“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.