The little pale image of goodness so frequently seen sitting in
Cutter’s car before the bank waiting for him around five o’clock in the
afternoon was what remained of the original Helen two years after he
had relinquished his plan to live in New York.
Keeping an entirely good resolution may be strengthening to character,
but it is fearfully damaging to feminine beauty. For one thing such
women lose the sense of clothes. Helen had known how to dress in the
happy, wild-rose period of her youth; but how can you keep up the
flaunting, flowing sweetness of your draperies when you are no longer
a girl to be won, but have become a wife who has been reduced to her
duties and her virtues?
Still, things had not been as bad for her as she had expected they
would be. George was away from home now much of the time. He had
interests in New York and spent at least a part of every month there.
But she heard from him regularly, usually a wire, sometimes a brief
note. When he was at home, it was the same old routine, except that he
spent more time at the golf and country club.
The truth was that Helen got on his nerves frightfully with her silence
and dutifulness and patience. The impeccable wife is a difficult
proposition, if you tackle it. Cutter instinctively avoided the issue.
He accepted Helen for this awfully “better” woman than he had bargained
for. There was none of that human “worse” in her, so amply provided for
in the marriage ceremony, with which to vary the monotony of their life
together. Often he wished for a stormy scene, such as by nature married
people are entitled to have. If he was irritable, she left him alone.
If he was calm, she would come and sit and sew a fine seam in a sweet
silence that was perfectly maddening. If he flung the paper he was
reading on the floor, slammed his feet down and groaned, she would look
up at him, then drop her eyes once more to this seam--or she would rise
and leave the room noiselessly.
Good heavens! He could not stand it, meaning “her.” Why didn’t she
complain that he neglected her? Why didn’t she say something, show
some spirit? Why didn’t she appeal to his conscience? That was what a
wife was for--one thing, at least. If she would only show some fight,
he might regain control of himself; as it was, he was slipping. Why
couldn’t she see that and stop him? He really wanted to slow up; but
how was a man to do it with his wife letting him go like this?
Cutter was the kind of man who would eventually account for his
transgression by saying if he had married another sort of woman he
might have been a better man. In that case, you may be sure, if his
wife had married a totally different kind of man, she would have been a
happier woman.
Meanwhile Helen was prepared for the worst. This is a terrific
preparation, but sometimes the only one a woman can make; and it
leaves her in a singularly placid state of mind. If she had understood
the situation, she might have behaved differently. But she did not
understand Cutter.
The woman who knows only one man never knows much about him. To
understand a husband, you must do a lot of collateral reading of
mankind. He is all of them, from the best to the worst. You are not so
apt then to be mystified by his various manifestations. And if you have
any sense of the proper courage of your sex, you will act according to
his symptoms, not your own sanity, even if it is to burst into tears
and cry: “Undone! Undone! Oh, my God!”
He will fall for it and react every time; because God, upon whom you
have just called, no doubt having your emergencies in view, has created
men so that almost without exception they have no defense against a
weeping woman.
At the same time it is the worst possible governing principle not
to vary your tears with laughter, tyranny and some sort of lovely
unreasonableness. Men cannot endure a perfectly logical and sane woman.
She is too much like a petticoated edition of themselves. They want
action. You must keep your ball rolling, you must convince your husband
of your mental inferiority and of your tender superiority.
Helen, poor girl, was not that much smarter than her husband. She was
straight. She lacked the dearer deviousness of her sex, and, within her
limits, was utterly all to the good. Whether a state of unmitigated
morality is profitable is a thing I have always wanted to know. And
in the course of a long life, the only answer I have ever been able
to find is that any state bordering on immorality, or unmoralness, is
sure to prove unprofitable. The difference between these two equations
offered the only light at the time on Helen’s future.