The brother and sister dined alone. Clayton was, finding his club a more
comfortable place than his home, in those days of his wife's
disillusionment and hesitation about the future. Many weak creatures are
curiously armed for the unequal conflict of existence--some with
fleetness of foot, some with a pole-cat weapon of malignance, some with
porcupine quills, some with a 'possumlike instinct for "playing dead."
Of these last was Fitzhugh. He knew when to be silent, when to keep out
of the way, when to "sit tight" and wait. His wife had discovered that
he was a fool--that he perhaps owed more to his tailor than to any other
single factor for the success of his splendid pose of the thorough
gentleman. Yet she did not realize what an utter fool he was, so clever
had he been in the use of the art of discreet silence. Norman suspected
him, but could not believe a human being capable of such fathomless
vacuity as he found whenever he tried to explore his brother-in-law's
brain.
After dinner Norman took Ursula to the opera, to join the Seldins, and
after the first act went to Josephine, who had come with only a deaf old
aunt. Josephine loved music, and to hear an opera from a box one must be
alone. Norman entered as the lights went up. It always gave him a
feeling of dilation, this spectacle of material splendor--the women,
whose part it is throughout civilization to-day to wear for public
admiration and envy the evidences of the prowess of the males to whom
they belong. A truer version of Dr. Holmes's aphorism would be that it
takes several generations in oil to make a deep-dyed snob--wholly to
destroy a man's or a woman's point of view, sense of the kinship of all
flesh, and to make him or her over into the genuine believer in caste
and worshiper of it. For all his keenness of mind, of humor, Norman had
the fast-dyed snobbishness of his family and friends. He knew that caste
was silly, that such displays as this vulgar flaunting of jewels and
costly dresses were in atrocious bad taste. But it is one thing to know,
another thing to feel; and his feeling was delight in the spectacle,
pride in his own high rank in the aristocracy.
His eyes rested with radiant pleasure on the girl he was to marry. And
she was indeed a person to appeal to the passion of pride. Simply and
most expensively dressed in pearl satin, with only a little jewelry, she
sat in the front of her parterre box, a queen by right of her father's
wealth, her family's position, her own beauty. She was a large
woman--tall, a big frame but not ungainly. She had brilliant dark eyes,
a small proud head set upon shoulders that were slenderly young now and,
even when they should became matronly, would still be beautiful. She had
good teeth, an exquisite smile, the gentle good humor of those who,
comfortable themselves, would not have the slightest objection to all
others being equally so. Because she laughed appreciatively and repeated
amusingly she had great reputation for wit. Because she industriously
picked up from men a plausible smatter of small talk about politics,
religion, art and the like, she was renowned as clever verging on
profound. And she believed herself both witty and wise--as do thousands,
male and female, with far less excuse.
She had selected Norman for the same reason that he had selected her;
each recognized the other as the "grand prize." Pity is not nearly so
close kin to love as is the feeling that the other person satisfies to
the uttermost all one's pet vanities. It would have been next door to
impossible for two people so well matched not to find themselves drawn
to each other and filled with sympathy and the sense of comradeship, so
far as there can be comradeship where two are driving luxuriously along
the way of life, with not a serious cause for worry. People without half
the general fitness of these two for each other have gone through to the
end, regarding themselves and regarded as the most devoted of lovers.
Indeed, they were lovers. Only one of those savage tests, to which in
all probability they would never be exposed, would or could reveal just
how much, or how little, that vague, variable word lovers meant when
applied to them.
As their eyes met, into each pair leaped the fine, exalted light of
pride in possession. "This wonderful woman is mine!" his eyes said. And
her eyes answered, "And you--you most wonderful of men--you are mine!"
It always gave each of them a thrill like intoxication to meet, after a
day's separation. All the joy of their dazzling good fortune burst upon
them afresh.
"I'll venture you haven't thought of me the whole day," said she as he
dropped to the chair behind her.
It was a remark she often made--to give him the opportunity to say,
"I've thought of little else, I'm sorry to say--I, who have a career to
look after." He made the usual answer, and they smiled happily at each
other. "And you?" he said.
"Oh, I? What else has a woman to think about?"
Her statement was as true as his was false. He was indeed all she had to
think about--all worth wasting the effort of thought upon. But
he--though he did not realize it--had thought of her only in the
incidental way in which an ambition-possessed man must force himself to
think of a woman. The best of his mind was commandeered to his career.
An amiable but shakily founded theory that it was "our" career enabled
him to say without sense of lying that his chief thought had been she.
"How those men down town would poke fun at you," said she, "if they knew
you had me with you all the time, right beside you."
This amused him. "Still, I suspect there are lots of men who'd be
exposed in the same way if there were a general and complete show-down."
"Sometimes I wish I really were with you--working with you--helping you.
You have girls--a girl--to be your secretary--or whatever you call
it--don't you?"
"You should have seen the one I had to-day. But there's always something
pathetic about every girl who has to make her own living."
"Pathetic!" protested Miss Burroughs. "Not at all. I think it's fine."
"You wouldn't say that if you had tried it."
"Indeed, I should," she declared with spirit. "You men are entirely too
soft about women. You don't realize how strong they are. And, of course,
women don't resist the temptation to use their sex when they see how
easy it is to fool men that way. The sad thing about it is that the
woman who gets along by using her sex and by appealing to the
soft-heartedness of men never learns to rely on herself. She's likely to
come to grief sooner or later."
"There's truth in all that," said Norman. "Enough to make it dangerously
unjust. There's so much lying done about getting on that it's no wonder
those who've never tried to do for themselves get a wholly false notion
of the situation. It is hard--bitterly hard--for a man to get on. Most
men don't. Most men? All but a mere handful. And if those who do get on
were to tell the truth--the _whole_ truth--about how they
succeeded--well, it'd not make a pleasant story."
"But _you've_ got on," retorted the girl.
"So I have. And how?" Norman smiled with humorous cynicism. "I'll never
tell--not all--only the parts that sound well. And those parts are the
least important. However, let's not talk about that. What I set out to
say was that, while it's hard for a man to make a decent living--unless
he has luck--and harder still--much harder--for him to rise to
independence----"
"It wasn't so dreadfully hard for _you_," interrupted Josephine, looking
at him with proud admiration. "But then, you had a wonderful brain."
"That wasn't what did it," replied he. "And, in spite of all my
advantages--friendships, education, enough money to tide me over the
beginnings--in spite of all that, I had a frightful time. Not the work.
Of course, I had to work, but I like that. No, it was the--the
maneuvering, let's call it--the hardening process."
"You!" she exclaimed.
"Everyone who succeeds--in active life. You don't understand the system,
dear. It's a cutthroat game. It isn't at all what the successful
hypocrites describe in their talks to young men!" He laughed. "If I had
followed the 'guides to success,' I'd not be here. Oh, yes, I've made
terrible sacrifices, but--" his look at her made her thrill with
exaltation--"it was worth doing. . . . I understand and sympathize with
those who scorn to succeed. But I'm glad I happened not to be born with
their temperament, at least not with enough of it to keep me down."
"You're too hard on yourself, too generous to the failures."
"Oh, I don't mean the men who were too lazy to do the work or too
cowardly to dare the--the unpleasant things. And I'm not hard with
myself--only frank. But we were talking of the women. Poor things, what
chance have they got? You scorn them for using their sex. Wait till
you're drowning, dear, before you criticise another for what he does to
save himself when he's sinking for the last time. I used everything I
had in making my fight. If I could have got on better or quicker by the
aid of my sex, I'd have used that."
"Don't say those things, Fred," cried Josephine, smiling but half in
earnest.
"Why not? Aren't you glad I'm here?"
She gave him a long look of passionate love and lowered her eyes.
"At whatever cost?"
"Yes," she said in a low voice. "But I'm _sure_ you exaggerate."
"I've done nothing _you_ wouldn't approve of--or find excuses for. But
that's because you--I--all of us in this class--and in most other
classes--have been trained to false ideas--no, to perverted ideas--to a
system of morality that's twisted to suit the demands of practical life.
On Sundays we go to a magnificent church to hear an expensive preacher
and choir, go in expensive dress and in carriages, and we never laugh at
ourselves. Yet we are going in the name of One who was born in a stable
and who said that we must give everything to the poor, and so on."
"But I don't see what we could do about it--" she said hesitatingly.
"We couldn't do anything. Only--don't you see my point?--the difference
between theory and practice? Personally, I've no objection--no strong
objection--to the practice. All I object to is the lying and faking
about it, to make it seem to fit the theory. But we were talking of
women--women who work."
"I've no doubt you're right," admitted she. "I suppose they aren't to
blame for using their sex. I ought to be ashamed of myself, to sneer at
them."
"As a matter of fact, their sex does few of them any good. The reverse.
You see, an attractive woman--one who's attractive _as_ a woman--can
skirmish round and find some one to support her. But most of the working
women--those who keep on at it--don't find the man. They're not
attractive, not even at the start. After they've been at it a few years
and lose the little bloom they ever had--why, they've got to take their
chances at the game, precisely like a man. Only, they're handicapped by
always hoping that they'll be able to quit and become married women. I'd
like to see how men would behave if they could find or could imagine any
alternative to 'root hog or die.'"
"What's the matter with you this evening, Fred? I never saw you in such
a bitter mood."
"We never happened to get on this subject before."
"Oh, yes, we have. And you always have scoffed at the men who fail."
"And I still scoff at them--most of them. A lot of lazy cowards. Or
else, so bent on self-indulgence--petty self-indulgence--that they
refuse to make the small sacrifice to-day for the sake of the large
advantage day after to-morrow. Or else so stuffed with vanity that they
never see their own mistakes. However, why blame them? They were born
that way, and can't change. A man who has the equipment of success and
succeeds has no more right to sneer at one less lucky than you would
have to laugh at a poor girl because she wasn't dressed as well as you."
"What a mood! _Something_ must have happened."
"Perhaps," said he reflectively. "Possibly that girl set me off."
"What girl?"
"The one I told you about. The unfortunate little creature who was
typewriting for me this afternoon. Not so very little, either. A curious
figure she had. She was tall yet she wasn't. She seemed thin, and when
you looked again, you saw that she was really only slender, and
beautifully shaped throughout."