be a millionaire,” said I.

“A millionaire with a title--with established social position at the
very top--that couldn’t be taken away. That’s the truth, Godfrey.”

“I’ll not contradict you,” said I.

“And,” she went on, “I’ve brought up our daughter so that she could
realize the highest ambition within our reach. Haven’t I brought her up
well?”

“Perfectly, for the purpose,” said I.

“When we came over here, I examined the ground carefully. I was at
first inclined to one of the big Continental titles. They are much
older, much more high sounding than the English titles--and so far as
birth goes they mean something, while the English titles mean really
nothing at all. The English aristocracy isn’t an aristocracy of birth.”

“That’s, no doubt, the reason why it still has some say in affairs,”
said I.

“Its talk about birth is almost entirely sham,” proceeded she, not
interested in my irrelevant comment. “But I found that it was the most
substantial aristocracy, the only one that was respected everywhere,
just as the English money circulates everywhere. And it’s the only
one that makes much of an impression at home. We are so ignorant that
we think England is all that it pretends to be--the powerful part of
Europe. Of course, it isn’t, but--no matter. I decided for an English
title.”

“And Margot?”

“I have brought her up to respect my judgment,” said Edna.

“I wonder what will become of her,” said I, reflectively, “when she
hasn’t you at her elbow to tell her what to do.... But why a marquis?
Why not a duke?”

She smiled, blushed a little. “The only duke we could have got--and he
was a nice young fellow--but he was in love with an English girl of
wealth--and he wanted too much to change to an American. Is that frank
enough to suit you?”

“If you’d only keep to that key,” said I.

“He wanted double the American dowry that he was willing to take with
an English girl.”

“His being in love with another girl might have made it unpleasant for
Margot,” I suggested.

“That wouldn’t have amounted to anything,” replied she. “Over here the
right sort of people bring up their children as I brought up Margot--to
give their hearts where their hands should go. They are not shallow and
selfish. They think of the family dignity and honor before they think
of their personal feelings.”

“That’s interesting--and new--at least to me,” said I.

“You have been judging these things without knowing, Godfrey,” said
she. “You have attacked me for narrowness, when in fact you were the
narrow one.”

“Yes? What next?” said I.

“I found that the Massingfords--that’s the family name of the Marquis
of Crossley--I found they ranked higher as a family than any of the
ducal families except one. Of course I don’t include the royal dukes.”

“Of course not,” said I gravely.

“I might possibly have got one of the royal dukes--if not in England,
then here on the Continent. But I decided-- You see, Godfrey, I looked
into everything.”

“You certainly have been thorough,” said I. “I should have said it was
impossible in so short a time.”

“But it wasn’t difficult. All the Americans over here are well informed
about these things.”

“I can readily believe it,” said I. “But why did you turn down the poor
royal dukes?”

“Because the other women would have made it dreadfully uncomfortable
for Margot. They’d have hated her for taking precedence over them by
such a long distance. Then, too--the dowry. I was afraid you couldn’t
afford the dowry--or wouldn’t think the title worth the money. Indeed,
I didn’t think so, myself.”

“A royal duke comes high?”

“The least dowry would be seventy-five million francs.”

“Fifteen million dollars!” I exclaimed. “Whew!”

“Mrs. Sinkers tried to get one for her daughter for ten millions--all
she could scrape together. They agreed to a morganatic marriage for
that, but not a full marriage. So, she and poor Martha gave it up.
Martha’s heart is broken. The duke made love to her so wonderfully. I
can’t imagine what Mrs. Sinkers was about, to allow such a thing before
the affair was settled. Poor Martha was so excited that she would have
accepted the morganatic marriage--she ranking merely as the duke’s
head mistress. But while he was willing to take other mistresses for
nothing, and even to pay them, he wouldn’t take _her_ for less than
fifty million francs.”

“Poor Martha!” said I.

“I was too wise to trifle with royal dukes,” pursued Edna, so
interested in her own narrative and so eager to show how sagacious she
had been that she forgot her pose and her doubts as to my sympathies.
“I weighed the advantages and disadvantages of about a dozen eligible
men. Only three stood the test, and it finally narrowed down to
Crossley. Margot was so happy when I told her. She wanted to love
him--and now she is loving him.”

A long pause while Edna calmed down to earth from her European
soarings, and while I, too, returned to the normal from an excursion in
the opposite direction. “How much does he want?” said I. “Let’s get to
bed rock.”

“He loves her so that he is willing, so I hear-- Of course, nothing has
been said-- You will not believe how refined and----”

“How much?” interrupted I.

Edna winced at my rudeness, then again presented an unruffled front of
happy loving serenity. “Enough to pay off the mortgages and to provide
them with a suitable income.”

“How much?” I persisted, laughing.

She looked tenderly remonstrant. “I don’t know, Godfrey----”

“You know _about_ how much. What’s the figure--the price of this marked
down marquis?”

“I should say the whole thing would not cost more than three or four
million dollars.”

“Three--or four.” I laughed aloud. “Not much difference there. Now
which is it--three or four?”

“Perhaps nearer four. Margot must have a _good_ income.”

“To be sure,” said I.

“The whole object would be defeated if she hadn’t the means----”

“The money,” I suggested. “Why use these evasive words? We’re talking a
plain subject. Let’s use its language.”

“The money, then,” acquiesced she, resolutely good-humored. “If she
hadn’t the money to make a proper appearance.”

“Naturally, to lead in society you must lead in spending money....
Well--it can’t be done.”

She paled, half started from her chair, sank back again. There was a
long silence. Then she said, “You have never been cruel, Godfrey. You
won’t be cruel now. You won’t destroy my life work. You won’t shatter
Margot’s happiness.”

“The whole thing is--is nauseating to me,” said I.

Her short, pretty upper lip quivered. Her eyes filled. “If you didn’t
approve, dear, why didn’t you stop me long ago? Why did you let me go
on until there was no turning back?”

I was silent. There seemed to be no answer to that.

“Did you do it purposely, Godfrey?” said she, with melancholy eyes upon
me. “Did you lure us on, so that you could crush us at one stroke?”

I was silent.

“I can’t believe that of you. I won’t believe it until you compel me
to.”

“As I understand it,” said I, “you propose that I hand over to this
young man four million----”

“Only about half of it, Godfrey,” cried she, reviving. “The other half
would be Margot’s--for her own income.”

“Then that I hand over to this amiable, insignificant young foreigner
two million dollars to induce him to consent to the degradation of
marrying my daughter--to have him going about, saying in effect, ‘It is
true, she is only one of those low Americans, but don’t forget that I
got two million dollars for stooping.’ Is that the proposition?”

“You know it isn’t!” cried she. “He doesn’t feel that he is degrading
himself. He feels proud of winning her--the most beautiful, the best
mannered girl in London. But it’d be simply impossible for them to
marry without the money. _I_ shouldn’t want it. They would be wretched.
You talk like a sentimental schoolboy, Godfrey. How could two refined,
sensitive people such as Hugh and Margot, used to every luxury, used
to being foremost in society--how could they be happy without the
means----”

“The money,” I corrected blandly.

“Without the money needed to maintain their position as marquis and
marchioness of Crossley?”

I nodded assent.

“He has only about five thousand--twenty-five thousand of our money--a
year. That is ridiculous for a marquis. He has to keep all his houses
closed and run as economically as possible. Even then they cost him
nearly seventy-five thousand dollars a year to maintain.”

“And he has only twenty-five thousand!”

“I meant twenty-five thousand over and above. He has that to live on.
And, poor fellow, he is dropping every year deeper and deeper into
debt. So much is expected of a marquis.”

“But not honesty, apparently,” said I.

“You mustn’t judge these people by our commercial standards,” she
gently rebuked.

“I forgot,” said I penitently.

“And the poor fellow does love Margot so!”

“Um,” said I. “Have you ever happened to hear of a Miss Townley--Jupey
Townley?”

A flash of annoyance flitted over Edna’s lovely, delicate countenance.

“I see you have,” said I. “You were, indeed, thorough. Permit me to
compliment you, my dear.”

“I am glad Hugh hasn’t been a saint.”

“Isn’t,” said I.

“That’s all in the past,” declared she.

“I saw them in a box at a London music hall night before last,” said I.
“They were-- They had been drinking.”

But Edna was not daunted. “You are a man of the world, Godfrey. Don’t
pretend to be narrow.”

“When a man loves a woman----”

“Love is very different from that sort of thing, and you know it.”

“Has Margot heard----”

“Godfrey!” cried Edna, in horror. “Do you think I would permit _my_
daughter--_our_ daughter--to know such things! Why, her mind is as
pure----”

I could not restrain a gesture of disgust. “You women!” I cried,
rising. “Pure! Pure--God in Heaven, pure!”

Her look of dazed astonishment, obviously sincere, helped me to get
back my composure. I sat down again. “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I
didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Even if you men have no purity yourselves, you ought to believe in it
in women,” said she, with an injured air.

“Yes, indeed,” I agreed heartily. “I congratulate you on being able to
make such generous allowances for masculine frailty.”

“You are sarcastic,” said she coldly.

“No matter. It certainly does not damage the title--perhaps adds to its
luster.”

“It’s hereditary in their family to be wild up to marriage, and then to
settle down and serve the state in some distinguished position.”

“Oh--in that case--” said I ironically.

“Margot and her husband and her children will have your money some
day,” pursued she. “Why not give it to her now, when it will get her
happiness?”

That impressed me. “I have not said I would not consent to this
marriage,” I reminded her. “As a matter of fact, I’m in favor of it. I
can see no future for Margot in America----”

“No, indeed,” cried Edna eagerly. “She simply couldn’t marry over
there. She’d be wretched.”

“But I feel it is my duty-- Rather late in the day for me to talk about
duty toward my daughter, after neglecting it all these years. Still, I
ought to see to it that she has the best possible chance for a smooth
married life. It’s only common prudence to take all precautions--isn’t
it?”

“All _sensible_ precautions,” said she.

“You know how many of these foreign ‘alliances,’ as they’re called,
have turned out badly.”

“They get a good many divorces in the states,” she suggested smilingly.
“One to every twelve marriages, I read the other day.”

I admitted that she had made an effective retort. “The truth is,” said
I, “American women aren’t brought up for domestic life. So, whether
they marry at home or abroad they have trouble.”

“Men resent their independence,” said Edna.

“It may be so,” said I. Of what use to point out to her that the
trouble lay in the women’s demanding to be supported and refusing to
do anything to earn their support? All I said was: “I suspect a good
many husbands think the marriage contract too one-sided--binding only
them and not their wives. But the trouble with the ‘alliances’ can’t be
that.”

“It’s because Europeans look on the wife as a kind of head servant. But
Hugh isn’t that sort.”

“We’ll know more as to that when we hear what Margot says after she’s
been married a few years,” said I. “The point to settle now is how to
bind him to good behavior so far as it can be done in advance. He may
be deeply in love with Margot. He may stay in love with her. But in
the circumstances it’s wise to assume that he wants only her money and
that, if he gets it, he’ll treat her badly.”

My wife’s silence was encouraging.

“If he had plenty of money he might even goad her into releasing
him--and might marry again.”

My wife was obviously impressed. “Yes--that has been done,” said she.
“Of course, if Margot should have an heir right away. But----”

She looked at me as if trying to decide whether she could trust me with
a confidence. She evidently decided in my favor, for she went on to say:

“On the other hand--Margot is a peculiar girl. No--many women have the
same peculiarity. They can’t be trusted with power over their husbands.
If she had all the money in her own name and he were dependent on
her-- Godfrey, I’m sure there’d be trouble.”

Once more she was astonishing me with her clear judgment in matters
as to which I should have thought her hopelessly prejudiced. “But _I_
can be trusted,” said I. “The plan I had in mind was to take over the
mortgages and guarantee a sufficient income.”

She shook her head. “He won’t consent,” said she. “His solicitors will
insist on better terms than that.”

“Now you see why I want to talk to him directly. I don’t purpose to be
hampered by that old trick of the principal hidden behind a go-between.”

“There’s no other way,” said Edna. “They’re too clever to yield that.”

“He needs money badly.”

“But he won’t marry unless he’s actually to get it,” replied she.
“Almost every American who has married a daughter over here has
tried to make a business bargain--at least, a bargain not altogether
one-sided. Not one of them has succeeded. These Europeans have been
handling the dowry and settlement question too many centuries.”

“I see,” said I affably. “If we want what they’ve got, we have to take
it on their terms.”

It was most satisfactory, talking with her now that she consented to
speak and listen to good sense. I was at once in a more amiable frame
of mind, although I knew she had descended from her high horse only
because she was shrewd enough to see it was the one way to get me to do
as she wished.

“I will hide behind a go-between myself,” said I.

“Any English lawyer would simply play into the hands of the other side.
At least, so Hilda was telling me.”

“Is she happy?”

“Very.”

“When’s her husband coming back?”

“Not for a year or so, I believe. Lord Blankenship cares more for big
game and for exploring than for anything else.”

“An ideal marriage,” said I. “She brought him the money he wanted. He
brought her the title she wanted. And they don’t annoy each other. He
devotes himself to sport, she to society. These aristocratic people,
with their simple, vulgar wants that are so easily gratified--how they
are to be envied!”

Edna was observing me furtively, uneasily. I pretended not to notice.
I went on: “Now, if they wanted the difficult things--things like love
and companionship and congeniality--they might be wretched. When a
child cries for a stick of candy or a tinsel-covered rattle--for money
or social position--why, it’s easily pacified. But if it cries for the
moon and the stars--” I laughed softly, enjoying her wonder as much as
my own fancies.

After a while she said, with some constraint: “You see a great deal of
Armitage?”

“We console each other,” said I, with mild raillery.

“Have you been going out much?”

“I’m very busy.”

“In one of your letters-- Those rare little notes of yours! You are
cruelly neglectful, Godfrey-- In one of them you spoke of a week end
or so on Armitage’s yacht. You and he don’t go off alone?”

“Oh, no. Some literary and artistic people usually are aboard.”

“I didn’t know you cared for that sort.”

“They’re interesting enough.”

“I suppose they’re friends of Mrs. Kirkwood’s,” pursued Edna. “She’s
like her brother--affects to despise fashionable society. Their
pretenses always amused me.”

“They are sincere people,” said I. “They don’t pretend. That’s why I
like them.”

“I notice that Armitage belongs to every fashionable club in New
York--and to some over here,” said Edna with a smile that was as shrewd
as her observation. “Also, that he manages to find time to appear at
the most exclusive parties during the season.”

I had observed this same peculiarity. While I refused to draw from it
the inference she drew--and was undeniably justified in drawing--I had
been tempted to do so. It irritated me to see her finger upon the weak
spot in Armitage’s profession of freedom from snobbishness.

“And Mary Kirkwood,” pursued Edna, “she’s the same sort of fakir. Only,
being a woman, she does it more deceptively than he.”

“She goes nowhere,” said I.

“But she revels in the fact that she _could_ go anywhere. So, she
fooled you--did she?” Edna laughed merrily at my ill-concealed
discomfiture. “But then you know so little about women.”

“I confess I’ve never seen in her the least sign of snobbishness or
of interest in fashionable foolishness,” said I, with what I flatter
myself was a fair attempt at the impartial air.

“That in itself ought to have opened your eyes,” said Edna. “Whenever
you see anyone, dear, with no sign of a weakness that everybody in the
world has, you may be sure you are seeing a fraud.”

“Because _you_ have a weakness, dear,” said I--as pleasant and as acid
as she, “you must not imagine it is universal.”

“But _you_ have that weakness, too.”

“Really?”

“Did you or did you not join the fashionable clubs Armitage put you up
at?”

I had to laugh at myself.

“Are you or are you not proud of the fact that your best friend,
Armitage, is a fashionable person? Would you be as proud of him if he
were only welcome in middle-class houses?”

“I’m ashamed to say there’s something in that,” said I. “Not much, but
something.”

“Yet you believed Mary Kirkwood!” ended Edna.

“I thought little about it,” said I. “And I still believe that she is
sincere--that she has no snobbishness in her.”

“You like her?”

“So far as I know her--yes.” My answer was an attempt to meet and
parry a suspicion I felt in Edna’s mind. And it was fairly successful;
fairly--for no one ever yet completely dislodged a suspicion. We
cannot see into each other’s minds. We know, from what is going on in
our own minds, that the human mind is capable of any vagary. Once we
have applied this general principle to a specific person, once we have
become definitely aware that there are in that person’s mind things of
which we have no knowledge--from that time forth suspicion of them is
in us, and is ready to grow, to flourish.

I had no difficulty in shifting to the subject of the marriage. “I’ll
cable for my lawyer,” said I. “If anyone can beat this game, Fred
Norman can.”

“Yes--send for him,” said Edna. “He is canny--and a man of _our_ world.”

“I’m going back to London to-night--” I went on.

“To-night!” she exclaimed. Her eyes filled with tears. “Godfrey--is
this treating us right?”

I looked at her intently. “Don’t fake with me,” said I quietly. “It
isn’t necessary.”

“What _do_ you mean?” cried she.

“I mean, I understand perfectly that you care nothing about me,
except as the source of the money you need in amusing yourself. As
you see in my manner, I am not wildly agitated by that fact. So far
as I’m concerned, there’s no reason why we should make each other
uncomfortable.”

“What _is_ the matter with you, Godfrey?” she said, with large widening
eyes gazing at me. “You have changed entirely.”

“As you have,” said I, admiring her shrewdness, and afraid of it.
“You’ve been educating. So have I. Mine has been slower than yours and
along different lines. But it, too, has been thorough.”

She was not satisfied, though I’m confident my tone and manner betrayed
nothing. Said she: “Some bad woman has been poisoning you against
Margot and me.”

“As you please,” said I, too wary to be drawn into that discussion.
I realized I had said entirely too much. Relying upon her intense
vanity, her profound belief in her power over me, I had gone too far.
“My business takes me to London to-night. I’ll probably be there until
Norman arrives. Then we’ll come over.”

“Don’t you want us in London with you?” said Edna.

“You are comfortably settled here,” replied I. “Why disturb yourselves?”

She knew how to read me. She saw I was not in a dangerous mood, as
she had begun to fear. She said: “We _did_ intend to stay in Paris a
month or six weeks. We have a charming circle of friends among the
old families here. I wish you’d stop on, Godfrey. The people are
attractive, and the social life is most interesting.”

“Not to me,” said I. “You forget I’m a Hooligan. Besides, you don’t
need me. There’s your advantage through being young and lovely and
rich. You can get plenty of men to escort you about. It’s only the old
and ugly married women who really need their husbands. Well--I’ll be
ready when you are forced to fall back on me. Nothing like having in
reserve a faithful Dobbin.”

She looked hurt. “How _can_ you joke about sacred things,” she
reproached.

I laughed her seriousness aside. “Yes, I’ll be waiting, ready to be
your companion, the confidant of your rheumatism and gout, when all the
others have fled. Meanwhile, my dear, I’ll have my frisk.”

“Godfrey!”

It amused me to see how bitter to her was the taste of the medicine she
had been forcing upon me so self-complacently. It amused me to watch
the confusion into which these new and unsuspected aspects of myself
was throwing her.

Said I: “I’m glad you’re as generous toward me as I’ve been toward you.
That’s why we’ve avoided the Armitage sort of smash-up.”

When I left Paris that night I’ll engage she was thinking about me as
she had never thought in her whole self-centered, American-female life.




VIII


My cable to Norman was answered the next day but one by a note from
him, stopping in the same hotel. I shall not detail the negotiations
that followed--the long and stormy scenes between him and Dawkins,
solicitor to the Marquis of Crossley. It is sufficient to say that
Norman had the novel sensation of being beaten on every point. Not
outwitted, for he had wit enough and to spare for any contest of
cunning; but beaten by the centuries-old precedents and customs and
requirements in matters of dower and settlement. The mercenary marriage
is an ancient habit of the human race; in fact, the scientists have
proved that it began with marriage itself, that there was no marriage
in the civilized sense until there was property to marry for. Perhaps
the mercenary marriage is not so recent in America as our idyllists
declare. Do we not read that the father of his country married solely
for money an almost feeble-minded woman whom everybody knew he did
not love? And, inasmuch as marriage is first of all a business--the
business of providing for the material needs and wants of two and
their children--may it not barely be possible that the unqualifiedly
sentimental view of marriage can be--perhaps has been--overdone? In
America, where the marriage for sentiment prevails to an extent unknown
anywhere else in the world--is not the institution of marriage there
in its most uneasy state? And may not that be the reason?

What a world of twaddle it is! If men and women could only learn to
build their ideals on the firm foundation--the only firm foundation--of
the practical instead of upon the quicksand of lies and pretenses,
wouldn’t the tower climb less shakily, if more slowly, toward the stars?

You may be sure there was nothing of the stars in those talks between
Norman and Dawkins--or in my talks with Norman--or in Crossley’s talks
with Dawkins. Crossley had had me looked up--had discovered as much
about my finances as it is possible to discover about the private
business of an American. He had got the usual exaggerated estimate of
my wealth, and he was resolved that he would not be cheated of a single
dollar he might wring from me. From my standpoint it was obvious that
he and Margot must have plenty of money or they could not be happy.
All I desired was to prevent him from feeling financially free--and
therefore under the aristocratic code, morally free--to show and to
act, after marriage, the contempt I knew he felt for all things and
persons American--except the dollars, which could be exchanged into
sovereigns. I fought hard, but he stood fast. Either Margot must lose
him or I must give him about what he asked--a fortune in his own right
for him. If I choose I could dower her; but as to dowering him he would
not permit the question of alternative to be raised.

“All right,” said I at last to Norman. “Give them their minimum.”

He was astounded, was furious--and as he is not the ordinary
lick-spittle lawyer but a man of arrogant independence, he did not
hesitate to let me see that his anger--and scorn--were for myself. “Do
you mean that?” he said.

“Yes,” replied I carelessly--as if I were now indifferent about the
whole business. “My girl wants his title. And why let a question of
money come between her and happiness?”

“I can’t refrain from saying, Loring, that I’d not have believed this
of you.”

“She’s not fit to live in America,” said I. “Her mother hasn’t educated
her for it. American mothers don’t educate their daughters nowadays to
be wives of American men. Honestly, do you know an American man able to
do for himself who would be foolish enough to marry that sort of girl?”

His silence was assent.

“You see. I’ve got to buy her a husband--that is, a title--over here.
This offering seems as good as there is in the market--at the price.
So--why not?”

“That’s one view of it,” said he coldly.

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Come now--be sensible,” said I. “What
else can I do?”

“It would be an impertinence for me to say,” replied he.

“I can guess,” said I. “You needn’t trouble yourself to say it. You
evidently don’t know the circumstances. And I may add that so long as
I’ve got to buy Margot a title I might as well buy her a good one.”

He eyed me sharply. But I did not take him into my confidence--nor
shall I confide in you at present, gentle reader. I did not even let
him see that I was holding back anything. I went on with good-humored
raillery:

“I’m doing better than Hanley or Vanderveld or Pattison or any of the
others who’ve dealt in these markets. For a marquis Crossley is selling
cheap. He’s far from penniless, you know. It’s simply that he wants
more money. Why, really, old man, it’s what’s called a love match. They
always call it a love match when the nobleman isn’t absolutely on his
uppers.”

“You are certainly a philosopher, Loring,” said Norman, anxious, I saw,
to finish and drop the affair.

“And I became one in the usual way--necessity,” said I. “I’m as eager
to have this thing dispatched as you are. I want to get out to sea,
where perhaps the stench of aristocracy will blow out of my nostrils,
and stay out of them till I reach the other shore. Then I’ll get it
again. It blows down the bay to meet the incoming ships.”

“Yes, we’re pretty bad,” admitted Norman. “Not so bad as we used to
be, but pretty bad.” He laughed. “They accuse us of loving money. Why,
we are mere beginners at it. We haven’t learned how to idle or how to
spend money except in crude, tiresome ways. And to love money deeply
you must know how to idle and how to spend. Money’s _the_ passion with
these people. How they do need it!”

Neither shall I linger over the details of the engagement and the
wedding. For all that was important about either I refer you to
the newspapers of London and New York. They gave everything that
makes a snob’s eyes glisten and a snob’s mouth water. My wife has
somewhere--she knows exactly where--a scrapbook, and my daughter has
another of the same kind. Those scrapbooks are strongly bound and the
pages are of the heaviest time- and wear-resisting paper. In them are
pasted columns on columns of lists of titles, of descriptions of jewels
and dresses, of enumerations of wedding gifts. Margot received things
costing small fortunes from people she barely knew well enough to
invite. They gave in the hope--the good hope--of gaining the valuable
favor of the Marchioness of Crossley, a great lady by reason of her
title, a greater lady by reason of the ancientness of the Massingford
family, and at the top and summit of greatness by reason of her wealth.

That last item, by the way, was vastly overestimated. Everyone assumed
that Crossley had sold much more dearly. No one but those intimately
concerned dreamed what a bargain I had got.

You may be picturing a sordid affair, redolent of the stenches of
commercialism. If you are, gentle reader, you are showing yourself
unworthy of your own soulfulness, unworthy of the elegant society
into which I have introduced you. I have been giving simply the plain
facts--a mere skeleton upon which you, versed in society columns
and society novels, and skilled in the art of hiding ugly truths
under pretty lies, may readily drape the flesh and the garments of
sentimentality and snobbishness. You will then have the truth as it
appeared to the world--a handsome, manly groom, every inch of him
the patrician; a wondrous lovely, innocent, pure young bride, looking
the worthy mate of the great noble she had won with her beauty and
her sweetness; a background of magnificent houses and equipages,
of grand society people, of lackeys in livery without number; an
atmosphere of luxury, refinement, perfumed with the fairest flowers
and the most delicate artificial scents. You are seeing also the high
and noble motives of all concerned--the joy of parents in a daughter
sentimentally wooed and won to happiness; the generous and kindly
feelings of all the friends; the lavish and affectionate overflowing of
costly gifts; above all, the ecstatic young couple wrapped up in their
love for each other. Flesh up and beautify the skeleton to your taste,
gentle reader. You will not go amiss.

I must linger a moment on the happiness of my daughter. It was too
spiritual to be of this earth. As soon as the miserable, unimportant
money matters were settled, and her mother gave her full leave to love,
she threw herself into it with all the ardor of the heroine of a novel.
She had two diamond hearts made--at the most fashionable jewelers in
Paris, you may be sure. Upon the inside of the one she kept she had
engraved, under his picture, “From Hugh to Margot.” In the one she gave
him there surrounded her picture in diamond inlay, “To Hugh from his
dear love Margot.”

Each was to wear the heart round the neck until death. Again and again
I caught her dreaming over hers, sometimes with tears in her limpid
eyes. Again and again I caught her scribbling, “Margot, Marchioness
of Crossley, Viscountess Brear, Countess of Felday and Noth, Baroness
de Selve,” and so on through a list of titles which gentle reader will
find in “Burke’s” and the “Almanach de Gotha.”

And she had a reverent way of looking at him and a tender way of
touching him. Her mother, you will believe, spared neither expense nor
pains in getting together the trousseau. But Margot was not satisfied.
“Not nearly fine enough for _his_ bride,” she would say. “I’m _so_
afraid he’ll be disappointed.” Then the tears would spring. “Oh, mamma!
If he should be disappointed in me!”

“Not so bad as if you were to be disappointed in him,” I put in with no
other motive than to cheer her up.

But it only shocked her. “In Hugh!” she exclaimed, meaning in Cecil
Robert Grunleigh Percival Hugh Massingford, Marquis of Crossley, etc.
“_I_ disappointed in _him_! Oh, papa! You don’t _realize_!”

“No, I suppose not,” said I, getting myself away as speedily as my legs
would carry me.

Through these joyous scenes of youth and love and luxury I moved
gloomily--restless, bitter, tormented by self-reproaches and by
thoughts of the woman I loved. What Edna had said about her, though
I knew it was by way of precautionary cattishness, put into my mind
the inevitable suspicion--no, not actual suspicion, but germ of
suspicion--the almost harmless germ from which the most poisonous
suspicions may develop. I went round and round my mental image of Mary
Kirkwood. I viewed it from all angles. But I could not find a trace of
the flaw Edna had asserted. I analyzed her with all the analytical
skill I possessed, and that, I flatter myself, is not a little. No one
who has not the faculty of analysis ever gets anywhere; no one who has
that faculty ever escapes the charge of cynicism. Shallow people--the
sort that make such a charge--will regard it as proof of my utter
cynicism, my absolute lack of sentiment, that I was able to analyze the
woman I loved, or pretended I loved. But I assure you, gentle reader,
that not even love and passion suspend the habitual processes of a
good mind. The reason you have read the contrary so often is because
precious few writers about men of the superior sort have the capacity
to comprehend the intellects they try to picture. To the man of large
affairs, the average--and many a one above the average--biography or
novel about a great man reads like the attempt of a straddle bug to
give his fellow straddle bugs an account of an elephant.

I was the only inharmonious figure in that round of festivals. But no
one observed me. I simply got the reputation of being a man of reserve,
a thinker rather than a talker--as if there ever lived a thinker
who did not overflow with torrents of talk like a spring fed from a
glacier; but, of course, the spring flows only when The conditions
are favorable, not when it is ice-bound. I was not even interested in
observing. There is a monotony about the actions of fashionable people
that soon reduces a spectator of agile mind to stupor. The same thing
over and over again, with variations so slight that only a nit-wit
would be interested in them-- Could there be a worse indictment of
the intelligence of the human race than that so large a part of its
presumably most intelligent classes engage in the social farce, which
is an example of aimless activity about on a level with a dog’s chasing
its own tail?

But Edna----

As I look back on those weeks of days, each one crowded like a ragbag
with rubbish, the figure of Edna stands out radiant. You would never
have thought her the mother of the bride--or, indeed, a mother at all.
A woman who for many years leads a virginal or almost virginal life
gets back the vestal air of the unmarried girl. This air had returned
to Edna. She had it as markedly as had Margot. It was most becoming
to her piquant style of beauty, giving it the allure of the height
that invites ascent and capture, yet has never been desecrated. And
how she did enjoy the grandeur--the great names, the gorgeous presents
of curiously and costlily wrought gold and silver and crystal, and
precious stones, the succession of panoramas of ultra-fashionable life,
with herself and Margot always the center.

I used to stand aside and watch her and feel as if I were hypnotized
into vivid hallucinations. I recalled the incidents of our early
life--Brooklyn, the Passaic flat, the squat and squalid homes of our
childhood. I recalled our people--hers and mine--tucked away in homely
obscurity among the New Jersey hills. But by no effort of mind could I
associate her with these realities. She had literally been born again.
I looked at the other Americans of humble beginnings--and there were
not a few of them in that society. All had retained some traces of
their origin, had some characteristics that made it not difficult to
connect their present with their past. But not Edna.

At the wedding--in the most fashionable church in the West End--Margot
looked weary and rather old, gone slightly stale from too long and
hard preliminary training. Edna was at her best--delicate, fragile,
radiant. How the other women hated her for that time-defying beauty of
hers! Many of the women of her still youthful age retained much of the
physical attractiveness of youth. But there was not another one who
was not beginning to show the effects of dissipation--of too much food
and wine and cigarettes, of lives devoid of elevating sensations, of
minds used only for petty, mean thoughts. But Edna seemed in the flower
of that period when the secrets of the soul have as yet made no marks
upon the countenance. You would have said she was a merry and romantic
girl. I could not fathom that mystery. I cannot fathom it now. Its clew
must be in her truly amazing powers of self-deception and also in that
unique capacity of hers for forgetting the thing, no matter what, that
is disagreeable to remember.

When we were at last alone, with the young couple off for the yacht
Lord Shangway had loaned them for the honeymoon, with the last guest
gone and the last powdered flunkey vanished--when she and I were alone,
she settled herself with a sigh and said:

“I wish I could make it begin all over again!”

“You must be built of steel,” said I.

“I am supremely happy,” said she, “and have been for weeks. Nothing
agrees with me so thoroughly as happiness.”

I looked at her scrutinizingly. No, she was not the least tired; she
was as fresh as if that moment risen from a long sleep in the air of
seashore or mountains.

She went on: “I’m going over to Paris to-morrow. I’ve a lot of
engagements there. And I must get some clothes. I’ve worn out all I
brought with me.”

“Worn out” meant worn once or at most twice; for in a society where
everyone is seeing everyone else all the time a woman with a reputation
for dress cannot afford to reappear in clothes once seen. In some
circles this would sound delightfully prodigal, in others delightfully
impossible, and perhaps in still others delightfully criminal. But then
all that sort of thing is relative--like everything else in the world.

“Won’t you come along?” said she in a perfunctory tone.

“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m off for Russia with a party of bankers to
look at some mining properties.”

“I thought you were returning to New York?”

“Not for several months,” said I.

“How can you stay away so long from your beloved America?”

“Business--always business.”

She eyed me somewhat as one eyes a strange, mildly interesting
specimen. “Well--you must enjoy it, or you wouldn’t keep at it year in
and year out.”

“One has to pass the time,” said I.

“How does Mary Kirkwood pass the time?”

This unexpected and--except sub-consciously--accidental question,
staggered me for an instant. “I don’t know much about it,” said I. “She
has a house--and she looks after it, herself. She reads, I believe.
She has gardens--and they use up a lot of time. Then she rides.”

Edna yawned. “It sounds dull,” she said. “But domestic people are
always dull. And she is certainly domestic. I wonder why she doesn’t
marry again.”

I was silent.

“Are any men attentive to her? It seems to me I heard something about a
novelist--some poor man who is after her money.”

I was choking with rage and jealousy.

“Did you see any such man about?”

I contrived to compose myself for a calm reply. “No one answering to
your description,” said I.

“Do you like her?”

“You asked me that once before,” said I.

“Oh--I forgot. It seems to me you and she would have exactly suited
each other. You like domestic women. That is, you think you do. Really,
you’d probably fly from a woman of that sort.”

“And a woman of the other sort would fly from me,” said I, laughing.

She looked at me thoughtfully. “You must admit you’re not easy to get
on with--except at a distance,” observed she. “But men of positive
individuality are never easy to get on with. A big tree blights all the
little trees and bushes that try to grow in its neighborhood.... No,
Godfrey dear, you weren’t made for domestic life--you and I. Domestic
life is successful only where there are two very small and very much
alike. People like us have to live alone.”

I rose abruptly. There was for me a sound in that “alone” like the slam
of a graveyard gate.

“You never will appreciate me--how satisfactory I’ve been,” she went
on, “until you marry again.”

“I must make my final arrangements for Russia,” said I.

“Shall I see you in the morning? I’m leaving rather early.”

“Probably not,” said I.

“Then we’ll meet when you come back. We’ll visit Margot at Sothewell
Abbey.” She rose, drew herself to her full height with a graceful
gesture of triumph. “Don’t you honestly rather like it, being the
father of a Marchioness?”

I could not speak. I looked at her.

“How solemn you are!” laughed she. “Well, good-by, dear.” And she held
out her hand and turned her face upward for me to kiss her lips.

“Oh, I’ll probably see you in the morning,” I said, “or to-night.” And
away I went.

       *       *       *       *       *

From Russia I drifted to India, intending to return home by the
Pacific. At Bombay I met Lord Blankenship, and he persuaded me to cross
to East Africa. I found him a companion exactly to my taste. He was a
silent chap having nothing to think about and nothing to think with--a
typical and model product of the aristocratic education that completes
a man as a sculptor completes an image, and prepares him to stand in
his appointed niche until decay tumbles him down as rubbish. I had lost
all my former passion for talking and listening. I wished to confine
myself--my thoughts--to the trivial matters of the senses, to lingering
over and tinkering with the physical details of life. The silent and
vacant Blankenship set me a perfect example, one easy to fall into the
habit of following.

At Paris, I picked up my private secretary, Markham, and resumed
attention to my affairs. I had arranged for things to go on without me,
when I set out for East Africa. I found that my guess as to how they
would go had been correct. For a month or so there was confusion--the
confusion that is inevitable when a man who has attended to everything
abruptly throws up his leadership. Then the affairs in which he fancied
himself indispensable begin to move as well as if he were at the
throttle--perhaps better. The most substantial result of my neglect
seemed to be that I had become much richer, had more than recovered
what my purchase of a son-in-law had cost me.

Markham, who had been at Cairo two months, had got himself engaged to
be married. For several years I had been promising him a good position,
that is to say, one more fitting a grown man of real capacity. But he
made himself so useful that I put off redeeming my promise and eased my
conscience and quieted his ambition with a succession of increases of
salary. Now, however, I could no longer delay releasing him. So I must
go back to New York, to find some one to take his place. Blankenship
was wavering between a trip through West Africa and going to America
with me, on the chance of my accompanying him on a shooting trip
through British Columbia. He decided to stick to me, and as I had
grown thoroughly used to having him about I was rather glad. It is
astonishing how much comfort one can get out of the society of a silent
man, when one feels that he is a good fellow and a devoted friend.

I telegraphed Edna that I would be unable to come to London, where she
then was. But she defeated my plan for not seeing her. When I reached
Paris there she was waiting for me at the Ritz. She had a swarm of
French, Italians, and English about her--I believe there were some
Germans or Austrians, also. I refused to be annoyed with them, and we
dined quietly with Blankenship, Markham, and a pretty little Countess
de Salevac to act us buffers between us. I tried to avoid being left
alone with her, but she would not have it so. She insisted on my coming
to her sitting room after the others had gone.

“I know you are tired,” said she, “but I shan’t detain you long.”

“Please don’t,” said I. “The journey has knocked me out. I’ve not slept
for two nights.”

“It’s a shame to worry you----”

I made for the door. “Not to-night--no worries. They’ll keep until
to-morrow.”

“No, Godfrey dear,” she said. “I must tell you at once. There is
serious trouble between Margot and Hugh.”

“Why, they haven’t been married a year.”

“He has been treating her shamefully from the outset. In fact, he cut
short the honeymoon to hurry back to that music-hall person.”

“The one I saw him with?”

“Yes--the same one--that notorious Jupey What’s-her-name. Isn’t it
dreadful! Margot’s pride is up in arms. Nothing I say will quiet her.”

“Um,” said I.

“She refuses to understand that over here husbands are allowed a--a----”

“Latitude,” I suggested.

“More latitude than in America. I have talked with Hugh, too. He
is--very difficult. Really, he isn’t at all as he seemed. He is a--he
is horribly coarse.”

“People who think of nothing but how to get money without work and how
to spend it without usefulness are apt to be coarse, when you probe
through to the reality of them.”

“He is--defiant,” pursued she, too femininely practical to have
interest in or patience with philosophy. “He-- Godfrey, he says he
hates her. He won’t speak to her. And there’s no prospect of an heir.
He says he wants to get rid of her.”

These successive admissions of a worse and worse mess were forced from
her by my air of indifference. “What has _she_ done?” I asked.

“Done? I don’t understand----”

“What has she done to drive him to extremes?”

“Godfrey!” she cried in a shocked tone. “_You_--taking sides against
your daughter--your only child! Have you no paternal feeling, either?”

“Not much,” said I. “You see, I’ve seen little of Margot--not enough
to get acquainted with her. And you educated her so that we are
uncongenial. No--since you set me to thinking, I find I haven’t much
paternal feeling for her. I used to have in Passaic, when I wheeled her
about the streets on Sundays.”

I paused to enjoy the shame my wife was struggling with.

“But soon after we moved to Brooklyn----”

Edna winced and shivered.

“You sent her away to begin to be a lady. And a lady she is--and ladies
are not daughters--are not women even.”

“You must help me, Godfrey,” said Edna, after a strained silence.
“Margot is wretched, and a dreadful scandal may break out in time.
Already people are talking. Margot is ashamed to show herself in
public. She thinks everyone is laughing at her.”

“No doubt she’s right,” said I. “A woman who loses her husband on the
honeymoon is likely to be laughed at.... What did she do?”

“Why do you persist in saying that?” cried she, so irritated that she
could not altogether restrain herself. “Your dislike of women has
become a mania with you.”

“But I don’t dislike them,” replied I. “On the contrary, I like
them--like them so well that their worthlessness angers me like the
treachery of a friend. And I believe so much in their power that, when
things go wrong, I blame them. They have dominion over the men and over
the children. And whenever they use their powers it is to make fools of
the men and weaklings of the children. I don’t know which is the worse
influence--the wishy-washy, unpractical, preacher morality of the good
woman or the lazy, idle, irresponsible dissipation of the--the ladies
and near-ladies and lady-climbers and lady-imitators.”

“But this has nothing to do with poor Margot!” exclaimed she
impatiently.

“Everything to do with her,” replied I. “Still--it’s a spilt pail of
milk. As for the present--and future-- How can I do anything to help
her?”

“You can’t, if you condemn her unheard.”

“I don’t condemn her. I am simply recognizing that there are two sides
to this quarrel. And I assure you, you only make matters worse when you
interfere without recognizing that fact. So I say again, what did _she_
do?”

My wife calmed slightly and replied: “He says she made him ridiculous
with the airs she put on.”

I laughed. “After the education you gave her?”

“That’s right! Blame me!”

“And aren’t you to be blamed?” urged I. “Didn’t you have full charge of
her from the time she was born? Couldn’t you have made what you pleased
of her? Didn’t you make what you pleased of her?”

Edna tossed her head indignantly. “I never taught her to be a vulgar
snob.”

“Why, I thought that was her whole education.”

Edna ignored this interruption. “It’s all very well for the women of
noble families to act the snob,” pursued she. “Lots of them do, and no
one criticises. But Margot ought to have had sense enough to realize
that she, a mere American, couldn’t afford to do it. I warned her that
her cue was sweetness and an air of equality. I told her that her
title in itself would keep people at their proper distance. But she
lost her head.”

“Then the thing for her to do is to behave herself.”

“It’s too late, I’m afraid. The tide has turned against her. All the
women--especially the titled English women of good family--were against
her--hated her--were ready to stab her in the back. And her haughtiness
and condescension gave them the chance.”

“Well, what do you propose? To give him more money?”

Edna showed none of her familiar scorn of sordid things. She reflected,
said uncertainly: “I wonder would that do any good?”

“To win anyone give them what they most want,” said I. “What do your
friends over here want above everything and anything?”

“Perhaps you are right,” confessed she. Consider, gentle reader, what
this confession involved, how it exposed the rotten insincerity of
all her and her fine friends’ pretenses. “Yes, I guess you’re right,
Godfrey.” She pressed her hands to her temples. “It simply _must_ be
straightened out. I am quite distracted. I can’t afford to lose sleep
and to be harrowed up. Those things mean ruin to a woman’s looks.
And what _would_ I do if she were flung back on my hands in this
disgraceful fashion!”

“You want me to go to London?”

“Godfrey, you _must_ go. You must see her, and him, too.”

“I was thinking it would be enough to see him. But perhaps you’re
right.”

“She is clean mad,” cried Edna, with sudden fury against her daughter.
“She doesn’t appreciate the peril of her position. One minute she’s
all for groveling. The next she talks like an idiot about her rank and
power. Oh, she is a fool--a _fool_! I always knew she was--though I
wouldn’t admit it to myself. You never will know what a time I’ve had
training her to hide it enough to make a pleasing appearance. She is a
brainless fool.”

“A fool, but not brainless,” said I. “Her education made her a fool and
paralyzed her brain. You see, she didn’t have the advantages you had
in your early training. In your early days you had the chance to learn
something--the useful things that have saved you from the consequences
of such folly as you’ve taught her.”

“What nonsense!” cried Edna in disgust. “But we mustn’t quarrel. I’m
agitated enough already. You will go to London?”

“Yes,” said I, after reflecting. “I’ll go.”

“When?”

“To-morrow.”

“And I’ll go with you.”

“No,” said I firmly. “Either I manage this affair alone or I have
nothing to do with it.”

“But, Godfrey, there are so many things about these people that you
don’t understand. And you----”

“I understand the essential thing,” said I. “And that is their mania
for money.”

She was on the verge of hysteria--afraid I would not go, afraid of what
I would do if I did go. “But they have to be handled carefully,” she
urged. “If you put them in a position where their pride won’t let them
take the--the money----”

“Trust me,” said I. “Go to bed, sleep soundly, and trust me.”

I stood. She suddenly flung herself against my breast and began to
sob on my shoulder. “You are hard and cold,” she said. “You have no
sympathy with me--no feeling for anything but business. But somehow--in
spite of it all--I have such a sense of your strength and your honesty.”

I laughed rather awkwardly, patted her shoulder, helped her to a chair.
“There are times when a coarse, common American business man of a
husband has his uses--and advantages,” I said lightly. “I’ll telegraph
you how things are going.”

She dried her eyes, looked at me in a puzzled way. “You always repulse
me,” she said.

“I appreciate your kindness in remembering to toss a few crumbs to the
starving man,” laughed I. “They are precious crumbs, no doubt, and more
than he deserves. But--please don’t do it. He hates that sort of thing.
You are free to act as you feel like acting. I’ll do as much for you
and Margot without the crumbs as with them.”

“How hard you are, Godfrey! How you have always misunderstood me!”

“That’s right,” said I amiably. “I’m too coarse for such a fine nature.
Well--good night.”

I took myself hastily away to bed; and at ten the next morning I
departed for London.

I decided to see Margot first. She was at Sothewell Abbey, about an
hour by express from Paddington. You perhaps know Sothewell Abbey
through the pictures and descriptions. And it is indeed an imposing
pile of old masonry seated in the midst of a park of surpassing beauty.
As soon as I entered the ancient gates for the two-mile drive to the
Abbey, I saw signs that my money was in action. When I first visited
it, the lodge was in sad disrepair, the gates were about to fall to
pieces and the vista of the drive was unkempt. Now, all was changed.
The servile pair who came out to open for me, and made me fear they
would drop down on their bellies and crawl before me, were neatly and
properly dressed, in strong contrast to their former appearance.

The exterior of the house, which had been most “romantic” but obviously
the front of poverty and decay, looked much better--not younger I
hasten to assure you, quiet reader, but somewhat like a hairless,
toothless old man when he gets a nice white wig on his pate and a set
of good false teeth on his shriveled gums. I saw gardeners at work--and
plenty there was for them to do. Within, I saw evidences of a more
adequate staff of servants; but the great halls were dreary and bare
and dingy. That was a cold summer in England, even colder than the
summer usually is. So, the enormous house was literally uninhabitable,
like all the European palaces, city and country, that I have been in.
I can fancy what such a place must be in winter with no way of heating
it but open fireplaces, and not many of them. I can’t conceive any
sane American, used to comfort in the way of steam heat, spending
a winter in the English country. I know it is done by Americans
reputedly sane; but if those at home knew what Europe in winter
meant--the old-fashioned “romantic” Europe--they would not believe
their expatriated countrymen sane in sacrificing comfort and health to
vanity. Yes, I believe they would; for, do not they, at home, make the
same imbecile sacrifices to vanity in other ways?

“Take me to some small warm room,” said I to Margot, “before I catch my
death of cold.” This the instant I was within doors and felt in my very
marrow the clammy chill of that picturesque vaulted hall.

“There isn’t any warm room in the house,” replied she.

“How about the kitchen?” said I.

She looked alarmed--being her mother’s own daughter, in lack of the
sense of humor as in many other ways. She said hastily: “The upstairs
rooms are a little better.”

“They couldn’t be worse. These rooms are cold storage.”

“I’m getting used to it,” said she. “One doesn’t mind it so much after
a while.”

Her nose was red and swollen, and her voice husky. She had a frightful
cold at that very moment. “Why don’t you get out of here and go to a
decent modern hotel in town?” said I.

“Give up possession!” cried she in horror. “He might not let me come
back.”

It was too ridiculous. “Possession of what?” said I.

“Oh, _papa_!” cried she, in despair and shame at my coarse stupidity.

“Possession of what?” I repeated. “Of a dirty, dingy old cold-storage
plant. Why should you want to come back? Put on your wraps and let’s
fly to town by the next train.”

She burst into tears. “I’d rather die!” she sobbed. “I _won’t_ give up
my position. I am Marchioness of Crossley and I belong here.”

“All right,” said I. “Let’s try the smaller rooms.”

She led me up a vast stairway--it would have thrilled your soul,
gentle reader. Think how it sounds, put into the fitting language--
“The beautiful young Marchioness conducted her father up the ancient
and magnificent stairway that rose from the spacious mediæval hall and
swept in a curve of wonderfully wrought stone work, dating from the
thirteenth century, to the upper chambers of the majestic old abbey.” I
hurried her as fast as I could, for we both were sneezing and a hideous
draught like the breath of death was streaming from somewhere. I don’t
mind looking at pictures of abbeys and the like; but when I read of the
grandeur of living in that sort of place, I laugh. The men who built
them did as well as they could in the age they lived in. But what shall
be said of men who dwell in them now, when infinitely better is to be
had?

Those upper chambers! Cold, clammy, draughty--the furniture and
hangings old and dowdy. And my daughter’s room! Like a squalid,
decrepit tenement flat. Yes, squalid; for the rugs and draperies were
dirty, were stained and frayed. There was a distinct tenement odor.

“Isn’t it fascinating?” said she, gazing round with sparkling eyes.

“Where’s the fire?” said I.

She led me to a smelly, low-ceilinged little room, like a segment out
of a hovel. It was her boudoir, she informed me. In one wall, in a
dinky fireplace burned a handful of fire.

“Is that it?” said I. “Is that all?”

“You must remember, papa,” said she proudly, “that this isn’t a
_modern_ house.”

“Ring for a servant,” said I. “This overcoat of mine is too light. I
must have wraps if I’m to sit here. And you’d better get out your furs
and put them on.”

“The servants’d think me mad,” said she. “Must you have a coat?”

“No--that spread will do,” said I. And I jerked it from the sofa and
flung it round my shoulders. “I don’t want to upset your establishment.
Good God, I had no idea people with any money at all anywhere on earth
lived like this. If you’re going to stay here, you must put in steam
heat.”

“Oh, we couldn’t do that, papa dear,” said she with a plaintive
mingling of shame for me and apology for the tradition against sense
and health.

“Let’s get to business, Margot,” said I. “Sit in the fireplace--that’s
right. What’s the trouble? Your mother has explained--has told all she
knew. I’ve come to find what the quarrel is _really_ about.”

“Has she told you of that woman?”

“Why did he go back to her?”

She began to sob. “Oh, the hideous things he said to me! I
didn’t dream a gentleman could talk like that. He called me a low
American--said he was ashamed of me--said he was going to get rid of me
at any cost, said----”

“But what had you _done_!” interrupted I.

“Nothing!” she cried, lifting her flushed face. “Absolutely
nothing--except worship him.”

“What had you done?” I repeated. As she started to rise I restrained
her. “Stay in the fireplace. What was the beginning of the row--the
very beginning?”

Her eyes wavered, but she said: “Nothing, papa!” though less vigorously.

“It was about money,” said I. “It always is--in all ranks of society.
The beginnings of the quarrels have money at the bottom of them.
Now--tell me!”

She was silent.

“I can’t help you unless you do.”

“Oh, it was so sordid!” cried she. “And I thought him high above those
things.”

“No one that’s human is,” said I. “Any person who wears pants or skirts
that have to be paid for is not above money.”

“He wanted me to turn over to him all I had,” said she. “Think of that!”

“I might have known,” said I.

“He said it was beneath his dignity as an English gentleman to have a
wife independent of him. And, do you know, papa, I was so infatuated
that I almost yielded. I could see his point of view. And I’d have been
glad to come to him for every cent. Only--” She stopped short.

“Only what?” I urged.

“I heard about that other woman. And his way of treating me-- He said
it was the proper way for a marquis to treat his marchioness. And I
liked the dignity and the beauty of it all, when others were about. But
it seemed to me that when we were alone-- Oh, papa, I can’t tell you
these things.”

“Never mind,” said I. “I understand.”

“And I was--a little jealous, away down in my heart--and suspicious.
And I was afraid he wanted the money to spend on _her_.”

“Um,” said I. “You didn’t tell your mother this?”

“She hates sordidness of every kind,” said Margot. “And I hadn’t the
courage. Besides, I’m sure mamma would have advised me to let him
have his way. She wouldn’t sympathize with the--the weak side of my
character.”

I was interested. Could it be that Edna’s daughter had a “weak”--a
human side? Could it be that her education and her mode of life had not
altogether killed the natural and made her soul a garden of artificial
flowers only?

“So, you want to be free from him?” said I.

“Free from him!” cried she, aghast. “Give up my position? Oh,
papa--never--_never_!”

“But you don’t love him. Don’t come away from that fire!”

She seated herself by the miserable smoky little blaze again. “He is my
husband. I am his wife. I am the Marchioness of Crossley.” And she drew
herself up with as much of an air as her cold and the contracted space
in the chimney-piece permitted. Unluckily, the sudden gesture caused a
current of air, and she sneezed once--twice--three times.

“Better get those furs,” said I. “You want the man back?”

“Yes, indeed. I must have him back.” She clasped her hands and wailed,
“If I only had a son! Then--_then_ I’d show Hugh that he couldn’t
trample on me. But he has me in his power now. If he casts me off
I shan’t have any position at all. The women are down on me. They
hate all the American women, except those who toady to them and give
them money or jewelry or pay their bridge and dressmaker’s bills.
And they’re only too glad of the chance to crush me. But they’ll not
succeed!”

“Why not?” said I dryly.

She burst into tears. “Oh, I don’t know what to do! Papa, shall I give
him the money?--sign over all my income to him and take only what he’ll
allow me? And would he come back if I did?”

“He would not,” said I.

“Then--what _shall_ I do? Oh, what slaves we women are! Think of it,
papa! He wants to make a _slave_ of me--said he didn’t believe in women
gadding about and showing themselves off in costly dresses and causing
scandalous talk--said my place was at home--looking after the house and
that sort of thing!” She laughed wildly. “Like a low, common servant!
And he--he free to carry on with that woman!”

“You might teach him to stay at home, if you set him a good example,”
suggested I.

“But I don’t want to stay at home!” cried she. “I didn’t marry for
that. I want to enjoy all the privileges of my rank.”

“To be sure,” said I.

“I wasn’t brought up to be like a low, middle-class woman, or a
workingman’s wife.”

“No, indeed,” said I. “You are a lady. You’re made, not to be of use in
the world, but to enjoy yourself.”

She seemed to find some cause for dissatisfaction in my enthusiastic
tone. “Of course,” she said, “I shall do my duty as a member of the
high nobility--lead in society and open bazars and visit the poor on
our estate and--and all that.”

“Yes, indeed,” said I. “And the world being what it is, there’s no
reason why you shouldn’t.”

“Do you think you can bring him back, papa?”

“That depends on you,” said I warily.

“I’ll do anything--anything. I’ll crawl to him, if he wants me to.
After all, he _is_ the Marquis of Crossley, and I’m only an American
nobody.”

“That’s the proper spirit,” said I. “But you mustn’t show it to
him _too_ plainly. Be moderate. A little pretense of dignity--of
self-respect.”

“I understand,” said she seriously--she was indeed Edna’s own daughter.
“I’ll be as I was before we were married.” Her eyes flashed. “Oh, I can
bide my time. When I have a son!”

“Get ready and come up to town to-night,” said I, with a most
unfatherly gruffness and curtness, I fear. “I’m off now to deal with
him.”

“Be careful not to wound his pride, papa,” she cautioned.

“I realize the danger of that,” replied I. “Come to the Savoy. Be on
hand, so I can get hold of you whenever I need you.”

“Oh, papa _dear_!” she cried, and cast herself into my arms.

I brushed my lips upon her crown of hair--it was false hair, that
being the fashion of the day. “Try to make yourself as pretty as you
can,” said I, releasing her and myself. “You’ll hear from me to-night
or to-morrow, unless I’ve caught my death in this damp cave. You must
leave it to the frogs, and snakes, and bats, and build yourself a
decent house somewhere. You’ll die here.”

“I’m afraid Hugh wouldn’t consent to _live_ anywhere but here. It’s
the ancestral seat, you know. The Massingfords have lived here since
forever and ever.”

“Have died here, you mean. Have killed wives they wanted to get rid of,
here.”

She startled--looked excitedly at me. “Papa!” she exclaimed
breathlessly. “Yes--I wouldn’t put it past him!”

I laughed.

She drew a long breath of relief. “Oh, you weren’t in earnest,” she
said.

“No,” replied I. “But--don’t live here.”

“I shan’t,” said she firmly. “It’s dreadful for the looks. You’ve seen
what so many of these English women look like.”

“Like shriveled, frost-bitten apples,” said I. “They don’t die
because they’re used to it. But it’s death for people accustomed to
civilization. Not even the steady glow of pride in your title and
position can keep you heated up enough to save you.”

“Will you give Hugh a house, if he’ll consent?”

“Yes.... Until to-night or to-morrow.”

And I fled from the romantic old Abbey, but not soon enough to avoid
what was threatening to be the cold of my life.




IX


The moment I was in London, and before that Sothewell Abbey cold had
a chance to grip me, I went at it. Starve, stay in bed, and keep the
air out for a day--that’s the way to put a cold out of business.
Unless it be some occasional prodigy endowed with superhuman common
sense and self-restraint, no one learns how to take care of his health
except by experience. The doctors know precious little about disease;
about health they know nothing--naturally, they have no interest in
health. The average human being not only does not know how to take care
of his health, but also does not wish to learn how; health involves
self-denial, cutting down on food, drink, tobacco and the other joys
of life. So he who wishes to avoid enormous payments in discomfort
and pain for slight neglects and transgressions of physical laws has
to work it out for himself. I’ve made several valuable discoveries in
the science and art of living; about the most valuable of them is that
every illness starts under cover of a cold. So I instantly take myself
in hand whenever I begin to sneeze and to have chilly sensations or
a catch in the throat. The result has been that since I was thirty I
have not spent a cent on doctors or lost a day through illness, and
I’ve eaten and drunk about as I pleased. I can see gentle reader’s
expression of disdain at these confessions as to my care for health.
You are welcome to your disdain, gentle reader. It is characteristic of
your shallowness. You see, the chief difference between you and me is
that I have imagination while you have not. And as I have imagination,
illness makes to my mind a picture of revolting internal conditions
which I can no more endure than I could endure having my outside
unclean and frowzy.

Margot, coming by a later train, sent me word that she was ill. She had
called in a doctor. He poured some medicine--some poison--into her, of
course, and so got her into the way of giving him an excuse for robbing
her. In England doctors rank socially with butchers and bakers, rank
scientifically with voodoo quacks and astrologers. They still look on
a cold as a trifle, and treat it by feeding! The food and drugs she
swallowed soon reduced Margot to the state where it was taking all
the reserve force of her youth to save her from severe illness. I was
entirely well the following day, and went to see her. The doctor--five
guineas or twenty-five dollars a visit--was coming twice a day; his
assistant--two guineas or ten dollars a visit--was coming four times a
day. The Marchioness of Crossley, a rich American, was ill. Her social
position and Dr. Sir Spratt Wallet’s rank as a practitioner together
made it imperative that the illness be no ordinary affair. The second
day he issued bulletins to the papers. I attempted to interfere in the
treatment, but Margot would not have it.

“She’s growing worse instead of better,” said I to Wallet.

“Certainly, sir,” replied he. “That is the regular course with a
cold.” And he stroked his whiskers and looked at me with dull,
self-complacent, supercilious eyes. “The regular course, sir.”

“In England, but not in America,” said I.

“I dare say,” said he, with heavy politeness. Then, after a heavy
pause, “her ladyship will be quite fit again in a week--quite fit.”

As she was eating three strapping meals a day and taking rhinitis and
another equally poisonous drug I had my doubts. But once you let a
doctor in you are powerless. If you order him out without giving him an
opportunity in his own good time to cure the mischief he has done the
consequences may be serious. Not to linger over this incident in high
life, Wallet made out of that cold a hundred guineas, not counting his
commissions on the fees of his assistant, on the wages of a trained
nurse, and on the stuff from the chemist. If Margot had been English
born the bill would have been about one fourth that sum--for the same
rank in society. Slay the Midianite! But that’s the rule the world
over. When I am “trimmed” abroad I console myself with reflecting on
the fate of the luckless foreigner visiting America. Europe trims us to
the quick; but we trim to the bone; and when no foreigners are handy we
keep in practice by trimming one another.

Margot’s illness did not interfere with my efforts to right her
matrimonial ship and set it in its course again. I had greatly modified
my original plan. It involved my seeking the Marquis. My new plan was
to compel him to seek me. I proceeded so successfully that on the
morning of the third day of Margot’s “indisposition,” while I was at
breakfast in my sitting room, Markham came in with a grin of triumph on
his face. “You win,” he cried. “But you always do.”

“Dawkins?”

“Here’s his card.”

“Let him up. No--wait.... Tell him I’ll see him in half an hour.”

Gentle reader, you are about to learn why in that controversy over
settlements _I_ abruptly abandoned the struggle and yielded everything.
I worked with Markham at my mail and telegrams for three quarters of an
hour before I let Dawkins in. I saw at a glance that my treatment of
him had produced the effect I had hoped. He was a typical middle-class
Englishman--but all middle-class Englishmen are typical. He was fattish
and baldish and smug. He had a beef-and-beer face, ruddy and smooth
except tufts of red-gray, curling whiskers before either ear. He had
cold, shrewd, pious eyes--the eyes of the hypocrite who serves the
Lord with every breath he draws, and gets a blessing upon every crime
he commits before committing it. In my first interviews with him I,
being new to England, had made the mistake of treating him as an
equal, that is, as a human being. My respect for myself forbids me to
meet any of my fellow-members of the human race in any other fashion.
But experience has taught me that in doing business with a man, it
is being absolutely necessary that you dominate him unless you are
willing to have him dominate you, the most skillful care must be taken
to impress him with your superiority. A certain amount of “side” is
useful in America. A lot of it is imperative in England; and if you
are dealing with an Englishman who feels that he is low, you dare not
treat him as an equal or he at once imagines you are lower than he, and
despicable--and you can do nothing with him.

I had suffered, and so had my lawyer, Norman, for our American way of
treating Dawkins. I appreciated my mistake afterwards, and resolved
not to repeat it. I studied the manner of Crossley and Blankenship and
the other upper-class men toward the middle and lower classes, and I
learned to copy it, an accomplishment of which I am not proud, though
common sense forbids me to be ashamed of it. Dawkins, entering with
heels thoroughly cooled, made ready to put out his hand, but did so
hesitatingly. He saw that his worst fears were realized, altered the
handshaking gesture into a tug at his right whiskers. Nor did I offer
him a seat, but simply looked at him pleasantly over the top of my
newspaper and said:

“Ah, Dawkins, is that you?”

“Good morning, Mr. Loring. Hope you are well, sir,” said Dawkins, now
squeezing awkwardly into his proper place.

I half turned my back on him and dictated a note and a telegram to
Markham. Then I glanced at Dawkins again. “Ah, Dawkins, yes--what were
you saying?”

“I would esteem it a favor, sir, if you would give me a few minutes of
your time--alone.”

“We are alone,” said I. “What is it?”

The solicitor shifted his portly frame uneasily, smoothed his top hat
with his gloved left hand, glanced dubiously at Markham. “The matter is
confidential, sir--relating to--to the family.”

“Mr. Markham knows more about my affairs than I do,” said I. “Don’t
beat about the bush, Dawkins. I have no time to waste.”

“Very well, sir. I beg your pardon. It concerns those bonds--the bonds
you turned over to me in arranging the settlements.”

“Yes. I remember. Great Lakes and Gulf bonds, were they not?”

“Precisely, sir. You bound us to a stipulation that they were not to be
converted for at least five years.”

“That’s right,” said I. “In fact, I made it impossible for you to
convert them.”

A pained expression came into the face of Dawkins.

“I believe I conceded everything else your client demanded,” pursued I.

“But it now develops, sir,” said Dawkins, “that that was the only
important thing.”

“Really?” said I.

“You have doubtless seen the papers these last few days--the stock
market.”

“Yes.... Yes--so the bonds _are_ dropping. That’s unfortunate.”

“Dropping rapidly,” said Dawkins. “And there are rumors that Great
Lakes and Gulf will soon be practically worthless.”

“So I’ve read.”

“I’ve come to ask you to release us. We wish to sell. We must sell. If
we don’t the settlement on your son-in-law will be worthless.”

I smiled agreeably. “As worthless as his promises to my daughter. As
worthless as he is.”

Dawkins was breathing heavily. His pious eyes were snapping with rage.
He had prided himself on his astuteness. He had gloated over his
shrewdness in outwitting Norman and me. And now he discovered that the
boot was on the other leg. I had trapped him and put him and his client
in my power.

I leaned back comfortably and smiled. “Of course I know nothing about
it, Dawkins, but I am willing to make a Yankee guess that the bonds
will continue to drop until----”

When my pause became unendurable, he said: “Yes, sir. Until when?”

“Until I discover some signs of value in my son-in-law. Then he may
discover some signs of value in the bonds. Our America is a peculiar
country, Dawkins.”

“Peculiar will do, sir,” said he with respectful insolence. “But I
should have chosen another word.”

I shook my head laughingly. “What bad losers you English are!” said I.
“But--I’ll not detain you. Good morning, Dawkins.”

“Then I am to understand, sir----”

But I had my back squarely to him and was busy with Markham, who took
his cue for the little comedy we were playing like the well-trained
American business man that he was. Presently Markham said, “He’s gone,
and I never saw a madder man get out of a room more awkwardly.”

You, gentle reader, who know about as much of the science of
managing men in practical life as you know of any other phase of the
world-that-is--you, gentle reader, are shocked by my rudeness to a
polite, well-educated, well-dressed Englishman. And you hope--and
feel--that I overreached myself. But let me inform you--not for your
instruction but for my own satisfaction--courtesy has to be used most
sparingly. Human vanity is so monstrous that men eagerly read into
politeness to them--the most ordinary politeness--evidence that their
superiority is inspiring fear, awe and desire to conciliate them.
You often hear men in high place severely criticised for being rude,
short, arrogant, insulting. Do not condemn them too hastily. It may be
that they were driven into this attitude toward their fellows by the
disastrous consequences of courtesy. Be polite to a man and he will
misunderstand. Be cool to him and he, thickly enveloped in his own good
opinion of himself, will not feel it. Rudeness, overt and unmistakable,
is often the one way to reach him and save not only yourself but also
him from the consequences of his vanity. It is the instinct of big men
to be big and simple and natural in their dealings with their fellows.
The mass of little men with big vanities compels them to suppress this
instinct; and by suppression it inevitably becomes in time crushed out
of existence. How can one who is busy continue to show consideration
for others if they, instead of showing a return consideration for him,
take it as tribute to their importance and begin to rear and impose and
trample?

To cite my own relatively unimportant case, I have long had a
reputation for coldness and meager civility in my business relations.
I recall distinctly the desperate pressure of sheer imposition that
led me to abandon my early openness to all comers at all times. And I
admit that I did change; rather abruptly, too, for it suddenly came to
me why I was slipping backwards. But looking only at my career _since_
the change, when I think of the boredom I have endured, the folly I
have permitted to waste my valuable time--when I recall the forbearance
I have shown in sparing impudent and lazy incompetence where I might,
yes, ought to have used the ax--when I think of my good-natured
tolerance in face of extremest daily provocation, year after year,
I marvel at myself and feel how unjust, how characteristically the
verdict of little shallow men, is the attack on me as cold and
unsympathetic. When I consider how the leaders of the human race have
been tempted to tyranny, I cannot understand why history is able to
record comparatively few real tyrants, most of them being homicidal
lunatics like Nero, or success-crazed megalomaniacs like Napoleon,
and almost none men of sanity. If the great of earth were as vain, as
selfishly, as egotistically inconsiderate of the small as the small are
of the great and of each other, would not the story of history have
come to an end long ago for lack of surviving characters?

Two days after Dawkins came Crossley. I knew that in America there is
no one so easily frightened as a rich man who has inherited his wealth
and does not know whether, if he lost it, he could make a living or
not. All rich men are cowards, but that species is craven. I suspected
that the same thing was true of the European type--the nobleman
with the grotesque pose of disdain for money that convinces and
captivates you, gentle reader, and your favorite authors. Crossley’s
face instantly showed me that my suspicion was correct. He had been
dissipating wildly for several weeks, but it did not account for the
look in his eyes. If, gentle reader, you wish to learn the truth about
the aristocracy you worship--which you do not--get an aristocrat
where you can cut off or turn on his supply of cash at will. You will
then discover that he who has a stiff neck also has supple knees--the
stiffer the neck the suppler the knees.

Crossley was a clever chap in his way; that is, he knew his business
of idle spender of unearned money thoroughly. Another mode of putting
it would be the commonplace and less exact if more alluring phrase
“aristocrat to his finger tips.” There are many modes of cringing. He
showed judgment and taste--judgment of me, taste in sparing himself--in
his choice of the mode. With fright and wariness in his eyes--the look
of readiness to go to any depths of self-abasement in gaining his
end--he put a tone of manly, bluff, shamefaced contrition into his
voice as he said:

“Pardon my breaking in on you this way. I’ve just heard. Is _she_ very
ill?”

He meant he had just heard about the bonds. I knew he meant that, and
he knew I knew it. But we were men of the world. “Not desperately
ill,” said I. “Only about twenty guineas a day.”

He smiled a faint but flattering appreciation of my humor, then resumed
his gloomy anxiety and self-reproach. “But she _is_ ill. I read it in
one of those screaming ha’penny rags and came as fast as ever I could.
The truth is--well, we’ve had a bit of a row. Has she told you?”

“Not much,” said I. “A little.”

“I’ve acted the skunk, the howling skunk--and I want to-- Do you think
she’ll see me?”

“If you wish, I’ll find out.”

“I’d be no end grateful,” said he with enthusiasm.

She saw him as soon as she could make herself presentable--and her
delay gave him a chance to tone up his nerves and to smooth out his
face. That afternoon I was able to telegraph Edna that all was well
The Crossleys were reconciled; Love had scored another of his famous
triumphs. She came over the following day, but I had sailed for America
a few hours before.

       *       *       *       *       *

The day after my arrival in New York I saw Mary Kirkwood and Hartley
Beechman lunching together at Delmonico’s. In those days that meant
an engagement actual or impending--or, at least, a flirtation far
advanced into the stage of loverlike intimacy. I was in the passageway
looking through the glass and the screen of palms. I stood there long,
noting every detail of her. She was well, perfectly well--of that much
her eyes and her color assured me. Is there anything lovelier than
a clear dark skin, tastefully set off by black-brown hair? Was she
happy? I could not tell. Still in her face was that restless, expectant
look--not unlike the expression of a child being shown a picture
book and too impatient for the next page rightly to examine the one
that is open. An intense interest in life, an intense vitality--that
fascinating capacity to love, if she found the right man. And her
beauty----

Beauty she undoubtedly had. But charm does not lie in beauty--physical
charm, I mean. There is a certain light in the eyes, a certain curve of
cheek and throat, of bosom and arm--and the blood flames and rushes.
She had charm for me. Her beauty impressed others; it was her charm
that made her the one woman to me.

Blankenship came to take me into the café where we were to lunch. I
went with the meager consolation that while I had stood there she had
given Beechman not a single glance with any suggestion of a feeling it
would have wounded me to the quick to see. Should I speak to her? Did
I dare risk the attempt? Would not speaking to her be merely a useless
torment? After a long struggle that could have but one end, I said:
“Excuse me,” rose and went to the palm room. They were gone; the waiter
was clearing the table at which they had been sitting. I stared round
dazedly, returned to Blankenship.

“You’re not up to the mark--what?” said he.

“New York doesn’t agree with me.”

“I hate towns. They give you such dirty second-hand stuff to breathe.
Let’s move on--what?”

“To-morrow,” I said.

But it seemed there was no place on earth for me. Don’t judge me so
poorly as to think, or to imagine I thought, this was due wholly to
Mary Kirkwood. I wish to be carefully, exactly accurate in this frank
recital of a man’s point of view. She was responsible for my forlorn
state to the extent that loving her had revealed to me the futility
and failure of my own life and had made me see another sort of life
that would have been possible with her, that was impossible without
her--without love and comradeship. But loving her did not make my life
empty; it was already empty, though I had not realized it. I understood
now why the big business men, as soon as they reached security,
cast about for some real interest. Most of them--nearly all--were
as unfortunate in their family relations as I. They had trivial
wives and trivial children--mere silly strutters and spenders. They
sought interest in art, in science, in religion, in exploration, in
philanthropy, in politics, in stamps and butterflies, in old books and
antiques, in racing stables and prize fighting, in gambling, in drink,
in women. Their craving was now mine. How to find an interest that
would make life attractive to me, with Mary Kirkwood left out--there
was my problem.

While waiting for the solution, I followed Blankenship to the
Northwest. The second day from New York, as he and I were walking
up and down the platform during a halt--at St. Paul, I think it
was--Hartley Beechman joined us.

“Didn’t I see you in the café at Delmonico’s a few days ago?” said he.
“I was getting my hat and stick in a rush. It certainly looked like
your back.”

“It was,” said I. And I was seized with a wild longing to escape from
him and a wilder longing to hold on to him and to pour out question
after question.

“Mrs. Kirkwood and I were lunching together,” he went on. “We talked of
you. I told her I thought I had seen you, and she said she heard you
were in town and was much hurt because you hadn’t looked her up.”

“I was merely passing through,” said I.

“She has an enormous admiration for you,” continued he. “She says you
have imagination--which means that she thinks you in the small class.
You know the world divides into sheep and goats on imagination, with
the mass in the have-not class. I believe it’s the true distinction
between House of Have and House of Have-not.”

“She is well?” said I.

“Always. She knows how to take care of herself. I never knew a woman so
sensible--and sensible means the reverse of what it’s usually supposed
to mean when applied to a woman.”

This hardly sounded like an engaged man talking of his fiancée. On the
other hand, Beechman was a peculiar chap.

“Does she still live in the country?”

“Just now--yes. Last winter she kept house for Bob in New York.”

But you will not be interested in how I drew from him bit by bit a
hundred details of her life, stories of what she had said and done.
I saw Beechman several hours every day until he left us at Seattle.
Alternately I thought him merely her closest man friend and her
accepted lover. At times I thought he was not quite sure, himself, in
which position he stood. When we were having our last talk together I
nerved myself and said:

“I heard in London that she was to be married.”

I felt him drawing in and shutting all doors and windows.

“Have _you_ heard anything of it?” pursued I.

“Oh, in the case of a woman like her,” replied he, “there’s always
gossip about this man and that.”

“She ought to marry.”

“She _will_ marry.”

I forced a smile, and, as we knew each other so well, I ventured: “You
speak as one having authority.”

“Don’t _you_ know she will?” parried he.

“That sounds like evasion,” laughed I.

“Not at all. She cannot escape. Some man will convince her--surely.”

“But so far as you know, no man has?”

His eyes were frankly mocking. “I did not say that,” said he.

And I could get no further.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before I returned to New York in the autumn I had added a lot of far
western enterprises to my already long list of occupations. Everything
I touched seemed to succeed. Even my new secretary, Rossiter, proved
better than Markham. Markham had an indifferent memory and a fondness
for women that was trying. Rossiter forgot nothing and was as shy of
the women, including the ladies, as was Lord Blankenship, who yawned
and retreated at the very sight of a skirt. The news from England was
altogether satisfactory. An heir was hoped for, and Crossley had become
a devoted husband and was about to enter politics. This struck me as a
huge joke, the more so because I knew that in England Crossley would
be welcomed as a source of real strength to his party. It seemed to me
amazing how England could stagger along when she was being managed by
such men and was grateful for it. But when I spoke to Blankenship about
it, he set me to thinking from a different standpoint.

“My son-in-law is going into politics,” said I. “In America he couldn’t
be elected dog-catcher.”

“Oh, I fancy money will do most anything most anywhere,” said he.

The news from Paris was equally good. Edna had settled there after a
joyous summer going from country house to country house in Britain,
and from château to château in France. She had seen one château which
she wished me to buy, and she begged me to come over and inspect it.
She did not explicitly say so, but I read between the lines that she
was greatly strengthening her social position by giving out that she
purposed buying a big place. You may imagine how much enthusiasm for
her such an announcement would create among noble down-at-the-heel
families eager to exchange unsalable old rook-roosts for American
dollars. I could hear her talking--how subtly she would put forth the
suggestion, how diplomatically she would discuss each worthless stone
heap in turn--and how she would rake in the invitations so difficult to
get unless one happens to know how, and so easy when one does know.

But with my arrival in New York I had a reverse. A cable came from Edna
saying that she was sailing at once and wished to see me.

I could not imagine what she wanted, and I did not waste much time in
making guesses. One evening, when Armitage and I were dining together
in the Federal Club--Blankenship had sailed for home--the idea flashed
into my mind that perhaps Edna wanted a divorce. Immediately I felt
that I had hit upon the precise reason for her coming. You will have no
difficulty in imagining what was the next idea in my train of thought.
If she divorced me I should be free to marry whom I pleased!

It was stupid of me, but in all my revolvings of my hopeless love for
Mary Kirkwood never once had I thought of divorcing my wife. I cannot
account for this lapse, except as an instance of the universal human
failing for overlooking the obvious. There was no religious scruple
in my early training to make me shy of divorce. On the contrary,
my parents, like most old-fashioned Americans of faiths other than
Episcopal and Catholic--and Episcopalians and Catholics were few in
the old American stock, except in New York and Baltimore and South
Carolina--most old-fashioned Americans believed that living together in
wedlock without love was sin, that divorce was no mere necessary evil,
but a religious rite as sacred as marriage itself. A house, they held,
is either a House of Hate or a House of Love, and no one should remain
in a House of Hate, and no child should be brought up there.

No doubt, if Edna and I had been living under the same roof the
idea of divorce would have taken form, actively definite form, long
before. But we had no home to be a House of Hate. We did not hate
each other; we bored each other. And as we were not poor, we lived
far enough apart not to annoy each other in the least. I cheerfully
paid any ransom she exacted for leaving me free--and you may be sure
she was not inexpensive. She had her own fortune--and it gave her
quite an income--but she husbanded that. She insisted upon state and
equipage, not to mention such small matters as stockings at fifty
dollars a pair and chemises at three hundred dollars apiece--for,
she knew how lovely she was and demanded for her beautiful body the
most beautiful garments that could be devised by French ingenuity at
combining cost and simplicity. I was--by instinct rather than by avowed
principles--thoroughly old-fashioned in my family ideas. Indeed, I
still am; and I say this with no apology. It may be that woman will
some day develop another and higher sphere for herself. But first she
would do well--in my humbly heretical opinion--to learn to fill the
sphere she now rattles round in like one dry pea in a ten-gallon can. I
want to see a few more women up to the modern requirements for wife and
mother. I want to see a few more women making a living without using
their sex charms--a few less ’tending the typewriter with one eye
while the other and busier is on the lookout for a husband. I believe
in emancipation of women--in votes for women--in all that sort of
thing. The one and only way to learn to swim is in the water. I am sick
and tired of woman the irresponsible, woman the cozener and milker of
man, woman the dead weight upon man, and drawing the pay of a housewife
and shirking all a housewife’s duties. So, you see, I am the friend of
woman--not of woman’s vanity and laziness and passion for parasiteism,
but of woman’s education and self-respect and independence.

I was thoroughly old-fashioned. My notion of wife was the independent,
self-respecting equal of her husband. That is, I had the typical
American husband’s ideal--the ideal that dates from the pioneer days
of no property and of labor for all, the ideal the American man still
lives up to, the one that enables woman to betray him. And, having this
ideal, I never permitted myself--no, not even when I spoke to her the
contrary in words--I never permitted myself to _feel_ that my wife was
not in the main what she should be.

If you have borne me company thus far, gentle reader, turn away
now. For, dreadful things are coming. I said to Armitage: “Your
sister--she’s still in the country?”

“No, she’s abroad,” replied he. “She’s visiting friends in Budapest.
Later on she’s to yacht in the East Mediterranean--she and the Horace
Armstrongs and Beechman--and--” He gave several names I do not now
recall.

“Is she engaged to Beechman?” I asked carelessly, but the question was
not one that could sound other than raw.

He smiled--an expression I did not like. At first I thought it a rebuke
to my impertinence. Afterwards I saw no such notion was in his mind.
“Beechman? Good Lord, no.”

“You are _sure_?”

“Absolute. He’d not dare go in that direction with _her_.”

“Why not?” said I.

“Oh--well--you see-- She doesn’t care for him,” replied Armitage
lamely. I was not liking him so well, now that I knew the world--his
world--better and could judge its beliefs and its hypocrisies more
accurately.

“He’s an unusual man,” said I. “She might easily care for him.”

“Well, she doesn’t,” retorted he irritably. “I happen to know she
doesn’t.”

I was convinced. Armitage’s tone said in effect that he had heard the
rumor, had questioned her, had been assured that there was no basis for
it.

So, she was abroad--five or six days away. I could not go to her and
make a beginning. Would I have gone if she had been within reach? I do
not know. I rather think not. As I have said, I was old-fashioned; and
the sort of love I felt for her, and my sense of what she had suffered
at the hands of the first man she had trusted would have made me wait,
I hope, until I was free. Still, love is insidiously compelling. Who
can say what love would or would not beguile or goad him into doing?
The old-fashioned man, always reminding himself that women haven’t an
equal chance with men, was inclined to be considerate in his dealings
with a woman. The new-fashioned man lets her look out for herself. I
am not sure that he is wrong. Perhaps some who have read thus far will
guess the reason for my doubt.

You may imagine how impatiently I waited for Edna to arrive. I am
afraid Rossiter found me difficult in those intervening days. Only
the weak sort of men and women are easy for an intelligent person to
live with. Men and women of positive character have their impossible
moods. I made this remark to Mary Kirkwood on that yachting trip in
the Sound. And her quick answer was: “Yes, that’s true. But everything
worth while is difficult. Weathering the stormy days would have its
compensations--and more.” What a woman! No wonder I loved her.

When Edna finally arrived----

What an arrival it was! She was attended by two maids, one French, the
other Italian. She had trained them--she and their former fashionable
mistresses--to treat her as if she was a royal person, requiring the
most minute assistance, incapable even of ascertaining for herself
whether it was daylight or dark, rain or shine. She was clad in the
latest Paris fashions, adapted and improved for her own especial
charms. She wore much jewelry, but nothing noisy. There never was
anything noisy about her--any more than there is about a burst of
sunshine that fills and floods the whole place, permeating everywhere
and dominating everything. She talked by turns in English--with a
superb British accent--in French that sounded Parisian and in Italian
that seemed as liquid and swift as the Italian maid’s. It was a vast
ship, and there were about a thousand passengers, and much luggage. To
me, to all on the pier that day, there seemed to be but one landing and
but one lot of luggage.

How many trunks had she? Heaven only knows. The customs people were
glad to expedite her after a glance at the exhibit imposing both in
extent and in costliness. She affected a delightful, most aristocratic
unconsciousness of the stir she was making, of the excited admiration
of men, of the gaping or jeering envy of women. Yes, it was a great
day, and as I accompanied her in the auto to the Plaza, I felt dowdy
and insignificant--felt like a humble male menial, a courier or valet.

“I did not fully appreciate your magnificence,” said I, “until I saw
you on these humble shores.”

“It is shocking here--isn’t it?” said she. “So incomplete, so crude. No
wonder the ideals are low. The surroundings give no inspiration.”

“None--except for work,” said I. “It’s a land for working people only.
No doubt you’ll be going back soon?”

“As soon as I can,” replied she. With a friendly but not tender smile:
“As soon as you’ll let me.”

The absence of her customary effusiveness confirmed my theory of her
coming. I had thought all out with the utmost care. I felt it would be
in every way unwise to let her see that I was eager for the divorce.
She must open the subject. It had ever been my rule, when I wanted
anything, so to maneuver that the other person should propose the
exchange. It is the rule of successful operation in every department of
life. Therefore, adhering strictly to my prearranged programme, I could
only sit tight and wait.

How she tried my patience! I was mad to have the preliminaries over,
to have the divorce under way--mad, not with the hysterical impatience
of those short-sighted people who mess their purposes through lack of
self-restraint, but with the white-hot repressed patience of those who
have their way in this world. Day followed day, and she did not speak.
I gave up the evenings and a large part of the afternoons to her. I
stayed on after dinner until there was no further excuse for lingering.
I listened to her interminable recital of fashionable names, dates,
gossip, adventure. A week of this, and just as my fortitude was wearing
itself out and I had begun to debate opening the subject myself, she
said:

“I’ve been down looking at our house. Really it’s not half bad. Why
shouldn’t we open it?”

I did not know what to say. Was I mistaken in her purpose in coming?
Or was this proposal to open the house the clever move of a clever
gamester to force me to speak first?

“This lovely weather!” she went on. “It’s a shame such a climate should
be wasted upon such a vulgar city. When I think of the dreadful rains
that infest Paris and the rains and fogs of London-- How they would
glory in this sun and sparkling air.”

To my notion New York was vastly more attractive than dreary London or
rainy, sloppy Paris. But I made no defense of New York. I wished her
to think it crude and tiresome.

“And the fashionable society here,” she went on. “What a silly copy of
the real thing over there!”

“It must remind you of Passaic,” said I.

She visibly shivered.

I was suddenly seized of a base inspiration. In my despair I did not
hesitate. Said I: “That reminds me. We must go over to see the old
people.”

“Oh, yes,” she murmured. “I’m so neglectful.”

I felt--I saw--that I was on the right track at last. “When will you
go?” I persisted. “Next Sunday?”

“Perhaps,” said she faintly.

“Yes, we’ll go Sunday. They fret because you never write.”

“They are well?”

“In splendid health. There’s no reason why all four of them shouldn’t
outlive us.”

“You--you go often?” she faltered.

“I haven’t been for some time,” said I. “You see, I’ve been away.... If
we opened the house, we could have them visit us. That would make up to
them for the way we’ve acted.”

She gazed at me in large-eyed horror. Suddenly she smiled with patient
scorn and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, I had forgotten your passion for
jesting.”

“I am in earnest,” said I--and I was indeed in the full flood of
a virtuous penitence whose hypocrisy I did not detect until I was
thinking about the matter afterwards. You, gentle reader, would in
the same circumstances never have permitted yourself to discover the
hypocrisy. I went on: “I’m ashamed of the way I’ve acted.”

“They’ve got everything they need or want,” said Edna.

“Material comfort,” replied I. “But haven’t parents a right to expect
something more? And now that our social position is secure, we’ve no
excuse for acting snobbishly.”

I enjoyed this virtuous talk for itself; still more, I enjoyed teasing
her. Her delicate, refined, ladylike nerves were aristocratically
sensitive. Have you observed that peculiarity of lady nerves? A lady
will live with the most shocking husband for luxury. She will endure
the most degrading humiliations to get dresses, jewels, motor cars.
She will crawl in the dirt to gain or to improve social position.
She will, without a quiver, kiss her worst enemy, cut her dearest
friends, in the furtherance of any ladylike purpose. But talk to her of
self-respecting independence, of earning her own living, or of any of
the homely decencies of life--of her ignorant old parents or unsightly
poor relatives--and what a fairy princess of high-strung nerves she
straightway becomes. Yes, Edna was a lady--a perfect lady, as perfect
as if she had been born to it.

To my surprise I had daunted her only for the day; the following
afternoon she began again. “This heavenly weather!” she exclaimed. “It
tempts me to stay on and on.”

“I hope it will last over Sunday,” said I.

She ignored the shaft, and went on with undiminished enthusiasm: “And
really New York has improved. In some respects it can be compared to
Paris--though, of course, it has no background. A city can be built in
a generation or so. But to build up the country--that takes centuries.”

“It’s building up rapidly,” said I. “You’ll be astonished Sunday by the
change down where the old folks are. The Fosdicks have bought up twenty
farms or so, and are making a park. I saw Amy Siersdorf not long ago
and she spoke of having stopped at father’s place and got milk and corn
bread.”

“The fluffy little cat,” said Edna, not especially ruffled. “I shall
snub her the first time we meet. But I was about to speak of our house.
I am arranging to open it. Of course, Margot can’t come over _this_
winter, but I don’t really need her. We owe it to our friends here to
do something socially. I want to stop the gossip.”

“The gossip?” said I.

“The talk because we are not living together. It isn’t dangerous, but
it’s uncomfortable. I believe people like us ought to maintain the best
social traditions--ought to set a good example to the lower classes.”

“Oh, bother!” said I as good-humoredly as I could. “We’ll do as we
please. Otherwise, where’s the use in having money?”

A pause which I felt was hopeful. Edna said with affected carelessness:
“_You_ don’t think people have a right to--to divorce?”

At last! My intuition had been correct! “Why not?” replied I, my tone
as casual as hers. “Certainly, if they wish.”

A long silence. Then she: “Sometimes I feel that way myself. When
two people find that they’re uncongenial, that they’d be better
off--happier--if free to go their separate ways and to realize to the
full their own ideals of life-- Why not?”

“Precisely my view,” said I.

Again a long silence. She finally said: “Has it ever occurred to you,
Godfrey, that you and I might be better off--apart?”

I laughed. “It’s a good many years now since we were together,” replied
I. “We might as well be divorced as living the way we do.”

“It’s because I’ve been feeling those very things, that I’ve come
back,” said she. “It seemed to me that, now I’ve fulfilled my duty to
Margot, I ought to do my duty to you.”

“That’s like you,” said I. “For you life is one long sacrifice.”

If she scented irony she dissembled well. “Sacrifice is the woman’s
part,” replied she sweetly.

“No doubt,” I went on, “you’re willing to stay here where you’re
unhappy, and for my sake to jam the house night after night with
people you care nothing about, and disport yourself in splendor to
make the world envy me. I appreciate your nobility of character, but I
positively can’t allow it.”

“We must do our duty,” said she. “Society expects certain things of us,
and we must do them.”

“Not I, my dear. Open the house if you like. But I stick to my bachelor
apartment.”

“Do you want me to go back to Europe?” said she with a fine show of
quiet melancholy.

“I want you to do as you please,” was my answer.

“But unless I stay here, and you and I take our place in society
together, I--” She hesitated. “Now that Margot is settled,” she went on
desperately, “I am adrift. And--Godfrey, we _can’t_ go on as we are.”

“I see that,” said I. “What do you propose?”

“To stay in New York,” replied she, with the promptness of the skilled
fencer. “To stay here and be the mistress of your establishment.”

“My establishment is an apartment at Sherry’s.”

“But that’s impossible!” remonstrated she.

“Be calm, my dear. I don’t ask you to lead my kind of life.”

“Then--what do you propose?” ventured she.

I shrugged my shoulders and settled myself more comfortably in her
luxurious motor. I gazed with absorbed interest at the bunch of orchids
in the flower-holder.

“I don’t see how we can continue neither free nor bound,” pursued she.

“Whatever you like,” said I. “Only--no fashionable capering for me.”

“Do you want me to get a divorce, Godfrey?” said she.

“I want you to be happy,” said I. “Divorce has no terrors for me.
Aren’t we practically divorced already?”

“That’s true,” said she. “We never did have much in common.” Then she
reddened--for, she could not quite forget those first days of our
married life, before I got the money to feed her ambition. “You make
me feel as if you were a--no, not a stranger, but only a friend.”

“And we _are_ friends,” said I heartily. “And always shall be.” For I
was beginning to like her, to take the amiably indifferent outsider’s
view of her, now that she was freeing me.

“Godfrey, do you want to marry again?” she asked with a sudden shrewd
look straight into my eyes.

I laughed easily. “That question might better come from me,” said I.
“You will never be happy, I suppose, until you are the Duchess or
Princess Something-or-other.”

A flush stole over her small sweet face, making it lovelier than ever.
“I never thought of such a thing,” she protested--but too energetically.

“Nonsense,” said I. “You’ve dreamed it for years. Be honest with me,
Edna.”

“How could I dream it?” replied she. “It would take an awful lot of
money.”

“You have quite a bunch,” said I. “And if we parted, naturally I’d give
you more.”

Once again--but this time slowly--the searching gaze turned upon me.

I bore it well. “You can’t live as I live,” I went on. “I won’t live
as you live. You say that means divorce. I don’t think so. Many rich
American couples live apart without divorce. I believe usually the
reason is the wife has found she couldn’t get a large enough slice of
the husband’s fortune, if she divorced him. Still, for whatever reason,
they stay married. You don’t like the idea. So I say, if you want to
go I’ll give you as much as I gave Margot--in addition to what you
already have--and my blessing. I’ve some sentiment about the past, but
it is as a past.”

“I am--stunned,” said she. And I think her vanity was.

“It’s what you want?” rejoined I.

“You put me in a hard position, Godfrey. You give me no alternative but
to accept.”

“I am a hard man,” said I suavely.

“You are really willing to let me go?”

“You expected to have a difficult time persuading me?” laughed I.

She looked at me reproachfully. “Do be serious, Godfrey, about these
serious things.”

“All right. What do you say, Edna? Yes or no?”

“I must have time to think,” replied she. “This is a very solemn
moment.”

“Why fake?” said I pleasantly. “You have it all thought out.”

“It is solemn to _me_, Godfrey.”

“There’s nothing solemn about our married life. It’s a farce.”

But she was searching for confirmation of her fear of some kind of
trap. “You really mean that you wish to free me?” she said.

“I mean precisely what I say,” replied I. “Freedom and the cash are
yours for the asking. But you must ask, my dear. I’ll not have any more
of your favorite comedy of making yourself out a martyr.”

“You don’t know how you hurt me,” cried she. “But you always have hurt
me--always. I know--” very gently--“that you didn’t mean to, but you
haven’t understood.”

“I did my best,” said I, with the pleasant smile of which she was so
intolerant. “But what can be expected of a plain, coarse materialist of
a business man?”

“Yet you are generous in many ways,” mused she. “It’s simply that you
can’t understand me.”

“Perhaps it’s _you_ that don’t understand _me_,” said I.

“What do you mean?” inquired she.

“Oh, nothing,” I replied carelessly. How hope to make a vain woman,
obsessed of the notion that she has a profound and mysterious soul when
she simply has a fog-bank--how hope to make her see the truth about
herself? “It isn’t worth explaining. Only--when you are free and you
find some one who appreciates and sympathizes with that soul of yours,
be careful to pay him well, and to keep on paying. You can always be
flattered and fooled, if you pay for it. But if you don’t pay-- Look
out. You may hear the truth.”

“What a cynic you are!” she cried. “Thank God, I haven’t your low views
of life.”

“Keep your views, by all means,” said I. “But don’t forget my advice.
You are lovely. You are charming. You dress beautifully and have good
taste. But it’s the money, my dear, that causes the excitement about
those charms and graces. Hold on to your principal, and spend your
income freely but judiciously.”

“If I could only convince you that there is something beside money in
the world.”

“Not for those to whom money is the breath of life,” replied I.

When we returned to her hotel she urged me to come in for tea. We went
into the greenroom, to listen to the music and to observe the crowds.
There was a sprinkling of men, but two thirds were women--women of
all classes and conditions, above the working class. Women obviously
fashionable as well as rich. Women obviously only rich. Women living
off men respectably. Women “trimming” here and there. An army of pretty
women--well-cared-for bodies, attractive faces, inviting the various
kinds of sensual attack from the subtlest to the frankest. This woman
at the next table is rather cheaply dressed, except a gorgeous hat.
That woman yonder has contrived to “trim” only a handsome set of
furs; it looks grotesque with the rest of the costume. A third has a
huge gilt bag as her sole claim to sisterhood with the throng of fair
pampered parasites upon husbands, fathers, lovers. A charming and a
useless throng. No, not charming, unless a man happens to be in the
mood in which he succumbs to the trimming process with pleasure--and
then, he would not think them altogether useless.

“New York grows more and more like Europe,” said my wife, gazing around
with shining eyes, and inhaling the heavily scented atmosphere with
dilating nostrils. “More and more like Europe.”

“More and more,” replied I. “Especially the women.”

“Oh, they’re ahead of the European women,” said she.

“So they are,” said I. “Yes--they beat the European women at it. But
I’m not sure whether that’s because they are really cleverer, or merely
because our men trim more readily.”

She regarded me with an expression of mildly interested perplexity, as
if she couldn’t imagine what was the “it” I was talking about. “You
must admit they are lovely,” said she.

“Admit it?” said I. “I proclaim it. If a man’s notion of dinner is only
the dessert, he couldn’t do better.”

She looked still more vague--one of her tricks when she wished to avoid
or to ignore. “I never touch desserts,” said she.

As I was leaving--for we were not dining together that evening--she
said:

“I shall think about your proposal.”

I looked straight at her. “Tell me whether you will or will not confirm
your own proposal,” said I. “And don’t delay too long. Unfinished
business makes me nervous.”

She returned my look with quiet composure. “I shall let you know
to-morrow,” said she.




X


Among my acquaintances, both in and out of fashionable society, there
were not a few jealous husbands. I knew one man who, in the evening,
made his wife account for every moment of the day, and tell him in
detail how she was going to spend the following day, and during
business hours he called up irregularly on the telephone. He was not
content with the effective system of espionage which a retinue of
servants automatically establishes. Another man--to give a typical
instance of each of the two types--hired detectives from time to time
to watch his wife living abroad “for her health and to educate her
children.” In a decently ordered society this sort of jealousy is
rare. Only where the women are luxuriously supported parasites and the
men are attaching but the one value to the women--the only value they
possess for them--only there do you find this defiling jealousy the
rule instead of the exception. Naturally, if the woman is mere property
the man guards her as he guards the rest of his material possessions;
and the woman who consents to be mere property probably needs guarding
if she has qualities of desirability discoverable by other eyes than
those of her overprizing owner.

This jealousy was in the air of the offices and clubs I frequented.
But it had somehow or other never infected me. Was I occupied too
deeply with other matters? Was I indifferent? Did my own disinclination
to dalliance make me slow to appreciate the large part dalliance now
plays in American life? I do not know why I was free from jealousy.
I only know that never once had my mind been shadowed by a sinister
thought as to what my wife might be about, far away and free. Possibly
my knowledge of her absorption in social ambition kept me quiet.
Certainly a woman whose whole mind and heart are set upon social
climbing is about the last person a seeker for dalliance would invest.

I had never heard a word or a hint of a scandal about her--for the
best of reasons; she did nothing to cause that kind of talk. But, how
curious is coincidence! On the very evening of the day of our divorce
discussion Edna had her first experience of scandal, and I immediately
knew of it. After leaving her I went to the Federal Club, where I
often took a hand in a rather stiff game of bridge before dinner. I
drifted into the reading room, glanced idly at the long row of current
magazines. In full view lay the weekly purveyor of social news, a
paper I had not looked at half a dozen times in my life, and then only
because some one had asked me to read a particular paragraph. The
week’s issue of this scandal monger had just come in. I threw back
the cover, let my glance drop upon the page. I was hardly aware that
I was reading--for my thoughts were elsewhere--when I became vaguely
conscious that the print had some relation to me. I reread it; it was a
veiled attack upon Edna. All unsuspected by her husband--so the story
ran--she had come to America to divorce him that she might marry a
German nobleman of almost royal rank. A voice close beside me said:

“What is it amuses you so in that dirty sheet?”

It was Armitage. I started guiltily. Then my common sense asserted
itself, and I pointed to the paragraph. When he had read it I said:

“Who’s the German? I’m not well enough up on the nobility to be able to
guess, though it’s probably plainly told.”

“The Count von Biestrich,” said he.

“Thanks,” said I, no wiser than before, and we went up to play bridge.

A year or so before I might possibly have talked freely with Armitage;
but the day of our closest intimacy had passed. He was still my
intimate friend; I was his--with several large reservations. Why?
Chiefly because when he passed the critical age his mind took the
turn for the worse. At forty to forty-five a man begins to reap his
harvest. Armitage had many and varied interests, but the one that
affected his nature most profoundly was women. He mocked at them; he
was always inventing or relating stories about them of the more or less
gamey sort. But, somewhat like his pretensions of disdain for birth
and fashion, his wordy scorn of women concealed a slavish weakness for
them. After forty this began to disclose itself in his features. Their
handsome intellectuality began to be marred by a sensual heaviness; and
presently his wit degenerated toward a repellent coarseness. It takes
delicate juggling to make filth attractive. After forty a man does well
to be careful how he attempts it; for, after forty, the hand loses its
lightness. I rather avoided Armitage; not that I was squeamish, but
my sense of humor somehow rarely has responded to rude rootings and
pawings in the garbage barrel.

About an hour after dinner Edna called me to the telephone and asked me
to come to her. I found her in high excitement, her color vivid, her
manner nervous beyond its natural vivacity even as now expanded upon
the best Continental models. “I got rid of my guests,” said she, “and
sent for you as soon as I could. Have you heard?”

“About von Biestrich?” said I.

“It is hideous!--hideous!” she cried. “I who have kept my name
unsullied--I who have----”

“I’m sure of that,” I interrupted. “I’m dead tired and, if you’ll
excuse me, I’ll go home.”

She caught me by the arm. “Godfrey, you think this was what I had in
mind. I swear to you----”

“I’m sure you’ve been all that a wife is expected to be,” said I, in
my usual manner of good-natured raillery. “And I’m also sure you would
wait until you were free, and would deliberate very carefully before
deciding----”

“Godfrey, how can you!” cried she, in her most exaggerated tone for
outraged spirituality. “Have you _no_ heart? Have you no respect for
me--your wife, the mother of your daughter?”

“Have I not said I did not suspect you?” remonstrated I. “Why so
agitated, my dear? Do you wish to make me begin to suspect?”

She shrank and began to cool down. “I’ve never had such an experience
before,” she apologized. “I don’t know how to take it.”

“It’s nothing--nothing,” I declared.

“I give you my word of honor that if I were free I should not consider
marrying that German.”

“I believe you.” I put out a friendly hand. “Good night.”

“This ends all talk of divorce,” said she.

I dropped my hand. “I don’t see that the situation is changed in the
least.”

“That’s because you are not a woman,” replied she. “You can’t
appreciate how I feel.”

“You wished to be free before this paragraph appeared. You still wish
to be free.”

“Oh, _how_ can you be so insensible!” cried she, all unstrung again
and, I could not but see, genuinely so. “I _never_ could face the
scandal of a divorce. I didn’t realize. It would kill me. How _did_
Hilda face it?--and all these other nice women? I should hide and never
show my face again.”

She was agitating me so wildly that I felt I could not much longer
conceal it. “I must go,” said I, pretending to yawn. “Sleep on it.
Perhaps to-morrow you’ll feel differently.”

She tried to detain me, but I broke away and fled. To be almost free
and then to have freedom snatched away! Not out of reach, but where it
can be reached easily if one will simply stretch out his hand somewhat
ruthlessly. By no means so ruthless as my wife had been a score of
times in gaining her ends without regard to me. Why not be ruthless?
Had she not been ruthless? Had she not given me the right to compel
her to free me? More, did she not herself wish to be free? And was she
not now restrained, not by consideration for me, not by any decent
instinct whatsoever, but solely by a snobbish groveling fear of public
opinion?--a senseless fear, too?

We are constantly criticising people--by way of patting ourselves on
the back--because they take what they want regardless of the feelings
of others. A form of self-righteousness as shameless as common; for
we happen not to fancy the things they show themselves inconsiderate
and swinish about. But--when we really do want a thing--what then? How
industrious we become in appeal to conscience--that most perfect of
courtiers--to show us how just and right it is that we should have this
thing _we_ want! Having set myself drastically to cure self-fooling
years before--when first I realized how dangerous it is and how common
a cause of failure and ruin--I was unable to conceal from myself the
cruelty of forcing Edna to divorce me. My conscience--as sly a sophist
and flatterer as yours, gentle reader--my conscience could not convince
me. Cruel things I had never done--that is, not directly. Of course I,
like all men of action, had again and again been compelled to do them
indirectly. But not by my own direct act had I ever made any human
being suffer. I would not begin now. I would not commit the stupidity
of trying to found my happiness upon the wretchedness of another. I
could feel the withering scorn that would blaze in Mary Kirkwood’s
honest eyes if I should go to her after having freed myself by force,
and she should find it out. I see your sarcastic smile, gentle reader,
as I thus ingenuously confess the selfish fear that was the hidden
spring of my virtue. Your smile betrays your shallowness. If you knew
human nature you would know that all _real_ motives are selfish.
The differences of character in human beings are not differences
between selfish and unselfish. They are differences between petty,
short-sighted selfishness and broad, far-sighted selfishness.

When I saw Edna again she was still wavering. She had come to
America with her mind made up for divorce, if I could by hook or by
crook be induced to consent. She had been frightened by this attack
upon her--frightened as only those who live a life of complete
self-deception can be frightened by a sudden and public holding up of
the mirror to reflect their naked selves. She was, of course, easily
able to convince herself that her own motives in seeking a divorce
were fine and high and self-martyring. But she could now see no way to
convince others. In the public estimation she saw she would be classed
with Lady Blankenship, with Mrs. Ramsdell, with all the other women who
had got divorces to better themselves socially or financially.

Instead of dying out the scandal grew. The daily papers took up the
hints in the society journal’s veiled paragraph, had long cabled
accounts of Count von Biestrich, of his attentions to Edna, told when
and where they had been guests at the same châteaus and country houses,
made it appear that they had been no better than they should be for
nearly a year. Edna was prostrated.

“There’s only one answer to these attacks,” she said to me. “You must
give up your apartment and move to this hotel. We must open the house
and live in it together and entertain together.”

I was not unprepared. I had threshed out the whole matter with myself,
had made my choice between the two courses open to me--or, rather, had
forced myself to see the truth that there was in decency but the one
course. “Very well,” said I to her--and that was all.

I moved to the Plaza the same day; I was seen constantly with her; I
did my best to show the world that all was serene between us. In fact,
if you saw us during those scandal-clouded days you may have thought
us a couple on a honeymoon. Behind the scenes we quarreled--about
anything, about everything, about nothing--as people do when forced to
play in public the farce of billing and cooing lovers. Especially if
one of them has not the faintest glimmer of a sense of humor. But in
public----

The newspapers soon had to drop their campaign of slander by
insinuation.

So it came to pass that by the opening of the season Edna and I were
installed in the big house, decidedly improved now thanks to the
collecting both of ideas and of things she had done abroad. And we
were giving all kinds of parties, with me taking part to an extent I
should have laughed at beforehand as impossible. She had become so
irritating to me that the mere sight of her put me in a rage. Have you
ever been forced into intimate daily contact with a nature that is
thoroughly artificial--after you have discovered its artificiality,
its lack of sincerity, its vanity and pretense and sex trickery? There
is, as we all know, in everyone of us a streak of artificiality, of
self-consciousness, a fondness for posing to seem better than we are.
But somewhere beneath the pose there is usually a core of sincerity, a
genuine individuality, perhaps a poor thing but still a real thing. It
may be there was this reality somewhere in Edna. I can only say that I
was never granted a sight of it. And I rather suspect that she, like
most of the fashion-rotted women and men, had lost by a process of
atrophy through suppression and disuse the last fragment of reality.
Had Gabriel’s trumpet sounded and the great light from the Throne
revealed the secrets of all hearts, it would have penetrated in her to
nothing but posing within posing.

I shall get no sympathy from man or woman--or fellow-beast--after
talking thus of a woman and a lady. It is the convention to speak
gallant lies to and about women--and to treat them as if they were
beneath contempt. So my habit of treating them well and speaking the
truth about them will be condemned and denounced with the triple curse.
Well--I shall try to live through it.

Except in occasional outbursts when her rude candor toward me would
anger me into retort in kind, I concealed my feeling about her. I knew
it was just, yet I was ashamed of it. Our quarrels were all surface
affairs--outbursts of irritation--the blowing off of surplus steam,
not the bursting of the boiler and the wrecking of the machinery.
If you happen to take into your employ any of the servants we had in
those days--Edna’s maids or my valet or any other of the menials so
placed that they could spy upon our innermost privacy--I am confident
that in return for your adroit, searching questionings you will hear
we were no more inharmonious than the usual married couple past the
best-foot-foremost stage. I did not swear at her; she did not throw
bric-à-brac at me. And once, I remember, when I had a bad headache she
stayed home from the opera--on a Monday night, too--to read to me. It
is true the new dress in which she had expected to show herself was not
ready. But that is a detail for a cynic to linger upon.

Three months of New York, and she was bored to extinction. I had
confidently been expecting this. I watched the signs of it with
gnawing anxiety, for I was very near to the end of my good behavior.
If possible I wished to stay on and help her toward a rational frame
of mind--one in which she would see that divorce was the only possible
solution of our impossible situation. But I began to fear I should
have to give up and fly--to hunt or to inspect western mines and
railways. She was bored by the women; they seemed shallow dabblers in
culture after the European women. She was offended by their nervousness
about their position; it made them seem common in contrast with the
Europeans, born swells and impregnably ensconced. She was bored by the
men--by their fewness, by the insufferable dullness of those few--all
of them feeble imitations of the European type of elegant loafer.

“These men have no subtlety,” she cried. “They have no conversation.
When they’re alone with a woman--you should hear them try to flatter.
They are as different from the European men as--as----”

“As a fence-painter from an artist,” I suggested.

“Quite that,” said she, and I saw her making a mental note of the
comparison for future use--one of her best tricks. “Really, I prefer
the business men to them. But one cannot get the business men. What a
country, where everyone who has any brains is at work!”

“If you are unhappy here, why not go abroad?” said I amiably. “Margot
is always waiting for you.”

“But how _can_ I go abroad?” railed she. “There’ll be another outbreak
of scandal. Was ever a woman so wretchedly placed! What _shall_ I do!
If I had some one to advise me!”

It was interesting to hear her, determined, self-reliant character
though she was, thus confess to the universal weakness of the female
sex. Women, not trained to act for themselves, can hardly overcome this
fundamental defect. That is why you so often see an apparently, and
probably, superior woman weaken and yield where a distinctly ordinary
man would be strong and would march ahead. The trouble with Edna was
that she had no definite man behind her, spurring her on to action. In
all she had done from the beginning of our married life she had felt
that she had me to fall back on, should emergency arise--an unconscious
dependence, one she would have scornfully denied, but none the less
real. In this affair there was no man to fall back on.

I saw this. Yet I refrained from giving her the support she needed and
all but asked. Her cry, “If I had some one to advise me,” meant, “If I
had some one to give me the courage to act.” I knew what it meant. But
eager though I was to be quit of her, I would not give her the thrust
toward divorce that would have put into her the courage of anger and
of the feeling that she was a martyr to my brutality. Why did I hold
myself in check? Candidly, I do not know. I distrust the suggestion
that it may have been due to essential goodness of heart. At any rate,
I did restrain myself. She--naturally enough--misunderstood; and she
proceeded to explain it to the gratifying of her vanity. I saw in her
eyes, in her way of treating me, that she thought me her secret adorer,
convinced of my unworthiness, of her god-to-mortal superiority; not
daring openly to resist her desire to be free from me, but opposing
it humbly, silently. I saw that she pitied me. Did this add to my
anger? Not in the least. I have a perhaps queer sense of humor. I
rather welcomed the chance to get a little amusement out of a situation
otherwise dreary and infuriating.

Curiously enough, it was Armitage who came to her rescue--and to mine.

Bob had been in retirement several weeks, having himself rejuvenated
by a beauty doctor. You are astonished, gentle reader, perhaps
incredulous, that a man of his position--high both socially and
financially--should stoop to such triviality--not a woman but a man.
And the serious, masculine sort of man he was, I assure you. But you,
being a confirmed accepter of the trash written and talked about human
nature, do not appreciate what a power physical vanity is in the
world. Of course, if you are a man, you know about your own carefully
hid physical vanity. But you think it in yourself a virtue, quite
natural, not a vanity at all. Bob Armitage was not vain enough to fail
to see the beginning of the ravages of time and dissipation. Another
man would have looked in the glass and would have seen a reflection
ever handsomer as the years went by, would have discovered in the
creases and crow’s-feet and lengthening wattles a superb beauty of
manly strength of character showing at last in the face. Bob was not
that sort of fool. He wished to fascinate the ladies; so, he strove
to retain the fair insignia of youth as long as he possibly could. He
knew as well as the next man that his wealth had value with the women
far beyond any degree of beauty or charm. But like most men he wished
to feel that he was at least not a “winner” in spite of his personal
self; and his young good looks even helped toward the pleasantest of
delusions--that he was loved for himself chiefly.

The beauty doctor did well by him, I must say. He looked ten years
younger, would have passed in artificial light for a youth of thirty
or thereabouts. He reappeared in his haunts, freshened up mentally,
too; for physical content reacts powerfully upon the mind, and while it
is true that feeling young helps one to look young, it is truer that
looking young compels one to feel young.

With him came a Prince Frascatoni, head of one of the great families
of Italy, one of the few that have retained German titles and estates
from the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Frascatoni was sufficiently
rich for all ordinary purposes, and could therefore pose as a traveler
for pleasure with no matrimonial designs. He was, in fact, poor for
a _grand seigneur_ and was on the same business in America that has
attracted here every other visiting foreigner of rank--except those who
come for political purposes, and those who come to shoot in the West.
And those classes give our fashionable society as wide a berth as they
would its middle-class prototype in their home countries.

The first time I saw Frascatoni--when he and Armitage strolled into
the reading room of the Federal Club together--I thought him about the
handsomest and, in a certain way, the most distinguished-looking man
I had ever seen. He was a black Italian--dark olive skin, coal-black
hair, dark-gray eyes that seemed black or brown at a glance. They were
weary-looking eyes; they gazed at you with the ineffable dreamy satiric
repose of a sphinx who has seen the futile human procession march into
the grave for countless centuries. He had a slow sweet smile, a manner
made superior by the effacement of every trace of superiority. He had
the quiet, leisurely voice of one used to being listened to attentively.

“Loring--the Prince Frascatoni. Prince, I particularly wish you to know
my friend Godfrey Loring. Don’t be deceived by his look of the honest
simple youth into thinking him either young or unsophisticated.”

The prince gave me his hand. As it had also been my habit ever since
I learned the valuable trick merely to give my hand, the gesture
was a draw. Neither had trapped the other into making an advance.
We talked commonplaces of New York sky line, American energy and
business enthusiasm for perhaps half an hour. Then we three and some
one else, a professional cultivator of millionaires named Chassory,
I believe, played bridge and afterwards dined together. It came out
sometime during the evening that Frascatoni had met my wife in Rome
and in Paris, and that he knew my son-in-law--not surprising, as the
fashionable set is international, and is small enough to be acquainted
all round.

Armitage must have told him that my wife and I were not altogether
inconsolable if we did not see too much of each other. For, the prince,
taking Edna in to dinner a few nights later, laid siege at once. I
recall noting how he would talk to her in his quiet, leisurely way
until she looked at him; then, how his weary eyes would suddenly light
up with interest--not with ardor--nothing so banal as that--but a
fleeting gleam of interest that was more flattering than the ardor of
another man would have been. As Frascatoni, an unusual type, attracted
me, I saved myself from boredom by observing him all evening. And it
was highly instructive in the art of winning--whether women or men--to
see how he led her on to try to make that fascinating fugitive gleam
reappear in his eyes. I afterwards discovered that he accompanied the
gleam with a peculiar veiled caress of inflection in his calm, even
voice--a trick that doubly reënforced the flattery of the gleam.

“What a charming man Prince Frascatoni is,” said my wife, when our
guests were gone.

“Very,” said I. “If I were writing a novel I’d make him the hero--or
the villain.”

“He is one of the greatest nobles in Europe.”

“He looks it and acts it,” said I.

“Why, I thought him very simple and natural,” protested she.

“Exactly,” said I. “So many of the nobles I’ve met looked and acted
like frauds. They seemed afraid it wouldn’t be known that they were of
the aristocracy.”

“You are prejudiced,” said Edna.

“Then why do I size up Frascatoni so well?”

“You happen to like him.”

“But I don’t,” replied I.

“Of course not,” said Edna with sarcasm. “He isn’t in business.”

“Precisely,” I answered. “He couldn’t do anything--build a railroad,
run a factory, write a book, paint a picture. He and his kind are
simply amateurs at life, and their pretense that they could be
professionals if they chose ought to deceive nobody. He probably could
ride a horse a little worse than a professional jockey, or handle a
foil almost as well as a fencing master, or play on the piano or the
violin passably. I don’t admire that sort of people, and I can’t like
where I don’t admire.”

Edna yawned and prepared to go up to her own rooms. “I hope he’ll stay
a while,” said she. “And I hope he’ll let me see something of him. He’s
the first ray of interest I’ve had this winter.”

“You will see something of him,” said I. “He liked you.”

“You think so?” said she, seating herself on the arm of a chair.

“I know it. Unless he finds what he’s looking for, he’ll attach himself
to you.”

“What is he looking for?”

“A very rich wife,” said I. “But she must be attractive as well as
rich, Armitage tells me. Frascatoni doesn’t need money badly enough to
annex a frump. And Armitage says that while Englishmen and Germans and
the heiress-hunting sort of French don’t care a rap what the lady looks
like, the Italians--of the old families--are rather particular--not
exacting, but particular. Unless, of course, the fortune is huge.”

Edna yawned again. That sort of talk either irritated or bored her.

Frascatoni was constantly with her thenceforth--not pointedly or
scandalously so; there are discreet ways of doing those things, and
of discretion in all its forms the Italian was a supreme master. The
game of man and woman had been his especial game from precocious and
maddeningly handsome boyhood. He had learned both by being conquered
and by conquering. They say--and I believe it--that of all the
foreigners a clean Italian nobleman is the most fascinating.

The Hungarian or Russian is a wild, barbaric love-maker, the German
a wordy sentimentalist, the Englishman dominates and absorbs, the
Frenchman knows how to flatter the most subtly, how to make the woman
feel that life with him would be full of interest and charm. But the
right sort of Italian combines the best of all these qualities, and
adds to them the allure of the unfathomably mysterious. He constantly
satisfies yet always baffles. He reveals himself, only to disclose in
the inner wall of what seemed to be his innermost self a strangely
carved door ajar.

My first intimation of what Frascatoni was about came from my wife.
Not words, of course, but actions. She abruptly ceased quarreling,
rebuking, reproaching, scoffing. She soothed, sympathized, agreed. She
became as sweet as she had formerly been. I was puzzled, and waited
for light. It came with her next move. She began to talk of going back
to Europe, to deplore that scandalmongers would not let her. She began
to chaff me on my love of a bachelor’s life, on my dislike of married
life. She said with reproachful, yet smiling gentleness, that I made
her feel ashamed to stay on.

“Admit,” said she, “that you’d be better pleased if I were in Guinea.”

“You oughtn’t have given me so many years of freedom,” said I.

“You’d have been glad if I had gone on and gotten a divorce,” pursued
she.

My drowsing soul startled and listened. “I was willing that you should
do as you liked,” said I. “Divorce is a matter of more importance to
the woman than to the man--just as marriage is.”

“And it’s a sensible thing, too--isn’t it?”

“Very,” said I.

“Godfrey, would you honestly be willing?”

“I’d not lay a straw in your way.”

“What nonsense we’re talking!” cried she, with a nervous laugh. “And
yet there’s no denying that we don’t get on together. I see how trying
it is to you to have me about.”

“And you want to be free and living abroad.”

“I wonder how much I’d really mind the scandal,” pursued she. “I don’t
care especially about these New York people. And at the worst what harm
could they do _me_?”

“None,” said I.

“They could only talk. How they’d blame me!”

“Behind your back, perhaps,” said I. “Unless they thought I was to
blame--which is more likely.”

“You talk of divorce as if it were nothing.”

“It’s merely a means to an end,” said I. “You’ve got only the one life,
you know.”

“And I’m no longer so _dreadfully_ young. Though, I heard that Armitage
said the other day he would never dream I was over twenty-eight if he
didn’t know.”

She laughed with the pleasure we all take in a compliment that is
genuine; for she knew as well as did Armitage that she could pass for
twenty-eight--and a radiant twenty-eight--even in her least lovely hour.

“No one has youth to waste,” observed I. “In your heart you wish to be
free--don’t you?”

“We are not suited to each other, Godfrey,” said she with gentle
friendliness.

“There’s not a doubt of that,” said I.

“Why should we spoil each other’s lives? I conceal it from you, but I
am so unhappy here.”

“You can’t blame _me_,” said I. “I’m not detaining you.”

A long silence, then she said: “Suppose I were to consent--” I laughed,
she reddened, corrected herself: “Suppose we were to decide to do
it--what then?”

“Why--a divorce,” said I.

“Can’t those things be done quietly?”

“Certainly. No publicity until the decree is entered and the papers
sealed.”

“Does that mean no scandal beyond just the fact?”

“No scandal at all. Just the fact, and some newspaper comment.”

“And we needn’t be here.”

“Not then.”

“Would it take long?”

I reflected. “Let me see--if you begin action say within a month, the
divorce would take-- I could have it pushed through in another month or
so, and then--by next fall you’d be free.”

“But doesn’t one have to have grounds for divorce, beside not wanting
to be married?”

“All that easily arranges itself,” said I.

She lapsed into a deep study, I furtively watching her. I saw an
expression of fright, at the daring of her thoughts, gather--fright,
yet fascination, too. Said she in a low voice: “Godfrey, are you
_serious_?”

“Entirely so,” was my careless reply. “Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know whether I am or not.... I am _wretched_ here!”

“All you have to do is to say the word. We don’t in the least need each
other, and mutual need is the only respectable excuse for marriage. And
I must tell you, I’ll not stand for any more of this social nonsense
that compels me to participate. I’m done.”

She looked at me pityingly. Our season had been a brilliant success,
yet I remained unconverted, coarsely unsympathetic. “If I should decide
to--to do it--what then?”

“Nothing. I’d go away. The rest would be for the lawyers.”

She looked at me dazedly. “I’ll see--I’ll see,” she said, and went to
her own part of the house.

A week passed. Frascatoni sailed for home, sending by her his polite
regrets at not having seen me before his departure. I waited,
confident. I knew she had a definite goal at last, and, therefore,
a definite purpose. Aside from the danger of frightening her back
by showing my own eagerness there was the matter of property. I was
willing to pay a good round price for freedom. I have always hated
money wrangles; I had never had one with her, and I did not purpose to
have. On the other hand, that is, on her side, she would have given me
short shrift had it not been that she wished a slice of my fortune--and
a generous slice--to add to her own. I’ve not a doubt that the fierce
social campaign she put me through that winter was not so much for her
own pleasure, though she delighted in it, as for goading me to demand
a divorce, and, so, enable her to ease her conscience and to drive a
better bargain.

My seeming indifference, combined with her now trembling eagerness to
be free and away, soon forced her hand. The break came on a Sunday
afternoon. Life is so inartistic--that is, from the standpoint of the
cheap novelists and playwrights with their dramatic claptrap. Here is
how the grand crash was precipitated:

Said I: “Well, I’m off for a few weeks’ fishing.”

“You’re not starting now?” said she.

“Day after to-morrow,” said I.

“But I’ve made several engagements for you.”

“Get a substitute,” said I. “No one will miss me.”

“How inconsiderate you are!”

“That’s pretty good--after all I’ve borne this winter.”

“You are insufferable!” cried she.

“Then--why suffer me?” said I coolly.

“If you torture me much further, I won’t,” retorted she.

“I think I’ll clear out to-night,” said I.

“With people coming to dinner to-morrow! A big dinner!”

“Yes--to-night,” said I. “I had forgotten to-morrow’s horrors.”

“If I were free!”

“That’s easy.”

“Yes--I _will_ be free!”

“I’ll send you a lawyer at eleven to-morrow morning.”

She was pale and trembling. The quarrel was a mere pretense--a pretext
so flimsy that each knew the other was not deceived by it. Her tones of
anger, my tones of abrupt and contemptuous indifference were obviously
false and forced. As I left the room I cast a furtive glance at her,
saw that her daring was so terrifying her that she could hardly keep a
plausible front of haughty anger.

It was several hours before I could get away from the house, though I
made all haste. Every moment I expected some word from her. But none
came. I sent the lawyer the following morning. I was surprised when
later in the day, by the necessary roundabout way, I learned that she
had actually consented.

She showed that she had made an exhaustive study of the subject, like
the wise campaigner she was. She thoroughly understood how to proceed;
for, she told her lawyer--the one of my lawyers whom I assigned to
her--that my coldness to her had filled her with suspicion and that she
wished detectives employed. She needed no coaching whatever; he found
her prepared on every point.

How far had matters gone between her and Frascatoni? Not so far as you
imagine; but perhaps farther than I think. Both the husband and the
world are poor judges in those affairs.

       *       *       *       *       *

I shall pass over the suit. It was commonplace throughout. There has
been much speculation as to the person named by my wife in the sealed
papers. I can truthfully say that I know as little about that person
as does the public. It is usually so, I believe, in these arranged
suits. I did not appear at any of the hearings, all of them held
secretly. Nor did Edna appear, though I believe that, to comply with
the forms of law, she made some sort of deposition in the presence
of the lawyers for both sides. It so happened that the first and
only public step--the judge’s ordering of the decree of divorce--was
published on the same day with the news of a big prize fight, a
sensational murder, and a terrific earthquake. So, we got off with
little public attention. At the time the law provided that a decree
should not become valid for six months. We were nominally free; but
actually neither could marry again for six months and meanwhile either
of us could reopen the case--and she could by merely requesting put an
end to it and restore her status as my wife. So, I was free--unless
Edna should change her mind sometime within the six months.

Edna was in London and I in Paris when the news came. Curiously enough,
as I stood in the doorway of the Ritz restaurant, that evening, looking
about for a table where I could dine alone, in came Prince Frascatoni
with another Italian whose name I cannot recall. I bowed to Frascatoni.
He said:

“You are alone, sir?”

“Unluckily, yes,” replied I.

He introduced his companion and suggested that we three dine at the
same table. “Why not share our dinner?” said he. “I can easily change
my order. Perhaps you will go with us afterwards to some amusing little
plays in a Montmartre theater?”

I accepted the courteous invitation. The situation appealed to my
sense of humor. Also I knew that Edna--toward whom I now felt most
kindly--would be delighted to read in the papers: “Prince Frascatoni
had as his guest at dinner last night Mr. Godfrey Loring.” It would
put an immediate stop to any tendency to gossip. As the prince did not
speak of my former wife I assumed that he had heard the news.

When we were separating I said: “You will dine with me to-morrow night?”

“Unfortunately I’m leaving town in the morning,” said he.

I thought I could guess which way he was journeying. With perhaps a
twinkle in my eyes, I said: “So soon? Well--thank you, and good-by--and
good luck.”

I thought I saw a sardonic smile flit over his face. He probably
imagined I was in the dark as to his maneuverings and designs and
smiled to himself as he thought, “How differently this American would
be treating me if he knew!” Do not fancy, because Edna had no charm
for me, I thought it strange she should have charm for other men.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I appreciated her attractive
points perhaps more than any other man possibly could. Also, I
appreciated--and still appreciate--that another man would not be so
peculiarly annoyed by her lack of any sense of humor as I was. Indeed,
had not circumstances forced me into the acutely critical mood toward
her, I doubt not I could have continued to bear with that lack, though
it made conversation with her all but impossible and precipitated
quarrels without number.

Beyond question the strongest and most enduring hold a man can get
upon a woman or a woman upon a man is the physical. We--even the least
intellectual of us--are something more than physical; but the physical
must be contented first, and must remain contented, because we are
first of all physical. The physical is the fundamental; but it takes
more than foundations to make a house. And a marriage such as ours was
could not endure. Each of us had but the one charm for the other. It
wore itself out like a fire that is not supplied with fuel.

If I had not fallen in love with another woman, there might have
remained a feeling for Edna that would have made me jealous, perhaps
domineering toward her. As it was, I viewed her calmly; when I said
“good luck” to Frascatoni, I meant it. I hoped he would make Edna
happy, for, I wished her well.

Through Armitage I had provided myself with Mary Kirkwood’s address--an
apartment overlooking the Parc Monceau which she and Neva Armstrong had
taken for the spring months. That very afternoon I went to leave cards.
As I feared she was not at home. “But,” said Mrs. Armstrong, “you may
find her walking in the park with Hartley Beechman.”

“Oh, is he here?” said I.

“Naturally,” replied she.

You may picture me as suddenly dashed down by this word whose meaning
there was no mistaking. If so, you have discovered little about me in
these pages. Life had made me a competent judge of the situation that
is really hopeless, the situation where to struggle is folly, and that
situation which seems hopeless to the small of earth, accustomed to
defeat in their desires, but seems only difficult to the other sort of
human beings.

“He has taken a studio over in the Latin quarter,” continued Mrs.
Armstrong. “We are all going back together in July.”

Mrs. Armstrong is an attractive woman--singularly so for one who
is obviously wholly absorbed in her husband. She has the sort of
personality her paintings prepare you to expect. But I had difficulty
in concealing my impatience to get away. I strolled several times
through the park, which is not large, before I finally came upon Mary
and Beechman seated in one of the less-frequented paths. As I was
moving directly toward them, both saw me at the same instant. Her
welcoming smile was radiant. I did not notice his, but I assume it was
more reserved.

Never had I seen her looking so well. You may say what you please,
but an American woman who knows how to dress, in touch with a French
dressmaker who is rather artist than dressmaker, is the supreme
combination for æsthetic beauty. Mrs. Kirkwood, of the ivory skin and
the coal-black hair, was a thrilling sight to see in her white dress
and big black hat, with that background of fresh spring foliage and
late afternoon light. Her eyes and her smile, I noted for the first
time, had somewhat the same quality as Frascatoni’s--the weary eyes,
the slow sweet smile.

“Mr. Loring!” she cried, rising and extending her hand impulsively. “I
thought I was never to see you again.”

I hid my emotion and greeted her, then Beechman, in my habitual manner
which, they tell me, is the reverse of effusive. I suppose, when I am
deeply moved, its lack of cordiality becomes even more pronounced.
After a few minutes of the talk necessary among acquaintances who have
not met in a long time Beechman rose.

“You and Beechman will dine with me, I hope?” I said. “Mrs. Armstrong
says she will go if you can.”

It was arranged and, as the day was warm, d’Armenonville was fixed
upon as the place. “Until half-past eight,” said Beechman as he left.
Mary and I sat silent watching him walk away. A superb figure of
young manhood, supremely fortunate in that his body was an adequate
expression of a strong and simple nature.

As he passed from view at the turn of the walk I transferred my gaze to
her. Her eyes slowly lowered, and a faint flush came into her cheeks.
Said I:

“You saw the news--about me?”

“Hartley and I were talking of it as you appeared.”

“You were not surprised?”

“Yes--and no,” replied she, with constraint and some confusion. “A year
or so ago I--people thought--you and she had--had drifted apart. Then
it looked as though you had come together again. It seemed the natural
thing. She is beautiful and has so much charm.”

“She was unhappy in America. She wished to be free.”

Mary looked at me reflectively. “You are not--inconsolable, I see,”
said she with a smile of faint raillery. “My brother has often told me
about you--how indifferent you are to women. Perhaps that is why you
are attractive to them.”

“Am I?” said I. “I did not know it.”

“You are terribly impersonal,” she went on laughingly. “Last summer
I--well, I was not--that is, not exactly--trying to flirt with
you. But your absolute unconsciousness of me as a woman was often
very--baffling.”

I laughed. “You thought that?”

“How could I help seeing it? Why, you treated me precisely as if I were
another man. Not that I didn’t like it, on the whole. A woman gets
tired of being always on guard.” She smiled at herself. “That sounds
horribly conceited. But you know what I mean. The men never lose a
chance to practice. Then, too--well, if a woman has the reputation of
being rich she need not flatter herself that it is her charms that do
all the drawing.”

“That’s the supreme curse of money--it all but cuts one off from love
and friendship. Fortunately it, to a great extent, takes the place of
them.”

“I don’t like to hear you say that,” said she.

“How many poor people get love and friendship?” replied I. “Isn’t
it the truth that there is little--very, very little--real love
or friendship in the world? All I meant was that money, and the
independence and comfort and the counterfeit of affection it brings,
are better than nothing at all.”

“Oh, I see,” said she. “You are so sensible--and you don’t cant. That
was why I liked to talk with you. At first I thought you cynical and
hard. That’s the first impression plain good sense makes. We are used
to hearing only shallow sentimentality.”

“The unending flapdoodle,” said I.

“Flapdoodle,” agreed she. “Then--I began to discover that you were
anything but hard--that you looked at people as they are, and liked
them for themselves, not for what they pretended to be. I was beginning
to trust you--to venture timidly in the direction of being my natural
self--when you left.”

“Well--here I am again,” said I. “And we start in afresh.”

She smiled with embarrassment. “Yes,” she said hesitatingly. “But the
circumstances have changed somewhat.”

I know full well now what I should have said. I should have replied,
“Yes--we are both almost free--but soon will be altogether free--I
in six months, you as soon as you break your engagement.” That would
have been bold and intelligent--for it is always intelligent to make
the issue clear at the earliest possible moment. But I did not speak.
I remained silent. Why? Because as I was talking with her I was
realizing that I had been deceiving myself in a curious fashion. I had
been so concentratedly in love with her-- Gentle reader, I see the
mocking smile on your shallowly sentimental face. You are ridiculing
a love that could have such restraint as mine--that could bear with
Edna, could wait, could refrain from any of the familiar much-admired
impetuosities and follies. You cannot understand. In this day when men
no longer regard or feel their responsibilities in taking a more or
less helpless woman to wife, your sense of the decencies is utterly
corrupted. But let me say that no matter how ardently and romantically
a man may conduct himself, a woman would do well to take care how she
trusts him if he has a bad or even a doubtful record as to his way of
meeting his responsibilities of whatever sort. That kind of love may
“listen good,” but it does not “live good.” However--as I was about
to say when your smile interrupted me, my all-absorbing love for Mary
Kirkwood had misled me into assuming, with no reason whatsoever, that
she understood all, that she knew I was eager to come to her, and would
come as soon as I could. You will say this was absurd. Granted. But
is not a man in love always absurd? You will say it was egotistical.
Granted. But is not a man in love always egotistical? It is not the
realities but the delusions that keep us going; and in those long
months of waiting, of hoping often against hope, I had to have a
delusion to keep me going. But now, her friendly, simply friendly, way
of talking to me made me see that I had her yet to win, that I could
not speak out directly as I had planned. You, who probably know women
well, may say that this was a mistake. Perhaps. Nevertheless _I_ could
not have done otherwise.

You will say that women do not know their own minds, but have to be
told. I admit it. You will say my silence was timidity. I admit it.
I could not talk of love to a woman until I was sure she wished to
hear. I had the timidity of the man to whom woman and love are serious
matters; the timidity unknown to the man who makes love to every
passable female at whom he has a chance; the timidity which all women
profess to approve, but which, I more than suspect, appeals only to
the jaded palate of the woman who has long made love and passion her
profession.

As Beechman was busy with a novel I had everything my own way without
strategy during those following days. There are a thousand attractive
places to go in and near Paris, and I was resourceful in contriving
excursions for the days when there was no chance of seeing only her.
Almost every day the London papers or the Paris _Herald_ printed
something about Edna and the brilliant season she was having in London;
often not far away from her name in a list of guests was the name of
Prince Frascatoni. My own activities, more Bohemian as was my taste
and the taste of my friends--and I may say the taste of civilized and
intelligent Paris--my activities were not recorded in the papers. I
fancied they were unobserved. I was soon to be undeceived.

I wonder who the people are that write anonymous letters--and give
anonymous “tips” to society journals? Every once in a while by
mischance--often by my having made a remark that was misinterpreted
into something malicious or low, utterly foreign to my real meaning--I
have had some fellow-being suddenly unveil a noisome corner in his or
her soul for confidently awaited sympathy; and I have almost literally
shrunk back in my horror at the cesspool of coarseness, or at the
vicious envy. Have you had that experience? No doubt scattered among
us ordinary folk, neither particularly good nor particularly bad,
well rather than ill-disposed and amiable, if not too severely tried
or tempted--no doubt, scattered among us there are not a few of these
swine souls or snake souls, hid beneath a pleasant smile and fine
raiment. And these are they who give off the foulness of the anonymous
letters and the anonymous tip.

In one of the minor London society papers appeared this paragraph which
I am sure I quote word for word:

  “American Paris is much amused these beautifully fine spring days
  with the ardent love-making of a recently divorced railway ‘baron.’
  The lady is herself a divorcee of several years standing and is
  supposed to be engaged to a famous young literary man who is all
  unaware of what is going on.”

I know of five copies of this journal that were mailed with the
paragraph marked. The five were received by Edna, Margot, myself, Mary
Kirkwood, and Hartley Beechman. I have often mentally gone through the
list of my acquaintances in search of the person who was responsible
for this thing. I have some extremely unpleasant characters in that
list. But I have never been able to suspect who did it. Not improbably
the guilty person is some one in other respects not a bad sort--for
almost any given cut from that vast universal, human nature, contains
something of everything.

I had an engagement with Mary Kirkwood to walk in the Bois and have tea
the afternoon of the day this paragraph reached me. When I arrived at
her apartment she came down ready to go. Her costume was so lovely and
I so delighted in her that I did not immediately note the heavy circles
round her eyes nor the drawn expression of her mouth. I did not dream
that she knew of the paragraph. I had read it and had dismissed it
from my mind. The anonymous letter and the anonymous newspaper attack
were old familiar stories to me, as they are to every man who attains
distinction in active life. But as we drove toward the Bois I happened
to catch a glimpse of her by way of the mirror in the frame of the
taxi. I saw the evidence of suffering--and the wistful, weary look in
her beautiful eyes.

“What is it?” said I. “You have had bad news?”

“Yes,” replied she.

“Can I help?”

“Don’t let’s talk of it now,” said she. “Wait until we are in the
woods.”

Soon after we passed the entrance gates we descended and rambled away
over the not too even ground, along the indistinct paths under the
fascinating little trees. It was a gorgeous, perfumed May day. You
know the Bois--how lovely it is, how artfully it mingles the wild and
the civilized, suggesting nature as a laughing nymph with tresses half
bound, half free, with graceful young form half clad, half nude. We
rambled on and on, and after half an hour seated ourselves where there
were leaves and the slim graceful trunks on every side and the sound of
falling water like the musical voice of the sunbeams.

Mary drew a long sigh. “I feel better,” she said.

I looked at her. “You _are_ better. You have shaken it off.”

She met my gaze. “This is the last time,” she said. She looked away,
repeated softly, thoughtfully, “the last time.”

“The last time?”

“We are not going to see each other any more. It is being
misunderstood.”

I glanced quickly at her, and I knew she had read the paragraph. “That
miserable scandal sheet!” said I. “No one sees it--and if they did why
should we notice anything so ridiculous?”

She did not answer immediately. After a while she said: “Perhaps I
ought not to say it, but--Hartley is sensitive. A copy of the paper got
to him.”

“One to me. One to you. One to him.”

“No matter,” said she. “The mischief is done.”

“You do not give up a friend lightly,” rejoined I. The time to speak
was at hand; I welcomed it.

“_He_ has asked me to give you up,” said she simply. “And I shall do
it.”

“But he has no right to ask such a thing,” protested I.

“Yes--he has. He and I are engaged--you knew that?”

“I imagined there was some sort of an engagement,” said I, still
waiting for the right opening.

“There is only one sort of engagement possible with me,” replied she,
with a certain gentle reproach.

“I know that,” said I. “But I remember the talk we had on the yacht.”

A flush overspread her paleness for a moment. Then she rose from the
little rustic iron chair. “We must go,” said she.

“Wait,” said I. And I made a tactless, a stupid beginning: “You can’t
deny that you do not love him.”

She turned coldly away and walked on, I following. “I think I’ll not
stop for tea,” she said. “Will you hail the first taxi we meet?”

“You are offended--Mary?” I said. What a blundering fool love does make
of a man!--unless he makes a fool of it.

She shook her head. “No--not offended. But when a subject comes up
about which we may not talk there is nothing to do but drop it.”

In my desperation I reached for the right chord and struck it. “Do you
know,” said I, “why I left the yacht abruptly?”

She halted, gave me a swift, frightened glance. The color flooded her
face, then fled.

“Yes--that was why,” said I. “And--I’ve come as soon as I could.”

“Oh, why, why didn’t you _tell_ me?” cried she. Then, before I could
answer, “I don’t mean that. I understand.” Then, with a wild look
around, “_What_ am I saying?”

“I’ve come for you, Mary,” I went on. “And you are not going to rush
into folly a second time--a greater folly. For--you do not love
him--and you will care for me. You are right, we can’t discuss him--you
and him. But we can, and must, discuss you and me.”

“I shall not see you again,” said she, looking at me with tranquil eyes
that would have daunted me had I not known her so well, understood her
so well--which is only another way of saying, had I not loved her so
well.

“Why have you been seeing me day after day, when you knew that I loved
you----”

“I did not know it,” replied she. “I did not think I could move you in
the least--beyond a friendly liking.”

An inflection in her voice made me suddenly realize. “You came because
it made you happy to come!” I cried triumphantly. I caught her hand.
“You do care, Mary!”

She drew her hand away resolutely. “I shall keep my promise,” she said
coldly. “I wish to hear no more.”

“You will not keep your promise. If necessary I’ll go to him and tell
him--and he’ll release you.”

She gave me a look that withered. “You--do a cowardly thing like that!”

“No,” said I. “But _you_ will ask him to release you. You have no right
to marry him. And I--I love you--and must live my life with you, or--I
can think of nothing more futile and empty than life without you. And
your life--would it not be futile and empty, Mary, if you tried to live
it without me, when we might have been together? Together!--you and I!
Mary, my love!”

“Why do you say those things, Godfrey?” she cried passionately. “To
make me wretched? To make it harder for me to do what I must?”

“To make it impossible for you to do what you must not. Marry a man
you don’t love--marry him when you love another! You’d be doing him
the worst possible injury. No matter how much he loves you, he can
recover from the blow of losing you. But the day to day horror of such
a loveless marriage would destroy you both. He is a sensitive man. He
would feel it, in spite of all your efforts to pretend. You--pretend!
You could not do it.”

“After what has passed between him and me--the promises we’ve
exchanged--the plans we’ve made--there is no going back! I don’t wish
to go back. I----”

“Mary--I love you!” I cried. “I love you--and you love me. That’s the
wall between you and any other man, between me and any other woman.”

She had waved to a passing taxi. It swept into the edge of the drive.
She opened the door. “You are not coming with me,” she said. “And I
shall not see you again.”

I laid my hand on her arm and forced her to meet my gaze. “You are
hysterical now,” I said. “But you will be calm, and----”

She gave me a cold smile--it would have deceived those who do not
understand the temperaments that can conceal themselves. “I am
perfectly calm, I assure you,” said she.

“As you were the first time we ever met,” said I. “You’ve no
right to marry any man but me, Mary. If you did you’d be wronging
yourself--me--him most of all. That is the truth, and you will see it.”

She dragged her arm away, burst into violent sobs, sank upon the seat
of the cab. I hesitated--obeyed a right instinct, closed the door,
gave her address to the ignoring chauffeur, stood watching the cab
whisk away. I was shaking from head to foot. But I had no fear for the
outcome. I knew that I had won--that _we_ had won.




XI


Rossiter--I believe I have mentioned the name of my new secretary--was
lying in wait for me at the hotel entrance. He read me a telegram from
Margot: Edna was ill, was not expected to live, begged me to come at
once.

I wrote to Mary Kirkwood--a brief repetition of what I had said to
her--“of what I know both your intelligence and your heart are saying
to you, dear.” I told her that Edna was desperately ill and had sent
for me, and that I should be back as soon as I could get away. I went
on to say many things such as a man deeply in love always says. No
doubt it was a commonplace letter, as sincere love letters are apt
to be; but because it was from my heart I felt that, for all the
shortcomings, it would go to her heart. I admit I am not a facile
love-maker. I have had little practice. And I suspect, those who are
facile at love-making have got their facility by making love speeches
so often when they were not in earnest that they cannot but have lost
all capacity to be in earnest.

Toward noon the next day Rossiter and I and my valet were set down at
the little station of Kesson Wells, half an hour out from London in
Surrey. We were in the midst of about as beautiful a country us I have
seen. I am a narrow enough patriot not to take the most favorable
view of things foreign. But I must admit that no other countryside can
give one the sense of sheer loveliness that one gets in certain parts
of England. I am glad we have nothing like it at home; for to have it
means rainy weather most of the time, and serf labor, and landlord
selfishly indifferent to the misery of the poor human creatures he
works and robs. Still, I try to forget the way it came in the joy of
the thing itself--as you, gentle reader, forget the suffering and death
of the animals that make the artistic and delicious course dinners you
eat.

We were received with much ceremony at the station. My money was
being exercised by those who knew how to do it. After a drive between
perfumed and blossoming hedgerows and over a road as smooth and clean
as a floor we came to Garton Hall, the place my son-in-law had leased
until his new house should be ready. It was a modern house, as I
noted with relief when we were still afar off, and while not large,
was a most satisfactory embodiment of that often misused and often
misunderstood word comfort. To live in the luxurious yet comfortable
comfort obtainable in England only--indoors, in its steam-heated or
Americanized portions--one must have English servants. I am glad we do
not breed English servants in America; I am glad that when they are
imported they soon cease to be the models of menial perfection they
are at home. But when I am in England I revel in the English servant.
To find him at his best you must see him serving in the establishment
of a great noble. And my son-in-law was that; and the establishment
over which Margot presided, but with which she was not permitted to
interfere in the smallest detail because of her utter ignorance of all
the “vulgarities” of life, as became a true lady of our quaint American
brand--the establishment was a combination of the best of the city with
the best of the country, a skillful mingling of the most attractive
features of home, club, and hotel.

My first question at the station had, of course, been as to Mrs.
Loring. I was assured that her ladyship’s mother was somewhat better,
but still awaiting the dangerous crisis of the fever. Margot, not a
whit less girlish for her maternity, met me in the doorway, and had the
nurse there with the boy--the Earl of Gorse. They said he looked like
me--and he did, though I do not believe they thought so. Why should
they say it? I was still a young man and might marry again. I fancy
the same prudent instinct prompted them to give him Godfrey as one of
his four or five names. Why do I think they did not believe he looked
like me? Because all of them were ashamed of everything American. In
the frequent quarrels between Margot and Hugh, he never failed to use
the shaft that would surely pierce the heart of her vanity and rankle
there--her low American birth, in such ghastly and grotesque contrast
to the illustrious descent of her husband. She had an acid tongue
when it came to quarreling; she could hurl taunts about his shifts
to keep up appearances before he met her that made ugly and painful
marks on his hide. She had discovered, probably by gossiping with some
traitor servant, that he had been flouted by a rich English girl for
a chauffeur--and you may be sure she put it to good use. But nothing
she could say made him quiver as she quivered when he opened out on the
subject of those “filthy bounders in the States.”

Do not imagine, gentle reader, that my daughter was unhappily married.
She would not have exchanged places with anyone but the wife of a duke;
and Hugh--well, he needed the money. Nor should you think that they
lived unhappily together. They saw little of each other alone; and in
public they were as smiling and amiable with each other as--perhaps as
you and your husband.

A fine baby was the Earl of Gorse--one who in a decent environment
would have grown up a sensible, useful person. But hardly, I feared,
when he was already living in his own separate apartment, with his
name--“The Earl of Gorse”--on a card beside the door, and with all the
servants, including his mother, treating him as if he were of superior
clay. This when he barely had his sight. They say a baby learns the
utility of bawling at about three days old; I should say the germ of
snobbishness would get to work very soon thereafter.

You are waiting to hear what was the matter with Edna. No, it was not
a fake illness to draw me within reach for some further trimming.
She had indeed fallen dangerously ill--did not expect to live when
Margot telegraphed me. It was an intestinal fever brought on by the
excesses of the London season. I wonder when the biographers, poets,
playwrights, novelists, and other gentry who give us the annals of the
race will catch up with the progress of science? How long will it be
before they stop telling us of germ and filth diseases as if they were
the romantic physical expressions of soul states? There was a time when
such blunders were excusable. Now, science has shown us that they are
so much twaddle. So, gentle reader, I cannot gratify your taste for
humbug and moonshine by telling you that Edna was stricken of remorse
or of overjoy or of secret grief or of any other soul state whatever.
The doctor bosh was, of course, nervous exhaustion. It always is if
the patient is above the working class. The truth was that she fell
ill, even as you and I. She ate and drank too much, both at and between
meals, and did not take proper care of herself in any way. She wore
dresses that were nearly nothing in cold carriages and draughty rooms,
when she was laden with undigested food. Vulgar--isn’t it? Revolting
for me to speak thus of a lady? But I am trying to tell the truth,
gentle reader, not to increase your stock of slop and lies which you
call “culture.” And if a lady will put herself in such a condition,
why should it not be spoken of? Why go on lying about these things,
and encouraging people to attribute to sensitive nerves and souls the
consequences of gluttony, ignorance, and neglect?

I am not criticising Edna for getting into such an internal physical
state that a pestilence began to rage within her. The most intelligent
of us is only too foolish and ignorant in these matters, thanks to
stupid education from childhood up. And she has the added excuse of
having been exposed to the temptations of a London season. She fell; it
is hardly in human nature not to fall.

You have been through a London season? It is a mad chase from food to
food. You rise and hastily swallow a heavy English breakfast. You ride
in the Row a while, ride toward a lunch table--and an English lunch,
especially in the season, means a bigger dinner than any Frenchman or
other highly civilized person ever willingly sat down to. Hardly is
this long lunch over before it is time for tea--which means not merely
tea, but toast, and sandwiches, and hot muffins, and many kinds of
heavy cake, and often fruit or jam. Tea is to give you an appetite for
the dinner that follows--and what a dinner! One rich, heavy course upon
another, with drenchings of wine and a poisonous liqueur afterward.
You sit about until this has settled a bit, then--on to supper! Not so
formidable a meal as the dinner, but still what any reasonable person
would call a square meal. Then to bed? By no means. On to a ball, where
you eat and drink in desultory fashion until late supper is served.
You roll heavily home to sleep. But hardly have your eyes closed when
you are roused to eat again. It is breakfast time, and another day of
stuffing has begun.

Starvation, they tell me, is one of the regular causes of death in
London. But that is in the East End. In the West End--and you, gentle
reader, are interested only in that section--death, I’ll wager,
reaps twenty from overfeeding to one he gets in the East End through
underfeeding. Famine is a dreadful thing. But how characteristic of the
shallowness of human beings it is that you can make a poetic horror
out of famine, when no one would listen while you told the far more
horrible truth of the frightful ravages of overfeeding, chief cause
of all the diseases that torture and twist the human body, aging and
killing it prematurely.

Edna had been for many years most cautiously careful of her health. She
loved her youth, her beautiful body. She fought against her natural
fondness for food and wine. I fancy that, for this first season after
freedom she relaxed her rules, and turned herself loose to “celebrate.”
I know she must have had something of this sort in mind, because her
French maid--I could not talk with the Italian--told me that madame had
arranged an elaborate programme of “cures” on the Continent after the
season. “And they were to be serious cures,” said she.

Her illness took such a course of ups and downs, with death always
hovering, that it was impossible for me to leave. I wrote Mary; I got
no reply. I sent Rossiter to Paris; he reported that Mrs. Armstrong
and Mrs. Kirkwood had left for the country, but that he could get no
address.

You probably picture me as scarcely able to restrain myself from acting
like a madman. How little you know of me! Do you think I could have
achieved my solid success before I reached forty-five years if I had
been one of the little people who fret and fume against the inevitable?
All men who amount to anything are violent men. Jesus, the model of
serenity and patience, scourged the money changers from the temple.
Washington, one more great exemplar of the majesty of repose, swore
like a lunatic at the battle of Monmouth. These great ones simply
had in the highest form the virtues that make for success in every
department of leadership. Certainly, I am a violent man; but I have
rarely been foolish enough to go crazy to no purpose.

What could I do but wait? And over that beautiful, quiet country place
floated the black cormorant, with wings outspread and hollow, burning
eyes bent eagerly downward. I waited, not in fury, but oppressed by a
deep melancholy. For the first time in my life I was thinking seriously
of death. To any man no decisive event of life is so absolutely
unimportant as his own death. I never have wasted, and never shall
waste, a moment in thinking of my death. It may concern others, but how
does it concern me? When it comes I shall not be there. The death of
another, however--that is cause for reflection, for sadness. I knew,
as did no one else, how intensely Edna loved life, how in her own way
of strain and struggle she enjoyed it. And to me it was pitiful, this
spectacle of her sudden arrest, her sudden mortal peril, as she was
about to achieve the summit of her ambition.

I wondered as to Frascatoni. I pictured him waiting, with those
tranquil, weary eyes already looking about for another means to his aim
of large fortune should this means fail. There I misjudged him; for,
one day as I stood in a balcony overlooking the drive he came rushing
up in a motor, and my first glance at his haggard face told me that
he loved her. In a way it is small compliment to a woman to be loved
by the fortune-hunting sort of man; for, he does not release himself
until he has the permit of basest self-interest. But Frascatoni,
having released himself, had fallen in love with all the frenzy of his
super-refined, passionately imaginative nature.

After a few minutes he drove away. I do not know what
occurred--naturally, they would not speak of his call and I did not ask
questions. I can imagine, however. She seemed better that day, and he
must have gone away reassured. He was sending, every morning, enormous
quantities of flowers; such skill and taste showed in the arranging
that I am sure it was not the usual meaningless performance of rich
people, who are always trying to make money-spending serve instead of
thoughtful and delicate attention.

Nearly a month dragged along before she was able to see me. As I have
explained, her beauty was not dependent upon evanescent charms of
contour and coloring, but was securely founded in the structure of her
head and face and body. So, I saw lying weakly in the bed an emaciated
but lovely Edna. Instantly, on sight of her, there came flooding back
to me the memory of the birth of Margot, our first child--how Edna
had looked when they let me go into the humble, almost squalid little
bedroom in the flat of which we were so vain. She was looking exactly
so in this bed of state, in this magnificent room with the evidences of
wealth and rank and fashion on every side. She smiled faintly; one of
the slim weak hands lying upon the cream-white silk coverlet moved. I
bent and kissed it.

“Thank you for being here,” she murmured, tears in her eyes. Her lips
could scarcely utter the words.

“You must not speak, your ladyship,” warned the nurse. To flatter
Americans and to give themselves the comfortable feeling of gratified
snobbishness English servants address us--or rather our women--as if we
had titles.

“You are to get well rapidly now,” I said.

“You’ll stay until I can talk to you?”

“Yes,” I said--what else could I say?

They motioned me away. I had committed myself to several weeks more of
that futile monotony--and I no longer had the restraint of the sense
that she might die at any moment.

Even had I been willing to break my promise I could not have done so;
for she would have me in every morning and every afternoon to look at
me, and they told me that if I were not there to reassure her, it would
undoubtedly cause a change for the worse. I stayed on and wrote to Mary
Kirkwood--all the time with the fear that my letters were not reaching
her, but also with the unshakable conviction that she was mine. You
smile at this as proof of my colossal vanity. Well, your smile convicts
you of never having loved. The essence of love is congeniality.
Appetite is the essence of passion--which, therefore, has no sense of
or especial desire for mutuality. Passion is as common as any other
physical appetite. Love is as rare as are souls generous enough to
experience or to inspire it. The essence of love is congeniality--and
I _knew_ there was a sympathy and understanding between me and Mary
Kirkwood that made us lovers for all time.

There came a day--how it burned into my memory!--when Edna was well
enough to talk with me. Several days before and I saw that it was not
far away, and I awaited it with fierce impatience; she would tell me
why she had sent for me and I should be free to go. It was one of those
soft gray days of alternating rain and sun that are the specialty of
the British climate. Edna, with flowers everywhere in her sitting room,
was half reclining in an invalid chair, all manner of rich, delicate
silk and lace assistants to comfort, luxury and beauty adorning her
or forming background for her lovely face and head. I do not think
there is a detail of the room or of her appearance that I could not
reproduce, though at the time I was unaware of anything but her
voice--her words.

I entered, seated myself in the broad low window opposite her. She
looked at me a long time, a strange soft expression in her weary
eyes--an expression that disquieted me. At last she said:

“It is so good to be getting well.”

“And you are getting well rapidly,” I said. “You have a wonderful
constitution.”

“You are glad I am better, Godfrey?”

I laughed. “What a foolish question.”

“I didn’t know,” said she. “I feared-- I have acted _so_ badly toward
you.”

“No indeed,” replied I. “Don’t worry about those things. I hope you
feel as friendly toward me as I do toward you.”

“But you have always been good to me--even when I haven’t deserved it.”

This was most puzzling. Said I vaguely, “I guess we’ve both done the
best we could. Do you want to tell me to-day why you sent for me? Or
don’t you feel strong enough?”

“Yes--I wish to tell you to-day. But--it isn’t easy to say. I’m very
proud, Godfrey--and when I’ve been in the wrong it’s hard for me to
admit.”

“Oh, come now, Edna,” said I soothingly. “Let’s not rake up the past.
It’s finished--and it has left no hard feeling--at least not in me.
Don’t think of anything but of getting well.”

She lay gazing out into the gentle rain with the sunshine glistening
upon it. A few large tears rolled down her cheeks.

“There’s nothing to be unhappy about,” said I. “You are far on the way
to health. You are as lovely as ever. And you will get everything you
want.”

“Oh, it’s so hard to tell you!” she sighed.

“Then don’t,” I urged. “If there’s anything I can do for you, let me
know. I’ll be glad to do it.”

She covered her eyes with her thin, beautiful hand. “Love me--love me,
Godfrey--as you used to,” she sobbed.

I was dumbfounded. It seemed to me I could not have heard aright. I
stared at her until she lowered her hand and looked at me. Then I
hastily glanced away.

“I’m sorry for the way I’ve acted,” she went on. “I want you to take me
back. That was why I sent for you.”

I puzzled over this. Was she still out of her mind? Or was there some
other and sane--and extremely practical--reason behind this strange
turn?--for I could not for an instant imagine she was in sane and
sober earnest.

“You don’t believe me!” she cried. “No wonder. But it’s so, Godfrey. I
want your love--I want _you_. Won’t you--won’t you--take me--back?”

Her voice sounded pitifully sick and weak; and when I looked at her I
could not but see that to refuse to humor her would be to endanger her
life. I said:

“Edna, this is an utter surprise for me--about the last thing I
expected. I can’t grasp it--so suddenly. I--I-- Do you really mean it?”

“I really mean it, dear,” she said earnestly.

It was evident she, in her secret heart, was taking it for granted
that her news would be welcome to me; that all she had to do in order
to win me back as her devoted, enslaved husband was to announce her
willingness to come. I have often marveled at this peculiar vanity of
women--their deep, abiding belief in the power of their own charms--the
all but impossibility of a man’s ever convincing a woman that he does
not love her. They say hope is the hardiest of human emotions. I doubt
it. I think vanity, especially the sex vanity both of men and of women,
is far and away hardier than even hope. I saw she was assuming I would
be delighted, deeply grateful, ardently responsive as soon as I should
grasp the dazzling glad tidings. And she so ill and weak that I dared
not speak at all frankly to her.

She stretched out her hand for mine. I slowly took it, held it
listlessly. I did not know what to do--what to say.

“It is so good to have you again, dear,” she murmured. “Aren’t you
going to kiss me?”

“I don’t understand,” I muttered, dropping her hand and standing up to
gaze out over the gardens. “I am stunned.”

“I’ve been cruel to you,” she said with gracious humility. “Can you
ever forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. But--” There I halted.

“I’ll make up for it, dear,” she went on, sweetly gracious. “I’m not
surprised that you are stunned. You didn’t realize how I loved you. I
didn’t myself. I couldn’t believe at first when I found out.”

“You are not strong enough to talk about these things to-day,” said I.
“We’ll wait until----”

She interrupted my hesitating speech with a laugh full of gentle
gayety. “You’re quite wrong,” said she. “I’m not out of my mind. I mean
it, dear--and more. Oh, we shall be _so_ happy! You’ve been far too
modest about yourself. You don’t appreciate what a fascinating man you
are.”

I’m sure I reddened violently. I sat, rose, sat again. “You’ve given me
the shock of my life,” said I, with an embarrassed laugh. “I’ll have to
think this over.” I rose.

“No--don’t go yet,” said she, with the graciousness of a princess
granting a longer interview. “Let me tell you all about it.”

“Not to-day,” I pleaded. “You must be careful. You mustn’t overtax
yourself.”

“Oh, but _this_ does me good. Sit near me, Godfrey, and hold my hand
while I tell you.”

I felt like one closeted with an insane person and compelled to humor
his caprices. I obediently shifted to a seat near her and took her hand.

“You could never guess how it came about,” she went on.

As she was looking inquiringly at me, I said, “No.”

“It was very strange. For the first few weeks after the divorce--no,
not the divorce--but the decree--for it isn’t a divorce yet, thank
God!--for the first weeks I was happy--or thought I was. I went early
and late. I had never been so gay. I acted like a girl just launched in
society. I was in ecstasies over my freedom. Do you mind, dear? Does it
hurt you for me to say these things?”

“No--no,” said I. “Go on.”

“How queer you are! But I suppose you are dazed, poor dear. Never mind!
When I am better--stronger, I’ll soon convince you.” And she nodded and
smiled at me. “Poor dear! How cruel I have been!”

“Yes--we’ll wait till you are stronger,” stammered I, making a move to
rise.

“But I must tell you how it came about,” she said, detaining me. “All
of a sudden--when I was at my gayest--I began to feel strange and
sad--to dislike everyone and everything about me.”

“It was the illness working in you,” said I.

She gave the smile of gentle tolerance with which she received my
attempts at humor when she was in an amiable mood. “How like you that
is! But it wasn’t the illness at all. It was my inmost heart striving
to force open its door and reveal its secret. Do be a little romantic,
this once, dear.”

“Well--and then?”

“Then--a paragraph in one of the society papers. Some one sent it to me
anonymously. Was it you, dear?--and did you do it to make me jealous?”

She spoke as one who suddenly sees straight into a secret. “I didn’t,”
said I hastily. “It never entered my head to think you cared a rap
about me.”

“Now, don’t tease me, Godfrey, dear. You must have been making all
sorts of plans to win me back.”

“You read the item in the paper?” suggested I.

“Oh, yes--I must finish. I read it. And at first I shrugged my
shoulders and said to myself I didn’t in the least care. But I couldn’t
get the thing out of mind. Godfrey, I had always been too sure of you.
You never seemed to be a single tiny bit interested in other women. So
the thought of you and another woman had not once come to me. That item
put it there. You--_my_ husband--_my_ Godfrey and another woman! It was
like touching a match to powder. I went mad. I----”

She was sitting up, her eyes wild, her voice trembling. “You must not
excite yourself, Edna,” I said.

“I went mad,” she repeated, so interested in her emotions that she
probably did not hear me. “I rushed down to Margot. I fell ill. I made
her telegraph for you. Oh, how I suffered until I knew you were here.
If you hadn’t come right away I’d have cabled to my lawyer in New York
to have the divorce set aside--or whatever they do. I can have it set
aside any time up to the end of the six months, can’t I?”

“Yes,” admitted I, though her tone of positive knowledge made my reply
superfluous.

She seemed instinctively to feel a suspicion--an explanation of her
amazing about-face--that was slowly gathering in my bewildered mind.
She drew from the folds of her negligee a note and handed it to me. She
said:

“I haven’t confessed the worst I had done. Read that.”

“Never mind,” said I. “I don’t wish to know.”

“But I wish you to know,” insisted she. “There mustn’t be anything dark
between us.”

I reluctantly opened the note and read. It was from Prince
Frascatoni--not the cold bid for a break that my suspicion expected
but a passionate appeal to her not to break their engagement and throw
him over. I could by no reach of the imagination picture that calm,
weary-eyed man of the world writing those lines--which shows how ill
men understand each other where women are concerned.

“He sent me that note the day I came here,” said she. “I did not answer
it.” Her tone was supreme indifference--the peculiar cruelty of woman
toward man when she does not care.

“You were engaged to him?” said I--because I could think of nothing
else to say.

“Yes,” said she. Then with the chaste pride of the “good” woman, “But
not until after the decree was granted. He would have declared himself
in New York, but I wouldn’t permit _that_. At least, Godfrey, I never
forgot with other men that I was your wife--or let them forget it. You
believe me?”

“I’m sure of it,” said I.

She gazed dreamily into vacancy. “To think,” she mused, “that I
imagined I could marry him--_any_ man! How little a woman knows her own
heart. I always loved you. Godfrey, I don’t believe there is any such
thing as divorce--not for a good woman. When she gives herself”--in a
dreamy, musical voice, with a tender pressure of my hand--“it is for
time and for eternity.”

Never in all my life had I so welcomed anyone as I welcomed the
interrupting nurse. I felt during the whole interview that I was under
a strain; until I was in the open air and alone I did not realize how
terrific the strain. I walked--on and on, like a madman--vaulting gates
and fences, scrambling over hedges, plowing through gardens, leaping
brooks--on and on, hour after hour. What should I do? What _could_ I
do? Nothing but wait until she was out of danger, wait and study away
at this incredible, impossible freak of hers--try to fathom it, if it
was not the vagary of a diseased mind. I wished to believe it that,
but I could not. There was nothing of insanity in her manner, and from
beginning to end her story was coherent and plausible. Plausible, but
not believable; for I had no more vanity about her loving me than has
the next man when he does not want the love offered him and finds it
inconvenient to credit, and so is in the frame of mind to see calmly
and clearly.

I wandered so far that I had to hire a conveyance at some village
at which I halted toward nightfall. As soon as I was at the house I
ordered my valet to pack, and wrote Edna a note saying that neglected
business compelled me to bolt for London. “But I’ll be back,” I wrote,
at the command of human decency. “I feel that I can go, as you are
almost well.” Half an hour later I was in the train for London.

A letter, feebly scrawled, came from her the next day but one--a brief
loving note, saying that she understood and that I knew how eagerly she
was looking forward to my return--“but don’t worry, dearest, about me.
I shall soon be well, now that my conscience is clear and all is peace
and love between us. I know how you hate to write letters, but you will
telegraph me every day.”

       *       *       *       *       *

How I got through those next few weeks I cannot tell. I had no sense of
the reality of the world about me or of my own thoughts and actions.
Every once in a while--sometimes when I was talking with the men
whose company I sought, again when I was alone in bed and would start
abruptly from sleep--I pinched myself or struck myself violently to
see if I was awake. Edna’s letters were daily and long. I read them,
stared at them, felt less certain than ever of my sanity or of my being
awake. I sent her an occasional telegram, dictated to Rossiter--a vague
sentence of congratulation on her better health or something of that
kind. Soon this formality degenerated to a request to Rossiter: “And
telegraph Mrs. Loring.” Or he would say, “Shall I send Mrs. Loring a
telegram?” and I would reply, “Yes--do please.”

It was obviously necessary that I should not see her before she was
well enough to be talked to frankly. I invented excuses for staying
away until my ability in that direction gave out. Then Rossiter, best
of secretaries, divining my plight, came to the rescue. I gave him
a free hand. He went too far, created in her predisposed mind the
illusion that I was champing with impatience at the business that
persisted in keeping me away from her. I do not blame him; he took the
only possible course.

At last she was completely restored. The doctors and nurses could find
no pretext for lingering, and that in itself was proof positive of her
health and strength. She was having her meals with the family, was
attending to her correspondence, was alarmed because she was taking on
flesh so rapidly. She began offering to join me in London. When she
wrote that she was starting the next day I telegraphed her not to come;
and, after four more days of delay on various excuses, I went down. I
should have liked to postpone this interview a week or ten days. Again
I see you smiling at me, posing as madly in love with Mary Kirkwood yet
able to put off the joy of being free to go to her. But, gentle reader,
you must not forget that I had first to deal with Edna. And, from what
you have learned of her, do you think I was wise or foolish to wish to
meet her only when she could not possibly prevent candor by pleading a
remnant of invalidism?

She was charmingly dressed to receive me, rushed forward before them
all and flung her arms around my neck in a graceful, effusive fashion
she had learned on the Continent. I received the shock as calmly
as I could, noting the awkwardly concealed surprise of Margot and
Hugh. We had lunch; she did most of the talking--a gay, happy-hearted
rattling--the natural expression of a woman with not a care in the
world. And I-- In spite of myself I felt like an executioner come to
assassinate an unsuspicious and innocent victim. For the best side of
her was to the fore, and all the unpleasant traits were so thoroughly
concealed that they seemed to have been burned up in that terrible
fever. I _knew_ they were still there, but I could not _feel_ it.

When we were alone in her sitting room, she said:

“Where’s your valet and your luggage?”

“In London,” said I.

“Oh, they’re coming on a later train.”

“No,” said I, seizing this excellent opportunity. “I’m going back this
afternoon.”

She gave a cry of dismay. “Godfrey!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t it a shame!”
Then, rushing to the bell, “I’ll have my things got ready. I’ll go back
with you. You shan’t be left alone, dearest.”

I seated myself. “Don’t ring,” I said. “Wait till we’ve talked the
matter over.”

“I see you can’t really believe--even yet,” cried she laughingly. “I
must convince you.” And she rang the bell.

“When your maid comes, send her away,” said I. “Don’t order her to
pack. You can’t go with me.”

She looked at me anxiously. “How solemn you are!” she cried. “Has
something gone wrong in that business?”

“Nothing,” said I. The maid came, was sent away. Edna moved toward me,
would have sat in my lap or on the arm of my chair had I not prevented
her by rising on the pretext of lighting a cigarette.

“You are very--very--strange,” said she. Then advancing toward me and
gazing into my face, “Godfrey, there wasn’t any truth in that item--was
there?” She looked like a sweet, lovely slip of a girl, all tenderness
and sincerity.

“I’ve come to discuss our affairs--not malicious newspaper gossip,”
said I, fighting for my usual manner of good-humored raillery. “First,
tell me what is the meaning of this outburst of affection for me?
Aren’t you satisfied with the settlements?”

“Oh, Godfrey, what a cynic you are!” laughed she. Then with an air of
earnestness that certainly was convincing, she said: “Can’t you _feel_
that I love you?”

“I cannot,” replied I blandly. “On the contrary, I _know_ that you care
nothing about me. So let’s talk business as we always have.”

She did not rave and vow and swear. She did not show the least
excitement. She seated herself and, fixing upon me a look which I can
only describe as tenacious, she said:

“Whether you believe me or not, I love you. And I shall not give you
up.”

My internal agitation instantly cleared away. I am always nervous about
crossing a bridge until my foot touches it; thenceforth I am too busy
crossing to bother about myself. “Well--what do you propose?” said I.

“To be your wife,” replied she. “To show you how sorry I am for the
way I have acted, to show you by thinking only of making you happy.”

“Yes? And what will you _do_ to make me happy?”

“Look after your comfort--your home, Godfrey.”

“But you don’t know about that sort of thing,” said I. “You know only
how to make a house attractive to other people. You are far too fine
for a private housekeeper.”

“I shall learn,” said she sweetly. “Those things are not difficult.”

I smiled at this unconscious confession of incapacity to learn the most
difficult of all the arts. “You will practice on me, eh? Thank you--but
no. You wouldn’t make me comfortable. You’d only harass yourself and
deprive me of comfort--and for years. ‘Those things’ are less easy than
you imagine. You are set in your ways, I in mine.”

“You don’t realize,” protested she confidently. “You must be lonely,
Godfrey. You need companionship--sympathy. I can give it to you
now--for, I am awake at last. I know my own mind and heart.”

I shook my head. “That sounds well, but what does it _mean_? Next
door to nothing, my friend. You and I are not interested in the same
things. We’ve nothing to talk about. I don’t know the things you
know--the social, the fashionable side of life. You don’t know my side
of life--and you couldn’t and wouldn’t learn enough to interest me.
Any forced interest you might give would bore me. Pardon my frankness,
but this is no time for polite falsehoods. The fact is we’ve outgrown
each other. When we look out of our eyes, each of us sees an entirely
different world; and neither of us cares about or even believes in the
other’s world. We talk, only to irritate. We are absolutely and finally
apart. It would be impossible for us to live together.”

She waited until I finished. I doubt if she listened. It was her habit
not to listen to what she did not wish to hear. “Godfrey--Godfrey!” she
cried, battling with the sobs that rose, perhaps in spite of her. “Do I
mean nothing to you--I who have been everything to you? Does the word
wife mean nothing to you?”

“You mean nothing to me,” replied I. “And I mean nothing to you. Let us
not pretend to deceive ourselves.”

“But you did care about me once,” she pleaded. “I am not old and faded.
I still have all the charms I used to have--yes, and more. Isn’t that
so, dear?”

“You are more beautiful than you ever were,” said I. “But--you’ve
gotten me out of the habit of you. And I couldn’t go back to it if I
would.”

She buried her face in her hands and wept.

“At your old tricks,” said I impatiently. “It has always been your way
to try to make me seem in the wrong. As a matter of fact, you lost
years ago--lost before I did--all interest and taste for our life
together. It was you who ended our married life, not I.”

“Yes, it was all my fault,” she sobbed. “Forgive me, dear. Take me
back. Don’t cast me off. I’ll be whatever you say--do whatever you
wish. Only take me back!”

I could not make an inch of progress toward the real motive behind this
obviously sincere plea. As I sat silent, looking at her and puzzling,
she began to hope that she had moved me. No--rather, she began to feel
stronger in her deep rooted conviction that at bottom I loved her and
had never wavered. She came across the room, dropped to her knees
beside my chair and hid her face in my lap. Why is it that passion once
extinguished can never light again? As she knelt there I appreciated
all her physical charms; but I was appreciative with that critical
calmness which is the absence of all feeling. I laid my hand on hers.

“Edna,” I said, “what _is_ the meaning of this?”

“I am telling you the truth, Godfrey,” replied she, lifting her
gold-brown eyes to gaze at me. “As God is my judge, I am telling you
the truth.”

“No doubt you think you are,” said I diplomatically. “But your good
sense must tell you that there’s something wrong.”

“Yes--with you,” was her answer in a sad tone. “I hoped we could begin
to be happy at once. I see now that I’ve got to win you back.”

I concealed my panic behind an amused laugh. “I suppose I’ve misled
you into forming this poor estimate of my intelligence where you are
concerned,” said I. “You have thought all these years that, because I
said nothing, I did not understand. The truth is, for many years I have
understood you thoroughly, Edna. You doubt it. You say to yourself,
‘If he had understood, he would have been furious and would not have
allowed me to use him as a mere pocketbook.’”

Up she started, wounded to the quick. “Godfrey!” she cried. “How you
hurt! Oh, my dear--spare me. If you had such a low opinion of me, don’t
tell me about it. Perhaps I deserve your contempt. God knows, I thought
I was doing right. Don’t be harsh with me, dearest. I am only a woman,
after all.”

I shook my head smilingly. “Drop it,” said I. “You are entirely too
strong a person to be able to hide behind a plea of weakness. I have
let you use me for your own selfish pleasure all these years because
I did not especially care. Also, it kept you away from me--which was
highly agreeable to us both.”

The anguish in her eyes, whether it was genuine or not, looked so
sincere that I avoided her gaze.

“But,” I went on, “I’m no longer in the mood to be used. You got
through with me, as you thought, and divorced me and prepared to marry
a man more to your liking----”

“Godfrey--you needn’t be jealous of him--of anyone!”

I made a gesture of resigned despair. Jealous! Her vanity rampant.
It had seized upon an insignificant phrase and had found what it was
eagerly looking for. “I am not jealous of him,” said I, “though it
would be useless for me to try to convince you. Still, I repeat--I
am not jealous. I was merely saying that you have cast me off, that
I choose to regard your action as final, that I shall not let you
fasten on me again simply because your selfishness and vanity happen to
discover a new value in me. Do I make my position clear?”

“I see I can’t convince you of what’s in my heart,” said she with sweet
resignation. “I had no right to expect it--to hope for it. But my life
will convince you, Godfrey. I shall win you back!”

I retained my appearance of calmness. But I was the reverse of calm.
I appreciated that she had me in her power. So far as I could judge,
she was not after more money, but was under the spell of some form of
hysteria that gave her the delusion of an actual desire to love me and
to be loved by me. As she had a fortune in her own right, and a large
one, I was without means of controlling her. I could not compel her to
stick to her bargain and make the divorce legally final; and, even if I
had been so disposed I had no ground for a divorce from her unless she
should be consenting and assisting.

“If you cared for another woman, I might despair,” she went on. “But
you don’t. My heart tells me that you don’t.”

Should I tell her? I strangled the impulse as it was born; my common
sense lost no time in reminding me of the folly of that course.

“I’ll be so utterly yours, Godfrey,” she went on, “that you’ll simply
_have_ to love me.”

I rose. “Let’s have no more of this nonsense,” said I. “Understand,
once for all, Edna, the day when you can use me is past--gone forever.
You are free--and so am I. We will annoy each other no more.”

She faced me, her bosom heaving, her widening eyes scrutinizing me.
And what I saw in them made me quail. For there shone the arch-fiend
jealousy. “Godfrey!” she exclaimed at last. “It must be another woman!”

I laughed--not pleasantly, I imagine. “Is there no end to your vanity?”
said I.

“Another woman,” she repeated dazedly. “If that weren’t true you
couldn’t treat me harshly--you would want me back--would love me----”

“If there were not another woman on earth, I would not go back to you,”
said I.

But what woman would believe that of a man--especially of one upon whom
she had put her private brand? She said in the same slow ferocious way:
“Some woman has hold of you--is getting ready to make a fool of you.”

I laughed--nervously watching her mind dart from woman to woman of
those we knew.

“Ah--you can’t deceive me!” she cried. “Mary Kirkwood! She has been
stealing you away from me. And you, a fool like all men where women are
concerned, can’t see through her.” Edna laughed wildly. “But she has
_me_ to reckon with now. I’ll show her!”

“Mrs. Kirkwood is engaged to Hartley Beechman,” said I.

“A nobody of a novelist,” said Edna. “That’s a mere blind. She’s after
_you_. After _my_ husband--the man _I_ love! We’ll see!”

Again I laughed--and I am sure my counterfeit of indifference was
successful. “Have it your way,” said I. “But the fact remains that you
and I are done with each other.”

“I shall set aside the divorce,” said she.

“As you please,” replied I, lighting a cigarette and preparing to leave
the room. “If you are not content with the terms of settlement you can
have more money. If that----”

“Why _do_ I love you?” cried she, all softness and piteous appeal
again. “You who are so base that you think only of money! What weakness
for me to love you! Yet, God help me, I do--I do! Godfrey----”

“I am going back to London,” said I.

She stretched out her arms, and her face was a grief-stricken appeal
for mercy. “You can’t be so cruel to me--your Edna.”

I smiled mockingly at her and left the room.




XII


I have not been unaware of your anger and disgust with me, gentle
reader, during the progress of the preceding scene. In real life--in
your own life--you would have understood such a scene. But you are
not in the habit of reading realities in books--real men, real women,
real action. Everything is there toned down, put in what is called an
artistic perspective. Well, I am not an artist, and perhaps I have no
right to express an opinion upon matters of art. But I’ll venture. To
me art means a point of view upon life; so, I see nothing artistic,
nothing but more or less grotesque nonsense, in an art that is not a
point of view but a false view. But to keep to Edna and myself.

You think I should have been moist and mushy, should have taken her
back, should have burdened myself for the rest of my days with her
insincere and unsympathetic personality. You are saying: “But after
all she loved him.” Even so--what does the word love mean when used
by a person of her character? It means nothing but the narrowest,
blighting selfishness. She had for years used me without any thought
for or of my feelings, wishes, needs. When we moved into our grand New
York house she gave me as a bedroom the noisiest room in the house,
one overlooking the street where the rattling of carriages, cabs, and
carts and the talk and laughter of pedestrians kept me awake until far
into the night and roused me about four in the morning--this, when I
was working with might and main all day long and needed every moment
of rest I could get. Why did she give me that room? Because she wanted
the only available quiet room--beside her own bedroom--for a dressing
room! She said the light in the room she gave me was unfit to dress
by! I thought nothing of all this at the time. It is characteristic of
American wives to do these things; it is characteristic of American
men to regard them as the matter of course. I cite the small but not
insignificant incident to show the minuteness of her indifference
to me. I have already given many of the larger though perhaps less
important instances, and I could give scores, hundreds, in the same
tenor. She professed to love me at that time--and she either had
or simulated a very ardent passion. But that was not love, was it?
Love is generous, is considerate, finds its highest pleasure of
self-gratification in making the loved one happy. Such a conception of
love never entered her head--and how many American women’s heads does
it enter? How it amuses me to watch them as they absorb everything,
give nothing, sit enthroned upon their vanities--and then wonder and
grow sulky or sour when their husbands or lovers tire of the thankless
task of loving them and turn away--or turn them away.

If Edna had awakened to genuine love, gentle outraged reader, would
she not have been overwhelmed with shame as she looked back upon her
married life? Would she have come to me with the offer of her love
as a queen with the offer of her crown? She would not have indulged
in empty words; she would have tried to _do_ something by way of
reparation. She would not have demanded that she be taken back; but,
feeling that she had forfeited her rights, she would have tried to find
out whether I would consent to take her back; and if she had found that
I would not, she would have accepted her fate as her desert.

In those circumstances do you think I could have laughed at her and
remained firm? No one not a monster could have done that.

But the thing she called love was not love at all, was merely as I
described it to her--a newly discovered way of using me after she had
thought all possible use for me exhausted. Such, gentle reader, is
the simple truth. Yet because I had intelligence enough to see the
truth and firmness enough not to be swayed by shallow and meaningless
sentimentalities, you call me hard, harsh, cruel. One of your impulsive
kindly souls would have taken her weeping to his arms, would have
begun to live with her. And there the novel would have ended, with
you, gentle reader, all tears and thrills. For, having no imagination,
you would have been unable to picture the few weeks of cat-and-dog
life after the “happy ending,” then the breaking apart in hatred and
vindictiveness. But this is not an “artistic” novel. It is a story of
life, a plain setting forth of actualities, in the hope that it may
enable some men and women to understand life more clearly and to live
their own lives more wisely and perhaps less mischievously.

I went to my daughter. “Margot,” said I, “your mother threatens to try
to stop the divorce. It is best for both her and me that we be free. I
am determined not to live with her again, for I abominate the sort of
life she and you lead. If you will do what you can to bring her to her
senses, I will see that you don’t regret it.”

Margot rather liked me, I believe. Not as a father; as a father I made
her ashamed, like everything else American about her. But it was a
resigned kind of shame, and she appreciated my money, my good nature
about it and my services in bringing back her marquis and making
possible her son the earl. I knew I could count on her active sympathy;
for she would vastly prefer that her mother be the Princess Frascatoni.

My mother, Mrs. Loring; my mother, the Princess Frascatoni. Pronounce
those two phrases, gentle reader, and you will grasp my meaning.

I was by no means sure she would have any influence with her mother,
even though she was now the wife of one marquis and the mother of a
marquis to be, with about half the high British peerage as relatives.
But I was desperate, and a desperate man clutches at anything.

“I think you are right, papa,” said she in her mother’s own grave sweet
way. “You and mamma never have been suited to each other. Besides, I
don’t want her away off in America where I never expect to be again.
Some of the girls who have married here like to go back there and
receive the flattery and the homage. But it seems cheap to me. I’m sure
I don’t care what the Americans think of me. I’m not snobbish, as I
used to be. I am English now--loyal English to the core.”

“This is the place for your mother, too.” An idea occurred to me. “If
I took your mother back with me, I would have my parents and hers live
with us in a big place I’m going to buy in the country. You don’t know
your grandparents well?”

She was coloring deeply. She must have heard more than her mother
dreamed she knew. “No, papa,” said she.

“Your mother and I were disgracefully neglectful of them,” pursued I.
“But I shall make up for it, as far as I can. I wish you would come
over and visit us.”

“I should like it, papa,” murmured she, ready to sink down with shame.

“They are plain people,” I went on, “but they are good and honest--much
ahead of these wretched parasites you’ve been brought up among.... Talk
to your mother about them. Tell her what I have said.”

She understood thoroughly; that is the sort of thing fashionable people
always understand. “I shall, papa,” said she. And I could see her
putting on a fetching air of sweet innocence and telling her mother.

“And if she does not like it,” continued I--“can’t bear the scandal and
ridicule among her fashionable friends--why, she can desert me. And
that would give me ground for divorce.”

“She would be dreadfully unhappy over there,” said Margot.

“I am sure of it,” said I, and my accent was a guarantee.

Should I see Edna again and picture our life together in the house of
love she was bent upon? I decided against it. Margot’s pictures might
lack the energy and detail of mine. They would more than make up in
bringing home to her the awful reality, as she would believe Margot
where she might suspect me of merely threatening what I would never
carry out. So, off I went to London--to wait.

About the hardest task in this world is inaction when every fiber of
your being is clamorous for action. Yet I contrived to sit tight--for
a week--for two weeks. I have always regarded myself as too impatient,
too impetuous. And, beyond question, my natural tendency is to the
precipitate. But looking back over my life I am astonished--and not a
little pleased with myself--as I note how I have held myself in check,
have confined my follies of rash haste to occasions when miscarriage
was not a serious matter.

Armitage came--on the way from St. Moritz to America. As soon as I
could command the right tone, I said:

“You’ve seen your sister and Mrs. Armstrong? How are they?”

“All right,” replied he indifferently. “Motoring in Spain at present, I
believe.”

“Beechman--he’s with them?”

“No. He’s somewhere hereabouts, I believe. I saw him in Hyde Park the
other day--looking as seedy as if he were pulling out of an illness. I
spoke and he stared and scowled and nodded--like the bounder that he
is.”

“You don’t care for him?” said I, rejoiced by this news of my rival’s
seediness.

“Oh, one doesn’t bother to like or dislike that sort of chap.” He said
this in a supercilious manner--a manner he had never had in the earlier
period of our acquaintance. How the inner man does poke through the
surface when the veneer of youth wears thin!

“For one who despises birth and wealth and rank,” said I, not without a
certain malice, “you have a queer way of talking at times.”

Armitage winced, changed the subject by saying: “And what the devil’s
the matter with _you_? You’re looking anything but fit yourself.”

“Oh--I’m up against it, as usual,” said I gloomily.

He laughed. My pessimism was one of the jokes of my friends. But,
having seen so much of the ravages of optimism--of the cheer-boys-cheer
and always-look-at-the-bright-side sort of thing, I had given myself
the habit of reckoning in the possibilities of disaster at full value
when I made plans. Little people ought always to be optimistic. Then,
their enthusiasm--_if_ directed by some big person--produces good
results, where they would avail nothing could they see the dangers in
advance. But big people must not be--and are not--optimists, whatever
they may pretend. The big man must foresee all the chances against
success. Then, if his judgment tells him there is still a chance for
success, his courage of the big man will enable him to go firmly ahead,
not blunderingly but wisely. The general must be pessimist. The private
must be optimist; for if he were pessimist, if he saw what the general
must see, he would be paralyzed with fear and doubt.

“You’re always grumbling,” said Armitage. “Yet you’re the luckiest man
I know.”

“Perhaps that’s why,” replied I.

He understood, nodded. “Doubtless,” said he.

“What’s luck? Nothing but shrewd calculation. The fellow who can’t
calculate soon loses any windfalls that may happen to blunder his way.
But what’s the grouch now?”

I was so helplessly befogged that I resolved to tell him.

“My late wife is threatening not to release me,” said I.

He smiled curiously. “But she hasn’t done it yet?”

“Not yet,” replied I. “At least not up to eleven o’clock this morning,
New York time.”

“I don’t think she will,” said he.

“Why?” demanded I.

“You won’t let her, for one reason,” replied he.

“You’re as fond of your freedom as I am. And nothing on earth
could induce me to marry again. When women--English women--look
at me I see them fairly twitching to get me where they can make
free use of me. Yes--marriage has gone the way of everything else.
Business--finance--politics--religion--they’ve all degenerated into so
many means of graft. And art’s going the same way. And marriage--it’s
the woman’s great and only graft. Our women look at marriage in two
ways--how much can be got out of it, living with the man; how much will
it net as alimony.”

“You seemed rather positive that my late wife would not hold on to me?”
persisted I.

He eyed me sharply. “You really wish to be free?”

“I am determined to be free.”

“She’s a charming--a lovely woman,” said he.

There was doubt of my candor in his eyes. It is all but impossible for
a man rightly to judge any woman except her he has tired of or for
some other reason does not want and cannot imagine himself wanting.
The unpossessed woman has but the one value; the possessed woman must
have other values--or she has none. Armitage could judge Edna only as
female, unpossessed female. Said he:

“She’s a charming--a lovely woman.”

“Like the former Mrs. Armitage,” I reminded him.

“So--so,” conceded he. “But I’ve always believed you were a fond
husband at bottom.”

“Dismiss it from your mind,” said I. “You are hesitating about telling
me something. Say it!”

With a certain nervousness he yielded to his love of gossip. “Prince
Frascatoni--you know him?”

I beamed in a reassuring smile. “My late wife’s chief admirer,” said I.
“A fine fellow. I like him.”

“He’s visiting down at--what’s the name of the place your son-in-law
has taken?”

“He is?” exclaimed I jubilantly. “When did he go?”

“About a week, I hear.”

“That looks encouraging, doesn’t it?” cried I.

“It certainly does,” said he. “They say he was charging round town like
a lunatic up to a few weeks ago----”

“Two weeks ago,” said I.

“But now he has calmed again--looks serene. I had a note from him this
morning. I’m positive he’s content with the way the cards are falling.”

The change in me was so radical that Armitage must have been
convinced--for the moment. “If I only knew!” said I.

“I can find out for you,” suggested he. “Your daughter has asked me
down for the week end. I’ll sacrifice myself, if you wish.”

“I’ll take your going as a special favor,” said I.

“Besides,” he went on, “these Anglo-American menages interest me.
American women are so brash with the men of their own country. I like
to see them playing the part of meek upper servants. The only kind of
wife to have is a grateful one. To get a grateful wife an American has
to marry some poor creature, homely, neglected by everyone till he
came along. Even then the odds are two to one she’ll go crazy about
herself and despise him--because he stooped to her, if she can’t find
any other excuse. But a titled foreigner-- An American girl is on her
knees at once and stays there. He can abuse her--step on her--kill her
almost--neglect her--waste her money. She is still humbly grateful.”

“The worms have been known to turn,” protested I. For, while I could
not deny the general truth of Armitage’s attack I felt he was whipped
too far by bitterness that he, for lack of a title, could not command
what these inferior men with titles had offered to them without the
bother of asking.

“Not a worm,” declared he. “No American woman ever divorced a title
unless she was either in terror of her life or in terror of being
robbed to the last penny and kicked out.”

“Thank God all our women aren’t title crazy,” said I.

“How do you know they aren’t?” retorted he. “Do you know one who has
been tempted and has resisted?”

I had to confess I did not.

“Then you thanked God too soon. The truth is our women are brought up
to be snobs, spenders--useless, vain parasites. Their systems are all
ready to be infected with the title mania.”

Armitage, on his favorite subject, talked and talked. I did not listen
attentively--not so much because I did not like what he was saying or
because I thought him prejudiced as because I knew him to be a secret
snob of the thoroughgoing variety. I suspected that if things were
reversed, if he could get a title by marriage and a position that would
enable him to swagger and would make everyone bow and scrape, he would
put the eagerest of the female title-hunters to the blush. It may be
just and proper to criticise women for being what they are. But let us
also hear in mind that it is not their fault but the fault of their
training; also that the men do no better when they have the chance to
live in idle vanity upon the labors of some one else.

On the following Monday my emissary returned from Garton Hall full to
the brim with news.

But first he had again to assure himself that there was no pretense in
my seeming anxiety to be free. I saw doubt of me in his eyes before he
began his adroit cross-examination. I gave no sign that I knew what
he was about; for in those cases the one chance of convincing is to
submit to whatever tests may be applied. It was not unnatural that he
should doubt, coming as he did direct from seeing and talking with the
charming Edna. Men are habitually fools about women--not because women
make fools of them but because they enjoy the sensation of making fools
of themselves. That is a sensation much praised by poets, romancers,
sentimentalists of all kinds; and because of this praise it has come
to have a certain fictitious value, has come to be a cheap way for
a man to imagine himself a devil of a fellow, a figure of romantic
recklessness. There is no limit to which the passion for living up to
a pose will not carry a man. Men have flung away their fortunes, their
lives, for the sake of a pose; martyrs have burned at the stake for
pose. So a man of experience even more than your ordinary brick-brained
citizen is distrustful of his fellow men where women are concerned.
And it is nothing against Armitage’s intelligence, nor any sign of his
having a low estimate of my strength of mind, that he tried to make
absolutely sure of me before proceeding.

Then, too, there was Edna’s charm. Women--I mean, our fashionable and
would-be fashionable American women of all classes, from Fifth Avenue
to the Bowery, from Maine to the Pacific--women are parlor-bred--are
bred to make an imposing surface impression. The best of them fool
the most expert man, as Edna had been fooling Armitage during those
two days down in the country. A man has to live with them to find
them out. And often, our men, being extremely busy and kindly disposed
toward their women and unobservant of them and uncritical of them, do
not find them out for many years. The house is run badly, the money
is wasted, the children are not brought up right. But the man lets it
pass as “part of the game.” He tells himself that not much but good
looks is to be expected of a woman; he buries himself still deeper in
his business. Then-- If he is a successful man, along about forty when
he has got up high enough to be able to relax from the labor of his
career and thinks of enjoying himself, he tries to form an alliance
for pleasure with his wife. And lo and behold, he discovers that he is
married to a vain, superficial fool.

There could have been no more delightful experience than passing a
few days in the society of Edna. She had educated herself, admirably,
thoroughly, for show. She could have fooled the fashionable man his
whole life through, for one cannot see beyond the range of his own
vision. She might have fooled many a serious man of the narrow type;
an excellent shoemaker might easily be misled by a clever showy jack
of all trades into thinking him a master of all trades so long as he
avoided betraying his ignorance of shoemaking. But your successful
American man of the highest type, having a broad range of practical
interests, becomes a shrewd judge of human values. Thus, the American
woman who can pass for brilliant in fashionable society at home
or abroad cannot deceive the American man--for long. Not when he
lives with her. No wonder she finds him coarse; who does not wince
when vanity is stepped on or ignored? No wonder she thinks him
uninteresting. A child would have an equally poor opinion of any person
inexpert at catcher, marbles, and mud pies.

Armitage, in a company of titled people, his nostrils full of his
beloved, stealthily enjoyed perfumes of wealth and rank, was captivated
by Edna. If he had stopped a week or so, his American shrewdness might
have found her out, might have seen why I could view with unruffled
sleeves, as the Chinese say, the loss of so lovely and lively a
companion. But, stopping only for the week end, he became doubtful
of my sincerity. I measured how deeply he had been deluded when he
spoke of her keen sense of humor. Woman nature is too practical, too
matter of fact for even the cleverest of them to have a real sense
of humor--with now and then an exception, of course. Edna had not a
glimmer of appreciation of either wit or humor. But only I, before
whom she dropped all pretenses except those that were essential to her
pose--only I knew this. Before the rest of the world, with the aid of
her vivacity!--What an aid to women is vivacity!--how many of them it
marries well!--With the aid of her vivacity she made a convincing show
not only of appreciating humor and wit but also of having much of both.
At precisely the right place she gave the proper, convincing, charming
exhibition of dancing eyes and pearl-white teeth. And occasionally
with a pretty liveliness she repeated as her own some witticism she
had heard much applauded in another and remote company. But I do not
blame you, ladies, for your inveterate and incessant posing. We men
are determined to idealize and to be gulled, and you need us to pay for
your luxury and your finery.

I let Armitage probe on and on until my impatience for his news would
suffer no further delay. I said:

“I see you refuse to be convinced. So let it go at that, and tell me
what you found out. Is she to marry Frascatoni?”

“As I’ve been telling you, I believe she is in love with you, Loring.”

“But is she going to free me?”

“Unless you do something pretty soon, I’m afraid you’ll lose her.”

It was too absurd that he, who had lived with one of these showy
vivacious women, had found her out and had rid himself of her should be
thus taken in by another of precisely the same kind. But that’s the way
it is with men. They understand why they yawn at their own show piece;
but they can’t appreciate that all show pieces in time produce the same
effect.

“There still remain three weeks before the day on which her lawyers
must ask the judge to confirm the decree,” said I. “Do you think she
will have them do it or not?”

“Unless you get busy, old man----”

“But I shall not get busy. I shall do everything I can to encourage her
to stay free.”

“Then you’ll lose her,” said he. “Frascatoni is mad about her, and he
knows how to make an impression on a woman. It irritated me to see a
damned dago carrying off such a prize--and you know I’m not prejudiced
in favor of American women.”

“I want to see her happy,” said I. “She will be happy with him--so, I
hope he gets her.” I laughed mockingly. “She wouldn’t be happy with an
American, Bob--not even with you.”

He colored guiltily. “That idea never entered my head,” protested he.

But I laughed the more. “And she wouldn’t have you, Bob,” I went on.
“So, don’t put yourself in the way of being made uncomfortable.”

He had enjoyed himself hugely. Not only was my former wife most
entertaining, but also Margot. She had, beyond question, been
beautifully educated for the part she was to take in life. Her
manner--so Armitage assured me--was the perfection of gracious
simplicity--the most exquisite exhibition of the perfect lady--“note
how ladylike I am, yet how I treat you as if you were my equal.”
Gracious--there’s the word that expresses the whole thing. And she
had a quantity of bright parlor tricks--French recitation, a little
ladylike singing in a pleasant plaintive soprano that gave people an
excuse for saying: “She could have been a grand-opera star if she had
cared to go in seriously for that sort of thing.” Also, a graceful
skirt dance and a killing cake walk. She had an effective line of
fashionable conversation, too--about books and pictures, analysis
of soul states, mystic love theories--all the paraphernalia of a
first-class heroine of a first-class society novel. And you, gentle
reader, who know nothing, would never have dreamed that she knew
nothing. You who are futile would not have seen how worthless she
was--except to do skirt dances well enough for a drawing-room or to
talk soul states well enough for a society novel.

The more Armitage discoursed of the delights of his little visit the
more nervous I became lest Edna should again change her mind and
inflict me further. What he had said brought back my life with her in
stinging vividness. I lived again the days of my self-deception, the
darker days of my slow awakening, the black days of my full realization
of the mess my life was, and of my feeling that there was no escape for
me.

“I will admit, Loring,” said Armitage, “that as women go our women are
the best of all.”

“Yes,” I assented, sincerely. “And they ought to be. America is the
best place to grow men. Why shouldn’t it be the best place to grow
women?”

He did not pursue the subject. In his heart he disagreed with me, for
he was wholly out of conceit with everything American. His pose had
been the other way, and he shrank from uncovering himself.

A day or so later I was crossing Green Park when I ran straight into
Hartley Beechman. I smiled pleasantly, though not too cordially. He
planted himself in front of me and stared with a tragic frown. I then
noted that he verged on the unkempt, that he had skipped his morning
shave and perhaps his bath. His stare was unmistakably offensive--the
look of a man who is seeking a quarrel.

“How’re you, Beechman?” said I, ignoring the signs of foul weather.
“Armitage told me you were in town, but didn’t know your address.
Stopping long?”

“You are a scoundrel,” said he.

I shrugged my shoulders. As I was much the larger and stronger man I
could afford to do it. “So I’ve often heard,” said I. “Perhaps it’s
true. What of it? Why should you think I cared to know your opinion of
me?”

“If I send you a challenge will you accept it?”

I laughed. “No, I never pay the slightest attention to crank letters.”

“You are a coward. You will not give me a chance to meet you on equal
terms.”

“I’ll take you over my knee and give you a spanking if you don’t behave
yourself,” said I, and I pushed him out of my path and was passing on.

“You took her away from me,” he jeered. “But it will do you no good.
She is laughing at us both.”

I strode away. I had heard enough to put me in high good humor.

       *       *       *       *       *

As the end of my wait upon the anxious seat drew into its last week, I
fell into a state of deep depression. Too much eating and drinking was,
of course, the cause. But I had to pass the time somehow; and what is
there to do in London but eat and drink?

Four days before the last, Rossiter came into my sitting room with
the news that Edna was calling. There arose a nice question: Would I
better send word I was out or see her? Because of my knowledge of her
persistence where her interest was really engaged, I decided to see her
and have done with. So in she came, vivacious, radiant--dressed for a
scene in which she was to be heroine, as I saw at a glance.

“Pray don’t think I’m going to repeat what I did the other day,” cried
she by way of beginning. “I’m in quite another mood.”

“So I see,” said I.

“I was horribly ashamed and disgusted with myself afterwards,” she went
on. “You must have thought me crazy. In fact, you did. You treated me
as if I were.”

“Won’t you sit?” said I, arranging a chair for her.

She smiled mischievously at me as she seated herself. “You do know
something about women,” said she. “You put this chair so that my face
would be spared the strong light.” As she said this, she turned into
the full strength of the light a face as free as a girl’s from wrinkles
or any other sign of years. “You certainly do know something about
women.”

“Very little,” said I, for it was not a time to pause and poke a
finger into the swelling bubble of woman’s baffling complexity and
unfathomable mystery. “You’ve come to tell me what it was you wanted
the other day?”

She shook her head. She was wearing a charming hat--but her costumes
were never indifferent and nearly always charming--a feat the more
remarkable because she, being a timidly conventional woman, followed
the fashions and ventured cautiously and never far in individual style.
“You’re usually right, my dear,” said she, “in your guesses at people’s
underlying motives. But you were mistaken that time. I wanted exactly
what I said. I wanted _you_.”

“Incredible,” laughed I.

“Yes--it does sound so,” conceded she. “But it’s the truth. I had a
queer attack--an attack of jealousy. I’d often heard of that sort of
thing. I fancied myself above it. Perhaps that was why I fell such
a foolish victim. But I’ve recovered completely.” And her eyes were
mocking me as if she had a secret joke on me.

“It couldn’t last long,” said I, to be saying something.

“No, perhaps not,” replied she. “At any rate, as soon as I heard of
Mary Kirkwood’s engagement I was cured--instantly cured.”

“I told you she was engaged,” said I.

“Oh, I don’t mean that Beechman person,” scoffed Edna. “She was simply
amusing herself with him. A woman--a woman of our world--might have
an affair with a man of that sort--as you men sometimes do with queer
women. But she wouldn’t think of _marrying_ him. Marriage is a serious
matter.”

“Yes, indeed,” said I.

“It’s a woman’s whole career,” pursued she. “It means not only her
position, but the position of her children, too.”

“Very serious,” said I.

“No--I mean Mary’s engagement to Count von Tilzer-Borgfeldt.”

“I hadn’t heard of it,” said I indifferently. There could be nothing in
such a silly story.

“Didn’t Bob Armitage tell you?”

“Not yet,” said I. “But why should he?”

“That’s queer,” mused she. “Perhaps he thought there might be a little
something in the talk about you and Mary, and that it would be well not
to stir things up.”

“That might account for it,” I agreed.

She was studying me closely. “I believe you really didn’t care about
Mary,” continued she. “I confess I was astonished when I first heard
that you did. She’s--” Edna laughed--“hardly up to _me_.”

“Hardly,” said I.

“But let’s not talk of her. I’ve forgotten all that. I’ve come to make
a last proposal to you.”

She was smiling, but I detected seriousness in her eyes, in her
unsteady upper lip, in her hands trying not to move restlessly.

“You don’t realize what a strong hold you have on me, Godfrey. Is it
love? Is it habit? I don’t know. But I can’t shake it off. Don’t you
think me strange, talking to you in this way?”

“Why shouldn’t you?” said I.

“It’s more like a woman who isn’t attractive to men.”

“On the contrary,” said I. “You speak like a woman accustomed to deal
with men according to her own good pleasure.”

“How shrewd that is!” said she, with an admiring glance. “How shrewd
you are! That’s what I miss in other men--in these men over here who
have so much that I admire. But they--well, they give me the feeling
that they are superficial. Do you think _I_ am superficial?”

“How could I?” said I.

“That’s an evasion,” laughed she. “You _do_ think so. And perhaps I am.
A woman ought to be. A man looks after the serious side of life. The
woman’s side is the lighter and graceful side--don’t you think so?”

“That sounds plausible,” said I.

“But I grow tired of superficial men. They give me the feeling
that--well, that they couldn’t be relied on. And you are reliable,
Godfrey. I feel about you that no matter what happened you’d be equal
to it. And that’s why I don’t want to give you up.”

I sat with my eyes down, as if I were listening and reflecting.

“Since you’ve been over here long enough to--to broaden a little-- You
don’t mind my saying you’ve broadened?”

“It’s true,” said I.

“I’ve fancied perhaps you might be seeing that I wasn’t altogether
wrong in my ideas?”

“Yes?” said I, as she hesitated.

“Margot was telling me about some plans you had--for living on the
other side. You weren’t in earnest?”

I looked at her gravely. “Very much in earnest,” said I. “I shall never
again, in any circumstances, live as we used to live.”

She sank back in her chair, slowly turned her parasol round and round.
“Then--it’s hopeless,” said she, with a sigh that was a sob also. And
the look in the eyes she lifted to mine went straight to my heart. “I
simply can’t stand America,” said she. “It reminds me of--” She rose
impatiently. “If you only knew, Godfrey, how I _loathe_ my origin--the
dreadful depth we came from--the commonness of it.” She shuddered.

“Europe is the place for you,” said I.

“Yes, it is,” cried she. “And we could be happy over here--if you’d
only see it in the right light. Godfrey, I don’t want to--to change.
Won’t you compromise?”

“By conceding everything?” said I good-humoredly. “By becoming the
bedraggled tail to your gay and giddy kite?”

“You simply won’t reason about these things!” exclaimed she. “Yet they
say men are reasonable!”

“My dear Edna, I don’t ask you to make yourself wretched for _my_ sake.
And I don’t purpose to be wretched for _your_ sake.”

She sat down again. The brightness had faded from her. She looked older
than I’d have believed she could. “Well--I see it’s useless,” she said
finally. “And as I’ve got to stay over here, I simply must marry again.
You understand that?”

“Perfectly,” said I.

“Don’t you care the least bit?” said she wistfully.

“You wish me to be unhappy about it,” laughed I, “to gratify your
vanity.”

She sighed again.

“You are content with the settlements?”

“Oh, yes,” said she wearily.

No doubt you, gentle reader, are now completely won over to her and
think that the least I could in decency have done would have been
to insist on her accepting half my fortune. I had no impulse toward
that folly. There is a kind of wife who can justly claim that she is
the equal partner in her husband’s wealth. But not the Edna kind. I
had made my fortune in spite of her. Nor was I keen to give her any
more money than I should be compelled; why turn over wealth to her to
fritter away and to bolster the pretensions of a family of worthless
Italian aristocrats?

With a sudden darting look at me, she said: “You know Frascatoni. What
do you think of him?”

“A fine specimen,” said I. “A fascinating man.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Fascinating enough, I suppose. But--would
you _trust_ him?”

“I would not,” replied I. “Nor any other man. I have long since learned
not to trust even myself. But I’d trust him as far as the next man--as
far as it’s necessary to trust anyone.”

She nodded in appreciation and agreement. “I believe he genuinely cares
for me,” she said, adding with a melancholy look at me, “And it’s
pleasant to be cared about.”

“So I have heard,” said I.

“You never wanted anyone to care about you,” said she. “You are
independent of everything and everybody.”

“That’s safest,” said I.

She did not reply. After reflecting she burst out with, “You ought to
have _made_ me, Godfrey--ought to have trained me to your taste. Women
have to be _made_.”

“Even if that had been possible in this case,” I observed, “I didn’t
know enough.”

Again she thought a long time; then with a sigh she said: “But it’s too
late now. You’re right. It’s too late.”

It puzzled me to note how much the world had taught her in some
ways, and how little in others. But that is a familiar puzzle--the
unexpected, startling ways in which knowledge juts out into ignorance
and ignorance closes in upon knowledge, forming a coast line between
the land of knowledge and the sea of ignorance more jagged than that
of Alaska or Norway. The result is that each of us is a confused
contention of wisdom and folly in which the imperious instincts of
elemental passions and appetites, by their steady persistence, easily
get their way.

“Since I’ve begun to look at these foreign men seriously,” she went on,
“to study them-- It’s one thing to size them up, as you say in America,
with the idea that they’re mere outsiders--acquaintances--social
friends. It’s very different to measure them with a view to serious
relations. I’m not altogether a fool--even from your standpoint--am I,
Godfrey?”

“Distinctly not,” said I.

“Since I’ve been _studying_ these upper-class men over here--I’ve
changed my mind in some respects. I’m not a child, you know. I haven’t
done what I’ve done without using some judgment of men and women.”
She flooded me with a smile of gratitude. “I owe my judgment to you,
Godfrey. You taught me.”

“You never agreed with anything I said--when I did occasionally venture
an opinion.”

“Because a woman disagrees and scorns--it doesn’t follow that she isn’t
convinced.”

“You’ve changed your mind about these men?” said I, for my curiosity
was aroused.

“I find a lack in them. You’re right to a certain extent, Godfrey. They
_are_ futile--the cleverest of them. Culture gives a great deal, of
course.”

“What?” said I.

“It’s too long and involved to explain. And you don’t believe in it.”

“I’m willing to,” said I. “But first, I’d like to know what it is, and
second, I’d like to know what it _does_. I’ve never been able to get
anything but words in answer to either question.”

“Well, _I_ see that it gives a great deal. But I must admit that it
takes away something--yes, much--strength from the mind and softness
from the heart.”

I was astonished at this admission from her--at the admission itself,
at the fresh evidences of what a good natural mind she had. But I
had no desire to discuss with her. I had long outgrown the folly of
discussion with futile people. I was tempted to air my own views of
this so-called culture--how it emasculated where it pretended to
soften; how it discovered nothing, invented nothing, produced nothing,
did not feed, or clothe, or shelter, or in any way contribute to the
sane happiness of a human being; how it unfitted men and women for
active life, made them pitiful spectators merely, scoffing or smiling
superciliously at the battle. But I refrained. I knew she believed
the rôle of spectator the only one worthy a lady or a gentleman--and
certainly it is the only one either lady or gentleman could take
without being exposed as ridiculous. I knew that her wise observations
were clever conversation merely, after the manner of futile
people--that when the time for action came her snobbishness dominated
her.

“I wish these men were not so--so----”

“Good-for-nothing?” I suggested.

She accepted the phrase, though she would have preferred one less
mercilessly truthful.

“You can’t find everything in one person,” said I.

That kind of tame generality--lack of interest thinly veiled in a
polite show of interest--kills conversation and sets a tarrying caller
to moving where dead silence produces a nervous tendency to linger.
Edna extended her arm, resting her hand upon the crook of her parasol
in a gesture of approaching departure. Yet she seemed loth to go. She
rose, but counterbalanced with:

“You know, I suppose, that it’s likely to be Frascatoni?”

I rose, replied indifferently, “So I hear.”

She stood, smiling vaguely down at the gloved hand on the crook of the
parasol. “If I were only younger--or more credulous,” said she. And I
knew that there was a thin, sour after-taste to the sparkling wine of
the prince’s love-making. I smiled--pleasant, noncommittal.

“I ask too much of life,” said she impatiently. “Isn’t it irritating
that I should become critical just as I am in a position to get
everything I’ve longed for and worked for?”

“Those moods pass,” said I.

“No doubt,” said she. “Well--good-by.” She put out her hand with a
radiant smile. “I’ll not annoy you any more.”

My answering smile and pressure of the hand were friendly, but
cautiously so, for I felt I was still on thin ice. I opened the door
for her. We shook hands again. Our eyes met. I think it must have given
each of us a shock to see in the other’s face the polite, distant look
of strangers parting. How easy it is for two to become like one--and
when they are, how impossible it seems that they could ever be aliens.
How easy it is for two that are as one to become utter strangers; the
sea is wide, and its currents curve rapidly away from each other.

“Rossiter,” said I--he was at work in the anteroom, “take Mrs. Loring
to her carriage, please.”

So--she was gone; I was free!




XIII


Not a shadow of doubt lingered. She was gone; I was free. Her manner
had been the manner of finality. Her reluctance and her sadness were
little more than the convention of mourning which human beings feel
compelled to display on mortuary occasions of all kinds. Beneath the
crepe I saw a not discontented resignation, a conviction of the truth
that life together was impossible for her and me.

My male readers--those who have a thinking apparatus and use it--will
probably wonder, as I did then, that she had overlooked certain obvious
advantages to be gained through refusing to divorce me. She knew me
well enough to be certain I would not compel her to go to America and
live with me, but if she insisted would let her stay in Europe or
wander where she pleased. This would have given her all the advantages
of widowhood. Free, with plenty of money, she could have led her own
life, without ever having to consult the conveniences and caprices of
a husband. It seemed to me singularly stupid of her to resign this
signal advantage, to tie herself to a husband she could not ignore, a
husband she already saw would bore her, as poseurs invariably bore each
other--to tie herself to such a man with no compensating advantage but
a title. Indeed, so stupid did it seem that from the moment she began
to waver about confirming the divorce I all but lost hope of freedom.

My women readers will understand her. A man cannot appreciate how
hampered a woman of the lady class is without a legitimate male
attachment of some kind--a husband, a brother, or a father in constant
attendance, ready for use the instant the need arises. Our whole
society is built upon the theory that woman is the dependent, the
appendage of man. Freedom is impossible for a woman, except at a price
almost no woman voluntarily pays. To have any measure of freedom a
woman must bind herself to some man, and the bondage has to be cruel
indeed not to be preferable to the so-called freedom of the unattached
female. Thus it was not altogether snobbishness, it may not have been
chiefly snobbishness, that moved Edna to transfer herself to a husband
who would be a more or less unpleasant actuality. She had to have a
man. She wished to live abroad and to be in fashionable society. She
chose shrewdly. I imagine, from several things she said, that she had
measured Frascatoni with calm impartiality, had discovered many serious
disadvantages in him as husband to a woman of her fondness for her own
way. But estimating the disadvantages at their worst, the balance still
tipped heavily toward him.

I am glad I was not born a woman. I pity the women of our day, bred
and educated in the tastes of men, yet compelled to be dependents, and
certain of defeat in a finish contest with man.

Though there was now no reasonable doubt of Edna’s having the decree of
divorce made final, I, through overcaution or oversensitiveness as to
Mary Kirkwood’s rights, or what motive you please, would not let myself
leave London until a cable from my lawyers in New York informed me that
the decree had been entered and that I was legally free. The newspapers
had given much space to our affairs. It was assumed that I had come
abroad “to make last desperate efforts to win back the beautiful and
charming wife, the favorite of fashionable European society.” Stories
had been published, giving in minute detail accounts of the bribes I
had offered. And when the final decree was entered, my chagrin and fury
were pictured vividly.

I did nothing to discredit this, but, on the contrary, helped along the
campaign for the preservation of the literary and journalistic fiction
that the American woman is a kind of divine autocrat over mankind. If
I had been so vain and so ungallant as to try to make the public see
the truth I should have failed. You can discredit the truth to the
foolish race of men; but you cannot discredit, nor even cast a shade
of doubt upon, a generally accepted fiction of sentimentality. And of
all the sentimental fictions that everyone slobbers over, but no one
in his heart believes with the living and only valid faith of works,
the fictions about woman are the most sacred. Further, how many men are
there who believe that a man could get enough of a physically lovely
woman, however trying she might be? Once in a while in a novel--not
often, but once in a while--there are scenes portraying with some
approach to fidelity what happens between a woman and a man who is
of the sort that is attractive to women. Invariably such scenes are
derided or denounced by the critics. Why? For an obvious reason. A
critic is, to put it charitably, an average man. He has no insight; he
must rely for his knowledge of life solely upon experience. Now what
is the average man’s experience of women? He treats them in a certain
dull, conventional way, and they treat him--as he invites and compels.
So when he reads how women act toward a man who does not leave them
cold or indifferent, who rouses in them some sensation other than
wonder whether they would be able to stomach him as a husband, the
critic scoffs and waxes wroth. The very idea that women might be less
reserved, less queenly, less grudgingly gracious than woman has ever
been to him sends shooting pains through his vanity--and toothache and
sciatica are mild compared with the torturings of a pain-shotten vanity.

Edna scored heavily in the newspapers. You would never have suspected
it was her late husband’s money that had given her everything, that
had made her throughout; for, what had she, and what was she, except
a product of lavishly squandered money? Think about that carefully,
gentle reader, before you damn me and commiserate her as in these pages
a victim of my venomous malice.... She was the newspaper heroine of the
hour. If she had been content with this-- But I shall not anticipate.

My cable message from New York came at five o’clock. At half-past six,
accompanied only by my valet, I was journeying toward Switzerland.

Mrs. Kirkwood, I had learned from her brother, was at Territet, at the
Hotel Excelsior, with the Horace Armstrongs. At four the following
afternoon I descended at Montreux from the Milan express; at five, with
travel stains removed, I was in the garden of the Excelsior having
tea with Mrs. Armstrong and listening to her raptures over the Savoy
Alps. Doubtless you know Mrs. Armstrong’s (Neva Carlin’s) work. Her
portrait of Edna is famous, is one of the best examples I know of
inside-outness. Edna does not like it, perhaps for that reason.

Mary and Horace Armstrong had gone up to Caux. “But,” said Neva,
“they’ll surely be back in a few minutes. Count von Tilzer-Borgfeldt is
coming at half-past five.”

I instantly recognized that name as the one Edna gave in telling me
that Mary had gone shopping for a title and had invested. I had thought
Edna’s jeer produced no effect upon me. I might have known better. My
nature has, inevitably, been made morbidly suspicious by my business
career. Also, I had found out Robert Armitage as a well-veneered snob,
and this could not but have put me in an attitude of watchfulness
toward his sister, so like him mentally. Also my investigations of
that most important phenomenon of American life, the American woman,
had compelled me to the conclusion that the disease of snobbishness
had infected them all, with a few doubtful exceptions. So, without my
realizing it, my mind was prepared to believe that Mary Kirkwood was
like the rest. When Neva Armstrong pronounced the name Edna had given,
there shot through me that horrible feeling of insufferable heat and
insufferable cold which it would be useless to attempt to describe; for
those who have felt it will understand at once, and those who have not
could not be made to understand. And then I recalled Hartley Beechman’s
jeer, “She’s laughing at us both.” But my voice was natural as I said:

“Tilzer-Borgfeldt. That’s the chap she’s engaged to just now, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Armstrong, who is a loyal friend, flushed angrily. “Mary isn’t
that sort, and you know it, for you’ve known her a long time.”

“Then she’s not engaged to him?” said I.

“Yes, she is,” replied Neva. “And if you knew him, you’d not wonder at
it. I don’t like foreigners, but if I weren’t bespoke I think I’d have
to take Tilzer-Borgfeldt if he asked me.”

“No doubt it’s a first-class title,” said I.

“You know perfectly well, Godfrey Loring, that I don’t mean the title.”
She happened to glance toward the entrance to the garden. “Here he
comes now. You’ll judge for yourself.”

Advancing toward us was a big, happy blond man of the pattern from
which nine out of ten German upper-class men are cut. He had the
expression of simple, unaffected joy natural to a big, healthy, happy
blond youth looking forward to seeing his best girl. He had youth, good
looks, unusual personal magnetism--and you will imagine what effect
this produced upon my mood. I could not deny that Neva was right.
Without a title this man would have all the chances in his favor when
he went courting. He had not a trace of aristocratic futility.

You would have admired the frank cordiality of my greeting. Instead of
sitting down again I glanced at my watch and said:

“Well, my time’s up. I shall have to go without seeing Horace and Mary.”

“But you’ll come to dinner?” said Mrs. Armstrong.

“I’m taking the first express back to Paris,” said I. “I found a
telegram waiting for me at my hotel.”

“Mary will be disappointed,” said Neva. “You’ll give Mrs. Loring my
best?”

I remembered that the English papers, with the news doubtless in it,
would not reach Territet until late that evening or the following
morning. But I could not well tell her what had occurred. “Good-by,”
said I, shaking hands. “Tell them how sorry I was. I may see you all in
Paris.”

And away I went, with not an outward sign of my internal state. In less
than half an hour I was in the Paris express.

       *       *       *       *       *

I stopped at Paris a month. A letter came from her--a bulky letter. I
tossed it unopened into the fire. A week, and a second letter came. It
was not so bulky. I flung it unopened into the fire. About two weeks,
and a third letter came. I got Rossiter to address an envelope to her.
I inclosed her unopened letter in the envelope and mailed it. I was
giving myself an exquisite pleasure, the keener because it was seasoned
with exquisite pain.

All this time I had been amusing my idle days in the usual fashion.
My readers who lead quiet lives--the women who sit thinking what they
would do if only they were men--the men who slip away occasionally
for a scampish holiday, and return to their sober routine with the
cheering impression that they have been most fearfully and wonderfully
devilish--those women and those men will regret that I refrain from
details of how I amused myself. But to my notion I have said enough
when I have said “in the usual fashion.” It passed the time as probably
nothing else in the circumstances would have passed such tenacious
hours, every one lingering to be counted. But I confess I have never
been virtuous enough to be especially raptured by so-called vice. No
doubt those who divide actions into good and bad, using the good for
steady diet and the bad for dessert, have advantages in enjoyment over
those who simply regard things as interesting and uninteresting. For,
curiously enough, on that latter basis of division practically all the
things esteemed by most human beings as the delightful but devilish
dessert of life fall into the class of more or less uninteresting. But
for the stimulus of the notion that he is doing something courageously,
daringly wicked, I doubt if any but a dull fellow would perpetrate
vice enough to lift the most easily scandalized hands in the world.
The trouble with vice is that it is so tiresome--and so bad for the
health. And most of it is so vulgar. Drinking to excess and gambling,
for instance. I have indulged in both at times, when hard pressed
for ways to pass the time or when in those stupid moods of obstinate
unreasonableness in which a man takes a savage pleasure in disgusting
himself with himself. Drinking has a certain coarse appeal to the
imagination--coarse and slight but definite. But gambling is sheer
vulgarity. I have been called money-mad, because I have made money,
finding it easy and occupying to attend to business. Yet never have I
cared about money sufficiently to take the faintest interest in the
gaming table. Gambling--all forms of it--is for those sordid creatures
who love money, and who have no intelligent appreciation of its value.
Gambling--all the vices, for that matter--is essentially aristocratic;
for, as I believe I have explained, aristocracy analyzes into the
quintessence of vulgarity. The two incompetent classes--the topmost
and the bottommost--are steeped in vice, for the same reason of their
incompetence to think or to act.

A fourth letter, the bulkiest of all, came from Mary Kirkwood. A few
hours before it was delivered a telegram came from her:

  “A letter is on the way. Godfrey, I beg you to read it. I love you.”

I tore up the telegram, sent back the letter without opening it. You
are denouncing me as inhuman, gentle reader. Perhaps you are right.
But permit me to point out to you that, if I had not in my composition
a vein of iron, I should never have risen from the mosquito-haunted
flats of the Passaic. Also, gentle reader, if I had been a man of the
ordinary sort would Mary Kirkwood have been sufficiently interested in
me to send those letters and that telegram?

A day or so after the return of her last letter I was seized--I can’t
say why--with a longing to see my father and mother and sister, on that
lonely farm out in New Jersey. I had never felt that desire since I
first left home, but had made my few and brief visits out of a sense
of duty--no, of shame. The thought of them gave me no sensation of
horror, as it gave Edna and her daughter. When I remembered them it
was simply as one remembers any random fact. They did not understand
me; and in them there was nothing to understand. We had few subjects
for conversation, and those not wildly interesting and soon exhausted.
You will smile when I say I loved them. Yet it is the truth. We do not
always love those we like to be with; we do not always like to be with
those we love.

There was nothing to detain me in Paris. The hours hung like guests
who do not know how to take leave. So not many days elapsed between
my seizure and my appearance at the spacious and comfortable stone
farmhouse where the four old people were awaiting in a semi-comatose or
dozing state what they firmly believed was a summons to a higher life.
Their belief in it, like that of most religious people, was not strong
enough to make them impatient to get it; still they believed, and found
the belief a satisfactory way of employing such small part of their
minds as remained awake.

I had not seen them or their place in several years, so I was
astonished by the changes. My sister Polly--a homely old maid--and
Edna’s father had some glimmerings of enterprise. Polly took in and
read several magazines, and from them gathered odds and ends of
up-to-date ideas about dress, about furnishing, about gardens. With
the valuable assistance of old Weeping Willie she had wrought a most
creditable transformation. The old people now “looked like something,”
as the saying is. And the place had a real smartness--both within and
without.

Polly--she was about eight years my senior, but looked old enough to be
my mother--Polly watched me anxiously as I strolled and nosed about. My
delight filled her with delight.

“You’re not so ashamed of us, perhaps?” said she.

“I never have been,” replied I. Nor did I put an accent on the personal
pronoun that would have been a hint about somebody else’s feelings.

“Well--you ought to have been,” said she. “We were mighty far behind
even the tail of the procession.”

“I’ll admit I like this better than the way we used to live in Passaic.
Polly, you’ve got the best there is going. All the rest--all the luxury
and other nonsense--is nothing but a source of unhappiness.”

She did not answer. I noted a touching sadness in her expression.

“You don’t agree with me?” said I.

“Yes, I do,” replied she emphatically. “I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“What have _you_ got to be unhappy about?”

“You think I’m ungrateful to you,” said she, with quick sensitiveness.
“But I’m not, Godfrey--indeed I’m not.”

“Ungrateful?” I laughed. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“You’ve done all you could--all anyone could. And in a way I am happy.
But----”

“Yes?” I urged, as she hesitated.

“Well, I’ve found out--looking back over my life--I’ve found out that
I-- It seems to me I’ve got all the _tools_ of happiness, but nothing
to _work on_. I keep thinking, ‘How happy I could be if I only had
something to work on!’”

I was silent. A shadow crept out of a black corner of my heart and cast
a somberness and a chill over me.

“You understand?” said she.

I nodded.

“I thought you would,” she went on. “Godfrey, I’ve often felt sorry for
you--sorrier than I do for myself.” She laid her hand on my arm. “But
you’re a man--a handsome, attractive, _young_ man. You’ll have only
yourself to blame if you waste your life as mine’s been wasted.”

“You don’t realize how lucky you’ve been,” said I, with a bitterness
that surprised me. “You’ve at least escaped marriage.”

“I wish to God I hadn’t,” cried she with an energy that startled me.
There was a fierce look of pain in her eyes. “I thought you understood.
But I see you don’t.”

“What do you mean, Polly Ann?” said I gently.

“The real unhappiness isn’t an unhappy marriage,” replied she. “It’s
being not married at all--not having any children. You know what I
am--an old maid. You think that means the same thing as old bachelor.
Well, it don’t.”

“Why not?”

“An old bachelor--nine times out of ten that means simply an old,
selfish, comfortable man. But an old maid-- The nature of woman’s
different from the nature of man. A woman’s got to have a home--_her_
home--her nest, with her children in it. And I’m an old maid. If I’d
been a man--” She turned on me. “I’m ugly, ain’t I? You know I am.
_I_ know it. Dress me up in men’s clothes and I’d be a good-looking
person--as a man. But as a woman I’m ugly. If I’d have been a man I
could have got a mighty nice, mighty nice-looking wife--one that’d have
been grateful to me for taking her and would have cared for me. But as
a woman I couldn’t get a husband.”

“You can get a very good one,” said I. “Money--what would have bought
you a wife as a man--what buys most men their wives--will buy you a
husband. And he’ll be grateful and loving, so long as you manage the
purse strings well--just as most wives are loving and grateful if their
husbands don’t treat them too indulgently.”

“It’s different, and you know it is,” retorted she. “Custom has made it
different. And I’m ugly--and that’s fatal in a woman.”

“Charm will beat beauty every time,” said I.

“I’ve got no charm--none on the outside. And that’s where a woman’s
charm has to be. No, I’ve thought out my case. It’s hopeless. I’m a
born old maid. No man ever asked me to marry him. No man ever said a
word of love to me. Do you know what that means, Godfrey?”

I was silent. A choke in my throat made speech impossible.

“Never a word of love,” she went on monotonously. “Yet I don’t suppose
any woman ever wanted to hear it more. And no children. Yet I know
no woman ever wanted them more. No, not adopted children--but my own
flesh and blood. I’ve heard women complain of the burden of bearing a
child. It made me wild to listen to them--the fools--the selfish fools!
What wouldn’t I have given to have felt a child within me. Does it
scandalize you to hear me talk like this?”

“No,” said I. “No.”

“It’s a wonder,” said she, with a grim smile. She was quieting down,
was hiding the heart from which she had on impulse snatched the
veil, was ashamed of her outburst. “A woman can talk about having a
cancer, or a tumor, or any frightful disease inside her, and nobody’s
modesty is shocked. But if she speaks of having a child within her--a
wonderful, living human being--a lovely baby--why, it’s immodest!” She
gave a scornful laugh. “What a world! What a world!”

I looked at her and marveled. What a world, indeed!--where _this_
was one of the sort of relatives of whom pushing arrived people were
ashamed!

       *       *       *       *       *

I think I forced myself to stay three days with them. I cannot recall;
perhaps I left the second day. However that may be, I have the sense of
a long, a very long visit. To one who has the city habit the country
is oppressively deliberate even when it is interesting. It makes you
realize how there is room, and to spare, for sixty minutes in an hour,
for sixty seconds in each minute. The city entertains; the country
compels you to seek entertainment, to make entertainment. People whose
mentality tapers away from mediocrity grow old and dull rapidly in
the country as soon as childhood’s torrential life begins to slacken.
For men of thought the country ought to be ideal, I should say, once
they formed its habit and lost the city habit of waiting in confident
expectation of being amused. But for men of action like myself, for men
whose whole life is dealing directly with their fellow men, to acquire
the country habit is a matter of years, of a complete revolution.

I brought a sore and a sick heart to the country. I took back to town
one that was on the way toward the normal. And I owed the improvement
not to the country directly, but to my sister. Polly Ann had reminded
me of the futility of graveyard mooning, of its egotism and hypocrisy.
She had reminded me that only the fool walks backward through life.
I believed I had been guilty of the folly of blowing a bubble of
delusion, pretending to myself that it was no bubble, but permanent,
substantial, real. The bubble had burst, as bubbles must--had burst
with a mocking and irritating dash of cold spray straight into my face.
Well!--the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do, was to laugh and
blow no more bubbles.

I went back to finance; I busied myself to the uttermost of my capacity
for work. But I could not uproot the idea Mary Kirkwood had set growing
in my mind. I saw ever more clearly that my sister was eternally right.
Some men might be successful bachelors. I could be fairly successful
at that selfish and solitary profession for a few years, perhaps
for ten or fifteen years longer. But I knew with the clearness of a
vision trained to search the horizon of the future that the feeling
of loneliness, of complete futility which already shadowed me, would
become a black pall. I _must_ have companionship; and to companionship
there is but the one way--the way of wife and children. A poor, an
uncertain way; nevertheless the only way.

You have, perhaps, observed the marriages of the rich. You have noted
that every rich man and every rich woman is surrounded by a smaller
or larger army of satellites--persons nominally their social equals,
often distinctly their mental superiors, salaried persons, wearers of
cast-off clothing, eaters of luncheons and dinners, permanent free
lodgers, constant or occasional pensioners more or less disguised.
Family life fails with the rich as it fails with the well off, or with
the poor. But while other classes revert to the herd life, the life of
clubs, saloons, teas, receptions, the rich take up the parasite-beset
life, each rich person aloof with his or her particular circle of
flatterers, attendants, coat-holders, joke-makers, and boot-lickers.

Now it so happened that for me there could be no enduring of this
standing apart in the meadow, switching my tail while parasites bit
and tickled, buzzed and burrowed. Riches, like any other heavy and
constantly growing responsibility, usually rob a man of his sense of
humor and turn his thoughts in upon himself and make him a ridiculous
ass of an egotist. They had not had that effect upon me. I can give no
reason; I simply state the fact. So, with my sense of humor active,
and my sense of proportion fairly well balanced, I could not give
myself up to the dreary life custom assigns to the rich. I retained the
normal human instincts.

I had hoped to satisfy them to the uttermost with the aid of Mary
Kirkwood. That hope had fallen dead. I must search on--not for the best
conceivable, but for the best possible.

You are not surprised at my lack of sentiment, gentle reader. By this
time, I am sure, I could not surprise you with any exhibition of
that or other depravity. But it confirms your conviction of my utter
sordidness. So? Then you imagine, do you, that there are many love
marriages in the world, leaving out of the count those in novels and
in the twaddling gossip men and women repeat as the true heart stories
of this and that person? Yes, I should say your intelligence was
about rudimentary enough to give you such a false notion of life as
it is lived. Marriages of passion there are a-plenty. Rarely, indeed,
does a man become bill-payer to a woman for life--not to speak of the
insurance--without having been more or less agitated by her physical
charms; and usually the woman, eager to be married, whips up for him
a return feeling that looks well, convinces the man and herself,
and makes you, gentle reader, sigh and wipe your sloppy eyes. But
love-marriage--that’s a wholly different matter. I should say it almost
never occurs. Where love, a sentiment of slow and reluctant growth,
does happen occasionally to come afterwards, because the two are really
congenial, really mated--where love does come afterwards, it did not
exist when the wedding bells rang. And I doubt not that love has grown
as often, if not oftener, where the motives that led to the marriage
were practical and even sordid than where they were the bright, swift
fading, and in death most foul-smelling, flowers of passion.

I was willing to buy a wife, if I could find a woman who promised
to wear well, to improve on acquaintance, or, at least, not to
deteriorate. And, beyond question, with my money I could have taken
my pick. Almost any girl anywhere, engaged or unengaged, would have
fallen in love with me as soon as she discovered my charms--of person
and of purse. Yes, would have fallen in love, gentle reader. Don’t you
know that a nice, pure girl always makes herself, or lets herself, fall
in love, before she gives herself? And don’t you know that, except
falling out of love--out of that kind of love--there’s nothing easier,
especially for an inexperienced girl, than falling in love--in that
kind of love?

But where was I to find a woman with enough solid quality to give me a
reasonable hope that she would aid me in my quest for family happiness?

Do not denounce me, gentle reader. Epithet and hiss are not reply.
Answer my question.

You say there are millions of such girls. Yes? But where?

You say there are millions of pure, sweet, charming girls, intelligent
and domestic. Yes. No doubt. But how long would they remain so if
tempted by wealth, by the example of all the money-mad, luxury-mad,
society-mad women about them?

Mind you, I did not want a stupid rotter, a cow, a sitter and lounger
and taker on of fat and slougher off of intelligence. I did not want
the lazy slattern who poses as domestic, who is fond of home in exactly
the same way that a pig is fond of an alley wallow.

You laugh at me. You say: “He is a conceited fool!--to think that _he_
could attract and absorb an intelligent woman with a complex woman’s
soul!” Not so, gentle reader. I did not wish to attract and to absorb
her. As for the “complex woman’s soul,” the less I saw or heard of it,
the better pleased I’d be. I simply wanted a woman who would join me in
being attracted by and absorbed in family life.

You are still smiling mockingly. But let me tell you a few secrets of
wisdom and happiness. First--Friendship is divine, but intimacy is the
devil himself--unless it is the intimacy of the family. Second--To love
your neighbor as yourself, he must be and must remain your neighbor,
that is to say, within hail, but not within touch. Third--Husband,
wife, and children are the only natural intimates--intimate because
they have the bond of common interest. The family that looks abroad
for intimates has ceased to be a family. Finally--A man who has his
wife and children for intimates has neither need nor time for other
intimates; and unless a man’s wife and children are his intimates, he
has, in fact, no wife and no children. Let me add, for the benefit
of--perhaps of you and your husband, gentle reader--that the only
career worth having is built upon and with efficient work; careers made
with friendships, gaddings, pulls, and the like would better be left
unmade.

You are smiling still, in your smug, supercilious fashion--smiling
at what you promptly call old-fashioned trite truisms. I am not
sure that, after they have been thought about a while, they would
seem old-fashioned or stale. Rather, I flatter myself, they are
the statement of a new philosophy of life. For the old theory
with which you are confusing these truths was that the family is
the _social unit_. In fact, it is not; the only _social_ units
are individuals--capable individuals. My theory, or rather my
philosophy--for it is more than a theory--my philosophy is that the
family is the _unit of happiness_. Society can--and does--get along
fairly well with little or no happiness. But happiness is an excellent
thing, nevertheless. And _I_ wanted it.

Now, perhaps, you see why I was not looking forward with any exuberance
of optimism to finding the woman whom I needed and wanted, and who
needed and wanted me. Prompted by my experiences and guided somewhat
by my shrewd and cynical friend Bob Armitage, I had been giving no
small amount of spare time to observing and thinking about the American
woman. And while I admired that charming lady and found her an amusing
companion for an occasional leisure hour, I saw that she was not to be
taken seriously by a serious person. She knew how to look well, how
to make a good “front,” how to get perhaps a hundred dollars worth of
pleasing surface results by squandering a thousand or two thousand
dollars. As an ornament, a decoration, as a basket of rare inedible
fruit to irradiate lovely costliness, she could not be beaten. As wife
to a showy plutocrat, ignorant of the art of comfortable living, as
head mistress to an European noble with servants trained to maintain
his state in splendid and orderly discomfort, she would do excellently
well. But not for the practical uses of sensible life. She had no
training for them, no taste for them, no intention of adapting herself
to them, whatever she might pretend in order to catch a bill-payer.

Still, I did not despair. I dared not despair. If I had,
loneliness--and heartache, yes, heartache--and my sense of present and
future futility would have become intolerable. On the other hand, while
there was every reason for haste--when happiness was my goal, and life
is short and uncertain--I was resolved to be deliberate. If I should be
deceived--perhaps by the girl’s honest self-deception--into choosing
wrong, how she would hate me! For not again would, or could I let a
woman use me as Edna had used me. A fool is a grown-up person who has
never grown up. I had grown up--had become a definite person, knowing
what I wanted and what I did not want. Such persons are hated by those
who try in vain to use them. My one chance lay in finding a woman with
the same definite tastes as mine. Only disaster could come through the
woman who might marry me, pretending to agree with me and secretly
resolved to “redeem” me once she got me firmly in her grasp.

Armitage was back in New York, was eager to resume our old relations.
But that could not be. I had outgrown him. And he, at the dangerous
age, was allowing himself to harden into all the habits of the rich
class and of middle life. Despite his efforts to conceal it, I saw
that he had even reached the pass where a man of property regards a
new idea as a menace to society. If it is a new invention, it may make
some stock he owns worthless. If it is a new social or political idea
it may make his laborers demand higher wages, or in some other way
affect his dividends. And, of course, whenever a man speaks of a menace
to society, he means a menace to himself whom he naturally regards as
the most precious and vital thread in the social fabric. Compelled by
my need for ideas to occupy me in supplement to the now thoroughly
familiar and rather monotonous routine of investing and reinvesting,
organizing and reorganizing, I was associating more and more with
artists and writers of the sort who feel suffocated in the society of
the merely rich.

Material conditions force upon men inexorable modes of life. And every
mode of life breeds a definite, distinct set of ideas. Men fancy
themselves original because they suddenly discover certain ideas in
their brains. As well might a hen who has just eaten hot bran fancy
herself original because she laid an egg. The idea was not from the
man, but from his material conditions--lawyer idea, politician idea,
banker idea, anarchist idea, big or little merchant idea, dog-fighter
idea, professor idea, preacher idea, and so on. I was fighting to
escape this to me repellent molding process--and I was making headway.
But poor Armitage was rapidly yielding; his struggle, I fear, had been
in its best days in large part a brassy make-believe--the valor of the
trumpet, not of the sword.

He was a sorry sight. His once handsome face was taking on that petty,
pinched, frost-bitten Fifth Avenue expression. And he had been driven
for companionship into forming the familiar parasite circle. The chief
figures in it were a decaying dandy of an old New York family who had
been fawner and crumb snapper all his days, and a broken-down plutocrat
who had squandered his fortune on fine women, fine wine, and fine food.
The dandy gave Bob the fashionable gossip; the broken-down plutocrat
gave him the gossip and scandal of the giddy part of town, also the
latest gamey stories; also he--perhaps both--arranged for him the
peculiar pleasures of the rich man with the palate that needs strong
sensations to make it respond.

Armitage was out of the question for me. Then----

I drifted into the Amsterdam Club one evening--to write a note or send
a telegram--and there sat Hartley Beechman. The instant he saw me he
sprang up and made straight for me. His expression was puzzling, but
not hostile--still, I was unobtrusively ready. Said he in a straight,
frank fashion:

“Loring, I want to apologize to you. I made a damned ass of myself
in Green Park last summer. My excuse is that I was more than half
crazy----”

I put out my hand. “I half guessed at the time,” said I. “I know all
about it now.”

We looked at each other with the friendliness that has become the
stronger by a mended break--for broken hearts and broken lives and
broken friendships are much the stronger if the break mends. Said he:

“One way of measuring the strength of a man is the length of the
intervals between the times when he makes a fool of himself about a
woman. My first came at eighteen, my next at thirty-eight. Not a bad
showing, I flatter myself--eh?”

“Uncommonly good,” said I.

“And the second shall be the last.”

“Optimism!” I warned him laughingly. “Beware of optimism!”

“No. I shall write about women, but I’ll see no more of them. I’ve
got hold of myself again. I’m as good as ever--better than ever,
probably. But--it cost! And I’ll not pay that price again. For a while
I thought it was you who had upset my happiness. Then--” He gave a
loud, unnatural laugh--“That German purchase! I saw she had been simply
playing with me. You know how fond women of that sort are of playing
with romantic or sentimental ideas. But when it came to the test--why,
she would have married only a fortune or a title.”

I made no comment. He was saying only what I thought, what I believed
true. But I hated to hear it.

“I may wrong her,” pursued he reflectively. “Not altogether, but to a
certain extent. I rather think the impulse to something saner and less
vulgar was there--actually there.”

As he was looking at me inquiringly I said: “I think so.”

“But--nothing came of it. And there’s little in these fine impulses of
which nothing comes.”

“Little?” laughed I. “Why, they produce the most beautiful decorative
effects. Life would be barren without them. What a repulsive sight
the poor little human animal would be, grunting and grubbing about,
thinking always of its beloved self--what a repulsive sight if it
didn’t wear the flowers of high ideals in its ears--and the jewels of
fine impulses ringed in its nose.”

“_I_ think it would look better without them,” said he. “Less
ridiculous--less contemptible.”

“To you--yes. Because you’re like I am--coarse. But not to itself and
its fellows.”

“I’m going back to the woods to-morrow,” said he.

“Better come on a yachting trip to South America with me,” said I.

He flushed. “Thank you--but I can’t do that,” replied he. “I can’t
afford it.”

It was my turn to flush. “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I spoke without
thinking--spoke on impulse. You are quite right.”

“A man’s a fool or a sycophant who goes where he can’t pay his own
way,” continued he. “I’ve come to realize that. I’ll do it no more.
I’ll stick to my own class. I’ve been justly punished for blundering
out of it. But not so severely punished as I should have been had my--”
he smiled ironically--“my love affair prospered.”

He thought for several minutes, then he said: “I wonder--when the clash
came--would I have gone with her or she with me?”

I did not reply.

He pulled himself together, smiled mockingly at his own folly of
lingering near the unsightly and not too aromatic corpse. “I must get
into the woods and breathe it out of my system. Did you see the account
of the arrangements for her approaching marriage in this evening’s
paper? Nearly a page--and I read every line.”

When he had finished his drink he rose and departed--and I have not
talked with him since. He resumed his career; we all know how brilliant
it is. As I have said before, I have no sympathy with the silly notion,
bruited about by silly flabby people that women ruin the lives of
strong men. Now and then a woman may be the proverbial last straw that
breaks the camel’s back. But there’s a vast difference between woman
the actuality, woman the mere last straw, and woman the vampire, the
scarlet destroyer as portrayed in novels and so-called histories. Those
mighty men, made or ruined by women--why do we never _see_ them, why do
we only read about them?

I resisted the temptation to follow Beechman’s example and read the
newspaper account of Mary Kirkwood’s approaching apotheosis into the
heaven that is the dream of all true American ladies. There is but
one way to do a thing--and that is to do it. I had destroyed or sent
back the letters; I had resisted the telegram. I could not yet bar my
mind from wandering to her. But I could avoid leading it to her--and
I did. So it was by accident that, the following week, I one morning
let my eye take in the whole of a four-line newspaper paragraph before
I realized what it was about. The purport was that the engagement
between Count von Tilzer-Borgfeldt and Mrs. Kirkwood had been broken
off because of a “failure to agree as to settlements.” This, in the
same newspaper that contained two columns descriptive of the quietly
gorgeous marriage of Frascatoni and Edna in my son-in-law’s new house
near London.

“Failure to agree as to settlements--” Faugh!

I had calmed until all my anger against her was gone and I was thinking
of her as merely human, as the result of her environment like everyone
else. I believed now that where she had deceived me she had also
deceived herself. And I saw as clearly as in the days of my infatuation
that she and I had been made for each other, that our coming together
had been one of those rare meetings of two who are entirely congenial.
It filled me with sadness that fate had not been kind instead of
sardonically cruel, had not brought us together ten years earlier,
before the world had poisoned her originally simple and sincere nature.
But how absurd to linger over impossible might-have-beens! I had gone
as far as I cared to go in the company of those who have made fools of
themselves for love.

I believed I could trust myself with her in the same neighborhood. But
I was not sure, and I would take no chance. A few days after I read of
the broken engagement I departed on the yachting trip to South America.




XIV


There were but two in my party--Dugdale, the playwright, and myself.
A more amusing man than Dugdale never lived. He was amusing both
consciously and unconsciously. A mountain of a man--bone and muscle,
little fat. He had eyes that were large, but were so habitually
squinted, the better to see every detail of everything, that they
seemed small; and his expression, severe to the verge of savageness,
changed the instant he spoke into childlike simplicity and good humor.
He made money easily--large sums of money--for he had the talent for
success. But he spent long before he made. I think it must have been
his secret ambition to owe everybody in the world--except his friends.
From a friend he never borrowed. The general belief was that he had
never paid back a loan--and I have no reason to doubt it. What did he
do with his borrowings? Loaned them to his friends who were hard up. If
the list of those he owed was long, the list of those who owed him was
longer. If he never paid back, neither was he ever paid.

He could work at sea, or anywhere else--no doubt even in a balloon.
On that trip he toiled prodigiously, crouched over a foolish little
table in his cabin, smoking endless cigarettes and setting down with
incredible rapidity illegible words in a tiny writing that contrasted
grotesquely with the enormous hand holding the pencil. He labored
altogether at night, after I had gone to bed. He was always astir
before me. He slept unbelievably little, probably kept up on the
quantities of whisky he drank. However that may be, he was as active by
day physically as he was mentally by night. He was all over the boat,
always finding something to do--something for me as well as for himself.

The only terms on which Dugdale would consent to go were that I should
keep him away from New York not less than two months, and that I
should take no one else. I promptly assented to both conditions. It
was not the first time he had put me under a heavy debt of gratitude
for congenial society. We had made several long trips together, always
with satisfaction on both sides. Whatever else you may think of me, I
hope I have at least convinced you that I am not one of those rich men
who rely for consideration upon their wealth. I believe I am one of the
few rich men who can justly claim that distinction. When I ask a man
less well off than I am to dine with me--or to accept my hospitality
in any way--I ask him because I want him. And I do not either directly
or indirectly try to make him feel that he is being honored. I would
not ask the sort of man who feels honored by being in the society of
bank accounts or of any other glittering symbols in substitute for
good-fellowship.

You will see, gentle reader, that my list was short indeed.

It is one of the not few drawbacks of riches that they rouse the
instinct of cupidity in nearly all human beings. The rich man
glances round at a circle of constrained faces, each more or less
unsuccessfully striving to veil from him the glistening eye and the
watery lip of the gold hunger. Probably you know how pepsin is got for
the market--how they pen pigs so that their snouts almost touch food
which they can by no straining and struggling reach; how the unhappy
creatures soon begin to drip, then to slobber, then to stream into
the receiving trough under their jaws the pepsin which the sight of
the food starts their stomachs to secreting. As I have looked at the
parasite circles of some of my friends I have often been reminded of
the pepsin pigs. Some of my friends like these displays, encourage them
in every way, associate solely with pepsin pigs. I confess I have never
acquired the least taste for that sort of entertainment.

I have traveled the world over, and everywhere I have found men either
industriously engaged in cringing or looking hopefully about for some
one to cringe to them. Well--what of it?

I owe Dugdale a debt I cannot hope to repay. He, a light-hearted
philosopher, made me light-hearted. He kept my sense of humor and my
sense of proportion constantly active. There is a stripe of philosopher
of the light-hearted variety who lets his perception of the fundamental
futility of life and all that therein is discourage him from everything
but cynical laughter at himself and at the world. That sort is a
shallow ass, fit company for no one but the bleary, blowsy wrecks to
whose level he rapidly sinks. Dugdale--and I--were of the other school.
We did not--at least, not habitually--exaggerate our own importance.
It caused no swelling of the head in him that his name was known
wherever people went to the theater, or in me that I usually had to be
taken into account when they did anything important in finance. We did
not measure the world or rank its inhabitants according to the silly
standards in general use. But at the same time we appreciated that to
work and to work well was the only sensible way to pass the few swift
years assigned us.

It takes a serious man to make even a good joke. A frivolous person can
do nothing. That is why so many of our American women, and so many of
the men, too, sink into insignificance as soon as the first freshness
of youth is gone from them. Youth has charm simply as youth because it
seems to be a brilliant promise. When the promise goes to protest the
charm vanishes.

I shall reserve what I saw and heard in South America for another
volume, one of a different kind. I shall go forward to the following
spring when I was once more in New York. Edna and her daughter--so
I read in the newspapers--were living in fitting estate in a famous
villa they had taken in the fashionable part of the south of France,
“for the health of the two young sons of the marchioness.” Frascatoni
was gambling at Monte Carlo, Crossley was at his government post in
London. I could fill in the tiresome details for both the wives and the
husbands--and so, probably, can you. While some business matters were
settling, I was turning over in my mind plans for making a systematic
search for a wife.

I count on your amusement confidently, gentle reader. If you wished a
fresh egg for your breakfast or a suit of clothes to be worn a few
weeks and discarded, or an automobile, you would set about getting it
with some attention to the best ways and means. But, saturated as you
are with silly sentimentalities about marriage, you believe that the
most important matter in the world--the matter which determines your
own happiness or unhappiness and also the current of posterity--you
believe that such a matter should be left to the lottery of chance!
Well, I had long since abandoned that delusion, and I purposed to
establish my life with as much thought and care as I gave all other
matters.

“A dull fellow,” you are saying. “No wonder his wife fled from him.”

I do not wonder that you regard as dull anything that is intelligent.
To ignorance intelligence must necessarily seem dull. When any subject
of real interest is brought up, some silly, empty-headed pretty woman
is sure to say, “How dull! Let’s talk of something interesting.” And
there will always be a chorus of laughing assent--because the woman is
pretty. So I accept your sneer at me with a certain pleasure. I wish
to be thought dull by some people, including some women very good to
look at. But out of vanity and in fairness to Edna I must acquit her of
having thought me dull--after she had been about the world.

One evening at the Federal Club I fell in with my old acquaintance,
Sam Cauldwell, the fashionable physician. He was something more than
that--or had been--but was too lazy to use his mind when his gift
for sympathetic and flattering gab brought him in plenty of money.
Cauldwell was a trained, thoroughgoing sycophant and snob. But he saw
the humorous aspect of the gods he was on his knees before--and saw the
humor of his being there. He knew the kind of man I was, and liked to
take me aside and make sport of his deities for an hour over a bottle
of wine. Also--he liked the idea of being, and of being seen, intimate
with a man conspicuous for wealth and for the social position of his
family--the ex-husband of a princess, the father of a marchioness.
Gentle reader, if you wish to see human nature to its depth, you
must occupy such a position as mine. Believe me, you are mistaken in
thinking the traits you shamedly hide are unique. There are others like
you--many others.

Cauldwell was perhaps ten years older than I, but being a
well-taken-care-of New Yorker, he passed for a young man--which,
indeed, he was. I do not regard fifty as anything but young unless it
insists upon another estimate by looking older than it really is. I
shall assuredly be young at fifty, perhaps younger than I am now, for
I take better care of my health every year--and I have health worth
taking care of. But, as I was about to say, Cauldwell had a meditative
look that night as we sat down to dinner together. And when he had
drunk his third glass of champagne he said:

“Loring, why the devil don’t you get married?”

I felt that he had something especial to say to me. I answered
indifferently, “Why don’t _you_?”

“Very simple,” replied he. “Not rich enough. To marry in New York a man
must be either a pauper or a Crœsus.”

“Then marry a rich girl,” said I.

“I’d have done it long ago if I could,” he confessed with a laugh. “But
I’ve never been able to get at the girls who are rich enough. Their
mammas guard them for plutocrats or titles. But you-- Really, it’s a
shame for you to stay single. I know a dozen women who’re losing sleep
longing for you--for themselves, or for some lovely young daughter.”

“Pathetic,” said I.

“I see that irritates you. Well--you needn’t be alarmed. You’re famed
for being about the wariest bird in the preserves. And I know you don’t
want that kind of woman. Why not take the kind you do want?”

“Where is she?” said I.

“I could name a dozen,” rejoined he. “But I shan’t name any. I have one
in mind. A doctor has the best opportunity in the world to find out
about women--about men, too--the truth about them.”

I laughed. “If I wanted misinformation about human nature,” said I,
“I’d go to a doctor--or a preacher. They’re the depositories of all the
hysterical tommyrot, all the sentimental lies that vain women and men
think out about themselves and their sex relations.”

His smile was not a denial. “Yes, I’ve been rather credulous, I’ll
admit,” said he. “And men and women do tell the most astounding
whoppers about themselves. Especially women, having trouble with their
husbands. I try not to believe, but I’m caught every once in a while.”

A gleam in his eye made me wonder whether he wasn’t thinking of some
yarn Edna had spun for him about me. Probably. There are precious few
women, even among the fairly close-mouthed, who don’t take advantage
of the family doctor to indulge in the passion for romancing.

“But I wasn’t thinking of any confession,” he went on. “Several women
have confessed a secret passion for you to me--with the hope that I’d
help them. The woman I have in mind isn’t that sort. I don’t know that
she cares anything about you. I only know that she’s exactly the woman
for you.”

“Interesting,” said I.

“She’s young--unusually pretty--and in a distinguished way. She knows
how to run a house as a home--and she’s about the only woman I know in
our class who does. She’s got a good mind--not for a woman, but for
anybody. And she needs a husband and children and a home.”

He must have misunderstood the peculiar expression of my face, for he
hastened on:

“Not that she’s poor. On the contrary, she’s rich. I’d not recommend a
poor girl to you. Poor girls can think of nothing but money--naturally.”

“Everybody, rich and poor, thinks of money--naturally,” said I.

“Guess you’re right,” laughed he. “But it _looks_ worse in a poor girl.”

“I should say the opposite. A feeding glutton looks worse than a
feeding famished man.”

“At any rate--this woman I have in mind isn’t poor. That’s not a
disadvantage, is it?”

“Not a hopeless obstacle,” said I. “By the way, what _are_ her
disadvantages?”

“Well--she’s been married before.”

“So have I,” said I.

“But, on the other hand, she has no children.”

“Neither have I,” said I, without thinking. I hastened to add, “My only
child is married.”

“And splendidly married,” said he with the snob’s enthusiasm.

“To return to the lady,” said I dryly. “Why don’t you marry her
yourself?”

He had drunk several more glasses of the champagne. He laughed. “She
wouldn’t look at _me_. She sees straight through me. She wants a
man with domestic tastes. I’m about as fit for domestic life as a
fire-engine horse for an old maid’s phæton.”

“Well--who is it?” said I.

“I’m afraid you’ll think she’s been at me to help her. But, on my
honor, Loring, she isn’t that sort. We’ve talked of you. For some
reason, ever since I’ve known her--well, I’ve never seen her without
thinking of you. I often talk of you to her--not marrying talk--I’d not
dare--but in a friendly sort of way. She listens--says nothing.”

“But she is sickly,” said I.

“Sickly?” he cried. He looked horrified and amazed. “Good Lord, what
gave you that notion?”

“You said you saw her often.”

“Oh, I see. It was her brother who had the illness.”

“All right. Bring her round and I’ll look her over,” said I carelessly.
And I forced a change of subject.

Had Mary Kirkwood been taking this agreeable, insidious doctor into
her confidence? I did not know. I do not know. I have reasons for
thinking he told the literal truth. And yet--women are queer about
doctors. However, that’s a small matter. The thing that impressed me,
that agitated me as he talked, was the picture he, by implication,
was making of Mary Kirkwood, alone again, and evidently absolutely
unattached--living alone in the country as when I first knew her.

I tossed and fretted away most of the hours of that night with the
result that at breakfast I resolved to leave town again, to put the
width of the continent or of the ocean between me and temptation to
folly. But one thing and another came up to detain me. It was perhaps
ten days later that I, walking alone in the Park, as was my habit,
found myself at a turning face to face with her. I don’t think my
expression reflected credit upon my boasted self-control. As for her--I
thought she was going to faint--and she is not one of the fainting
kind. We gazed at each other in fright and embarrassment, and both
had the same child’s impulse to turn and fly--one, of those sensible,
natural instincts for the shortest way out of difficult situations that
the cowardly conventionality of the grown-up estate makes it impossible
to obey. But--we had to do something. So, we laughed.

She put out her hand; I took it. “How well you are looking,” said
I--and it was the truth.

“You, too,” said she.

I turned to walk with her. We strolled along cheerfully and
contentedly, talking of the early spring, of flowers, and birds, and
such neutral matters. I was fluent, she no less so. Our agitation
disappeared; our sense of congeniality returned. Our acquaintance
seemed to have lumped back to where it was before we had that first
confidential talk together on the yacht. After perhaps an hour, as
agreeable an hour as I ever spent, she said she must go home, as she
had an engagement. On the way to the Sixty-fifth Street entrance the
conversation lagged somewhat. We were both busily resolving the same
thing--the matter of explanations. Now that I was seeing her again--a
wholly different matter from inspecting my defaced and smirched and
battered image of her--battered by the blows of my jealousy, and
anger, and scorn--now that I was seeing _her_ again, I could not but
see and feel that she was in reality a sweet and simple and attractive
woman. No doubt she had her faults--as all of us have--grave faults of
inheritance, of education, of environment. But who was I that I should
sit in judgment on her? I realized that I had judged her unjustly so
far as her treatment of me was concerned. Assuming that she was tainted
with snobbishness, assuming that her defects were as bad as I had
thought in my worst paroxysms, still that did not alter the charms and
the fine qualities.

“We are friends?” said I abruptly.

“I hope so,” said she. She added: “I know so.”

“Without discussion or explanation?”

“That is best--don’t you think?” replied she. “I am--not--not proud of
some things I did.”

“Nor I, of some things I did.”

“I should like to forget them--my own and yours.”

“I, too. And explanations do not explain. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

She smiled and nodded. She said:

“The latter part of the week I’m going back to the country. Perhaps
you’ll spend Saturday and Sunday there?”

“Thank you,” said I. “Let me know at the Federal Club if your plans
change.”

At her door we shook hands, but both lingered. Said she:

“I am glad we are friends again.”

“It was inevitable,” I replied. “We _like_ each other too well not to
have come round. Bitternesses and enmities are stupid.”

“And sad,” said she.

When we met again--at her house in the country--there was no
constraint on either side. We knew that neither of us had the power to
breach, much less to remove, the barrier between us. We ignored its
existence--and were content.

You may have observed that I have rarely been able to speak of Edna
without resentment. I shall now tell you why:

The friendship between Mary Kirkwood and me presently set the
newspaper gossips to talking. Our engagement was announced again and
again--the announcement always a pretext for rehashing the story of the
matrimonial bankruptcy through which each had passed. But as we were
above the reach of the missiles of the scandalmongers the worst that
was printed produced only a slight and brief irritation. This until
the Princess Frascatoni began her campaign of slander.

I shall not go into it. I shall simply say that she ordered one of
her hangers-on--one of the semi-literary parasites to be found in the
train of every rich person--to attack Mary and me as keeping up an
intrigue of long standing, the one that was the real cause of my wife’s
divorcing me. When I read the first of these articles I believed, from
certain details, that no one in the world but the Princess Frascatoni
could have inspired it. But with my habitual caution I leashed my
impetuous anger and did not condemn her until I had investigated. Is it
not strange, is it not the irony of fate that in every serious crisis
of my life, except one, I should have had coolness and self-control,
and that the one exception should have been when I loved Mary Kirkwood
and condemned her unheard? After all, I am not sure that love isn’t a
kind of lunacy.

Why did Edna engage in that campaign of slander? Why did she say
to everyone from this side the most malicious, the most mendacious
things about my relations with Mrs. Kirkwood--that she had ignored the
intrigue as long as she could for the sake of her dear daughter; that
it had driven her from New York, had forced her to get a divorce, and
so on through the gamut of malignant lying? There may perhaps be a clew
to the mystery in the failure of her second marriage--as a marriage,
I mean; not, of course, as a social enterprise, for there it was a
world-renowned success. If the clew is not in Edna’s emptiness of heart
and boredom, then I can suggest no explanation. I imagine she had been
hearing and reading the gossip about an impending marriage between
Mrs. Kirkwood and me until she had concluded that there must be truth
in it--and by outrageous slander she hoped to make it impossible.

The first effect was as she had probably calculated. Mary and I avoided
each other. Mary hid herself and would see no one. Armitage and I for
a time kept up a pretense of close friendship, or, rather, publicly
again pretended a friendship that had long since all but ceased. But
when the talk both in the newspapers and among our acquaintances grew
until the “at last uncovered scandal” was the chief topic of gossip, he
and I almost stopped speaking. You may wonder why he or I or both of us
did not “do something” to crush the absurd lie. Gentle reader, did you
ever try to kill a scandal? It is done in novels and on the stage; but
in life the silly ass who draws his sword and attacks a pestilent fog
accomplishes nothing--beyond attracting more attention to the fog by
his absurd and futile gesticulations. The world had made up its nasty
little mind that the relations between Mary Kirkwood, divorced, and
Godfrey Loring, divorced, were not, and for years had not been, what
they should be. And the matter was settled. I think Armitage himself
believed. I know Beechman believed, for he pointedly crossed the street
to avoid speaking to me.

I stood this for a month. Then I went down to Mary’s place on Long
Island.

You may imagine the excitement my coming caused among the honest
yeomanry gathered at the station--those worthy folk who peep and pry
into the business of their fashionable overlords, and are learning
to cringe like English peasants. I found Mary setting out for a
ride--through her own grounds; she was ashamed to venture abroad.
I came upon her abruptly. Instead of the terror and aversion I had
steeled myself to meet, I got a radiance of welcome that made my heart
leap. But in an instant she had remembered and was almost in a panic.

“Please send the groom away with the horse,” said I. “Let us walk up
and down here before the house.”

She hesitated, obeyed.

The broad space before the house was laid out in hedges and blooming
beds with a long, straight drive leading in one direction to the
highroad, in the other direction to stable, carriage house, and garage.
When we were securely alone I said:

“Have you missed me?”

“Our friendship meant a lot to me,” replied she.

“I have discovered that it’s the principal thing in my life,” said I.

We paced the length of the drive toward the lodge in silence. As we
turned toward the house again I said:

“I have chartered the largest yacht I could get--for a cruise round the
world.”

A pause, then she in a constrained voice: “When do you start?”

“Immediately,” I answered. “Perhaps to-morrow.”

She halted, leaned against a tree, and gazed out through the shrubbery.

“You’ve not been well?” said I.

“I never am, when I lose interest in life,” replied she. “You will be
gone--long?”

“Long,” said I. “Either we shall not see each other again for
years--or--” I paused.

After a wait of fully a minute she looked inquiringly at me.

“Mary,” said I, “shall we take a motor launch and go over to
Connecticut and be married?”

She began to walk again, I keeping pace with her. “It’s the only
sensible thing to do,” said I. “It’s the only way out of this mess. And
to-morrow we’ll sail away and not come back until--until we are good
and ready.”

I waited a moment, then went on, and I had the feeling that I was
saying what we were both thinking: “We’ve had the same experience--have
been through the same bankruptcy. It has taught us, I think--I hope--I
can’t be sure; human nature learns slowly and badly. But I see a good
chance for us--not to be utterly and always blissfully happy, but to
get far more out of life than either is getting--or could get alone.”

As we turned at the group of outbuildings she looked at me and I at
her--a look straight into each other’s souls. And then and there was
born that which alone can make a marriage successful or a life worth
the living. What is the difference between friendship and love? I had
thought--and said--that love was friendship in bloom. But as Mary and I
looked at each other, I knew the full truth. Love is friendship set on
fire. We did not speak. We glanced hastily away. At the front door she
halted. In a quiet, awed voice she said:

“I’ll change from this riding suit.”

And what did I say, gentle reader, to commemorate our standing upon
holy ground? I did no better than she. With eyes uncertain and voice
untrustworthy and hoarse I said:

“And tell your maid to pack and go to town with the trunks--go to the
landing at East Twenty-third Street. Can she be there by four or five
this afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll see you at the bay--at the launch wharf--in half an hour?
I’ve got to send off a telegram.”

“In half an hour,” said she, and with a grave smile and a wave of her
crop she disappeared into the house.

       *       *       *       *       *

At seven that evening we steamed past Sandy Hook. At ten--after an
almost silent dinner--we were on deck, leaning side by side at the
rail, near the bow. We were alone on the calm and shining sea. No land
in sight, not a steamer, not a sail--not a sign of human existence
beyond the rail of our yacht. Her arm slipped within mine; my hand
sought hers. Not a sail, not a streamer of smoke. Alone and free and
together.

       *       *       *       *       *

I forgive you, gentle reader. Go in peace.


THE END




TITLES SELECTED FROM

GROSSET & DUNLAP’S LIST

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list.


_THE SECOND WIFE._ By Thompson Buchanan. Illustrated by W. W. Fawcett.
Harrison Fisher wrapper printed in four colors and gold.

An intensely interesting story of a marital complication in a wealthy
New York family involving the happiness of a beautiful young girl.


_TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY._ By Grace Miller White. Illustrated by
  Howard Chandler Christy.

An amazingly vivid picture of low class life in a New
York college town, with a heroine beautiful and noble, who makes
a great sacrifice for love.


_FROM THE VALLEY OF THE MISSING._ By Grace Miller White. Frontispiece
  and wrapper in colors by Penrhyn Stanlaws.

Another story of “the storm country.” Two beautiful children
are kidnapped from a wealthy home and appear many years
after showing the effects of a deep, malicious scheme behind
their disappearance.


_THE LIGHTED MATCH._ By Charles Neville Buck. Illustrated by R. F.
  Schabelitz.

A lovely princess travels incognito through the States and
falls in love with an American man. There are ties that bind her
to someone in her own home, and the great plot revolves round
her efforts to work her way out.


_MAUD BAXTER._ By C. C. Hotchkiss. Illustrated by Will Grefe.

A romance both daring and delightful, involving an American
girl and a young man who had been impressed into English
service during the Revolution.


_THE HIGHWAYMAN._ By Guy Rawlence. Illustrated by Will Grefe.

A French beauty of mysterious antecedents wins the love
of an Englishman of title. Developments of a startling character
and a clever untangling of affairs hold the reader’s interest.


_THE PURPLE STOCKINGS._ By Edward Salisbury Field. Illustrated in
  colors; marginal illustrations.

A young New York business man, his pretty sweetheart,
his sentimental stenographer, and his fashionable sister are all
mixed up in a misunderstanding that surpasses anything in the
way of comedy in years. A story with a laugh on every page.

_Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction_




A FEW OF
GROSSET & DUNLAP’S
Great Books at Little Prices


WHEN A MAN MARRIES. By Mary Roberts Rinehart. Illustrated by Harrison
  Fisher and Mayo Bunker.

A young artist, whose wife had recently divorced him, finds that
a visit is due from his Aunt Selina, an elderly lady having ideas
about things quite apart from the Bohemian set in which her
nephew is a shining light. The way in which matters are temporarily
adjusted forms the motif of the story.

A farcical extravaganza, dramatised under the title of “Seven Days.”


THE FASHIONABLE ADVENTURES OF JOSHUA CRAIG. By David Graham Phillips.
  Illustrated.

A young westerner, uncouth and unconventional, appears in
political and social life in Washington. He attains power in politics,
and a young woman of the exclusive set becomes his wife, undertaking
his education in social amenities.


“DOC.” GORDON. By Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman. Illustrated by Frank T.
  Merrill.

Against the familiar background of American town life, the
author portrays a group of people strangely involved in a mystery.
“Doc.” Gordon, the one physician of the place, D. Elliot, his
assistant, a beautiful woman and her altogether charming daughter
are all involved in the plot. A novel of great interest.


HOLY ORDERS. By Marie Corelli.

A dramatic story, in which is pictured a clergyman in touch with
society people, stage favorites, simple, common village folk, powerful
financiers and others, each presenting vital problems to this man “in
holy orders”--problems that we are now struggling with in America.


KATRINE. By Elinor Macartney Lane. With frontispiece.

Katrine, the heroine of this story, is a lovely Irish girl, of lowly
birth, but gifted with a beautiful voice.

The narrative is based on the facts of an actual singer’s career,
and the viewpoint throughout is a most exalted one.


THE FORTUNES OF FIFI. By Molly Elliot Seawell. Illustrated by T. de
  Thulstrup.

A story of life in France at the time of the first Napoleon. Fifi,
a glad, mad little actress of eighteen, is the star performer in a third
rate Parisian theatre. A story as dainty as a Watteau painting.


SHE THAT HESITATES. By Harris Dickson. Illustrated by C. W. Relyea.

The scene of this dashing romance shifts from Dresden to St.
Petersburg in the reign of Peter the Great, and then to New Orleans.

The hero is a French Soldier of Fortune, and the princess, who
hesitates--but you must read the story to know how she that hesitates
may be lost and yet saved.




TITLES SELECTED FROM
GROSSET & DUNLAP’S LIST

REALISTIC, ENGAGING PICTURES OF LIFE


THE GARDEN OF FATE. By Roy Norton. Illustrated by Joseph Clement Coll.

The colorful romance of an American girl in Morocco, and
of a beautiful garden, whose beauty and traditions of strange
subtle happenings were closed to the world by a Sultan’s seal.


THE MAN HIGHER UP. By Henry Russell Miller. Full page vignette
  illustrations by M. Leone Bracker.

The story of a tenement waif who rose by his own ingenuity
to the office of mayor of his native city. His experiences
while “climbing,” make a most interesting example of the
possibilities of human nature to rise above circumstances.


THE KEY TO YESTERDAY. By Charles Neville Buck. Illustrated by R.
  Schabelitz.

Robert Saxon, a prominent artist, has an accident, while in
Paris, which obliterates his memory, and the only clue he has
to his former life is a rusty key. What door in Paris will it
unlock? He must know that before he woos the girl he loves.


THE DANGER TRAIL. By James Oliver Curwood. Illustrated by Charles
  Livingston Bull.

The danger trail is over the snow-smothered North. A
young Chicago engineer, who is building a road through the
Hudson Bay region, is involved in mystery, and is led into
ambush by a young woman.


THE GAY LORD WARING. By Houghton Townley. Illustrated by Will Grefe.

A story of the smart hunting set in England. A gay young
lord wins in love against his selfish and cowardly brother and
apparently against fate itself.


BY INHERITANCE. By Octave Thanet. Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty.
  Elaborate wrapper in colors.

A wealthy New England spinster with the most elaborate
plans for the education of the negro goes to visit her nephew
in Arkansas, where she learns the needs of the colored race
first hand and begins to lose her theories.




A FEW OF
GROSSET & DUNLAP’S
Great Books at Little Prices


QUINCY ADAMS SAWYER. A Picture of New England Home Life. With
  illustrations by C. W. Reed, and Scenes Reproduced from the Play.

One of the best New England stories ever written. It is
full of homely human interest * * * there is a wealth of New
England village character, scenes and incidents * * * forcibly,
vividly and truthfully drawn. Few books have enjoyed a greater
sale and popularity. Dramatized, it made the greatest rural play
of recent times.


THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF QUINCY ADAMS SAWYER. By Charles Felton Pidgin.
  Illustrated by Henry Roth.

All who love honest sentiment, quaint and sunny humor,
and homespun philosophy will find these “Further Adventures”
a book after their own heart.


HALF A CHANCE. By Frederic S. Isham. Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer.

The thrill of excitement will keep the reader in a state of
suspense, and he will become personally concerned from the
start, as to the central character, a very real man who suffers,
dares--and achieves!


VIRGINIA OF THE AIR LANES. By Herbert Quick. Illustrated by William R.
  Leigh.

The author has seized the romantic moment for the airship
novel, and created the pretty story of “a lover and his lass”
contending with an elderly relative for the monopoly of the
skies. An exciting tale of adventure in midair.


THE GAME AND THE CANDLE. By Eleanor M. Ingram. Illustrated by P. D.
  Johnson.

The hero is a young American, who, to save his family from
poverty, deliberately commits a felony. Then follow his capture
and imprisonment, and his rescue by a Russian Grand Duke. A
stirring story, rich in sentiment.




THE NOVELS OF
GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON


GRAUSTARK.

A story of love behind a throne, telling how a young
American met a lovely girl and followed her to a new and
strange country. A thrilling, dashing narrative.


BEVERLY OF GRAUSTARK.

Beverly is a bewitching American girl who has gone to
that stirring little principality--Graustark--to visit her friend
the princess, and there has a romantic affair of her own.


BREWSTER’S MILLIONS.

A young man is required to spend _one_ million dollars in
one year in order to inherit _seven_. How he does it forms the
basis of a lively story.


CASTLE CRANEYCROW.

The story revolves round the abduction of a young American
woman, her imprisonment in an old castle and the adventures
created through her rescue.


COWARDICE COURT.

An amusing social feud in the Adirondacks in which an
English girl is tempted into being a traitor by a romantic
young American, forms the plot.


THE DAUGHTER OF ANDERSON CROW.

The story centers about the adopted daughter of the town
marshal in a western village. Her parentage is shrouded in
mystery, and the story concerns the secret that deviously
works to the surface.


THE MAN FROM BRODNEY’S.

The hero meets a princess in a far-away island among
fanatically hostile Musselmen. Romantic love-making amid
amusing situations and exciting adventures.


NEDRA.

A young couple elope from Chicago to go to London
traveling as brother and sister. They are shipwrecked and a
strange mix-up occurs on account of it.


THE SHERRODS.

The scene is the Middle West and centers around a man
who leads a double life. A most enthralling novel.


TRUXTON KING.

A handsome good-natured young fellow ranges on the
earth looking for romantic adventures and is finally enmeshed
in most complicated intrigues in Graustark.




KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN’S
STORIES OF PURE DELIGHT

Full of originality and humor, kindliness and cheer


_THE OLD PEABODY PEW._ Large Octavo. Decorative text pages, printed in
  two colors. Illustrations by Alice Barber Stephens.

One of the prettiest romances that has ever come from this
author’s pen is made to bloom on Christmas Eve in the sweet
freshness of an old New England meeting house.


_PENELOPE’S PROGRESS._ Attractive cover design in colors.

Scotland is the background for the merry doings of three very
clever and original American girls. Their adventures in adjusting
themselves to the Scot and his land are full of humor.


_PENELOPE’S IRISH EXPERIENCES._ Uniform In style _with “Penelope’s
  Progress.”_

The trio of clever girls who rambled over Scotland cross the border
to the Emerald Isle, and again they sharpen their wits against
new conditions, and revel in the land of laughter and wit.


_REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM._

One of the most beautiful studies of childhood--Rebecca’s artistic,
unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle
of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal
dramatic record.


_NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA._ With illustrations by F. C. Yohn.

Some more quaintly amusing chronicles that carry Rebecca
through various stages to her eighteenth birthday.


_ROSE O’ THE RIVER._ With illustrations by George Wright.

The simple story of Rose, a country girl and Stephen a sturdy
young farmer. The girl’s fancy for a city man interrupts their love
and merges the story into an emotional strain where the reader follows
the events with rapt attention.




LOUIS TRACY’S
CAPTIVATING AND EXHILARATING ROMANCES

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list.


_CYNTHIA’S CHAUFFEUR._ Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.

A pretty American girl in London is touring in a car with
a chauffeur whose identity puzzles her. An amusing mystery.


_THE STOWAWAY GIRL._ Illustrated by Nesbitt Benson.

A shipwreck, a lovely girl stowaway, a rascally captain, a
fascinating officer, and thrilling adventures in South Seas.


_THE CAPTAIN OF THE KANSAS._

Love and the salt sea, a helpless ship whirled into the hands
of cannibals, desperate fighting and a tender romance.


_THE MESSAGE._ Illustrated by Joseph Cummings Chase.

A bit of parchment found in the figurehead of an old vessel
tells of a buried treasure. A thrilling mystery develops.


_THE PILLAR OF LIGHT._

The pillar thus designated was a lighthouse, and the author tells with
exciting detail the terrible dilemma of its cut-off inhabitants.


_THE WHEEL O’FORTUNE._ With illustrations by James
Montgomery Flagg.

The story deals with the finding of a papyrus containing
the particulars of some of the treasures of the Queen of Sheba.


_A SON OF THE IMMORTALS._ Illustrated by Howard
Chandler Christy.

A young American is proclaimed king of a little Balkan
Kingdom, and a pretty Parisian art student is the power behind
the throne.


_THE WINGS OF THE MORNING._

A sort of Robinson Crusoe _redivivus_ with modern settings
and a very pretty love story added. The hero and heroine, are
the only survivors of a wreck, and have many thrilling adventures
on their desert island.

_Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction_




B. M. Bower’s Novels
Thrilling Western Romances

Large 12 mos. Handsomely bound in cloth. Illustrated


_CHIP, OF THE FLYING U_

A breezy, wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and
Della Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip’s
jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue-eyed
young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of
the American Cow-puncher.


_THE HAPPY FAMILY_

A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of
eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst
them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative
powers cause many lively and exciting adventures.


_HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT_

A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Easterners
who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeliness
of a Montana ranch-house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the
fascinating Beatrice, and the effusive Sir Redmond, become living
breathing personalities.


_THE RANGE DWELLERS_

Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist.
Spirited action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo
and Juliet courtship makes this a bright, jolly, entertaining story,
without a dull page.


_THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS_

A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author,
among the cowboys of the West, in search of “local color” for a new
novel. “Bud” Thurston learns many a lesson while following
“the lure of the dim trails” but the hardest, and probably the most
welcome, is that of love.


_THE LONESOME TRAIL_

“Weary” Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional
city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with
the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of
large brown eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome love story.


_THE LONG SHADOW_

A vigorous Western story, sparkling with the free, outdoor,
life of a mountain ranch. Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play
the game of life fearlessly and like men. It is a fine love story from
start to finish.


Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction.

GROSSETT & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26TH ST., NEW YORK




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized or underlined text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.




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