I
"THE marriage law of the new dispensation will be: _Thou shalt not be
unfaithful--to thyself_."
A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze
of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from
his improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of
ladies. Westall's informal talks on "The New Ethics" had drawn about
him an eager following of the mentally unemployed--those who, as he had
once phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The
talks had begun by accident. Westall's ideas were known to be
"advanced," but hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of
publicity. He had been, in his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously
careful not to let his personal views endanger his professional
standing. Of late, however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to
dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in
the face of society; and the relation of the sexes being a topic always
sure of an audience, a few admiring friends had persuaded him to give
his after-dinner opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a
series of talks at the Van Sideren studio.
The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on the
fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly
valuable as accessories to the _mise en scene_ which differentiated his
wife's "afternoons" from the blighting functions held in long New York
drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends
whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was
skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure
and an easel create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to
maintain, and lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert
could paint, she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling
in some fresh talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the "artistic"
impression. It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall,
coaxing him, somewhat to his wife's surprise, into a flattered
participation in her fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren
circle, that all the audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who
pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter
who depicted purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were
tired of the conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.
Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage;
she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early
days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to
proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax
him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions
for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the first
burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly
account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her
impulses to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that
she did not care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by
the vulgar. In this connection, she was beginning to think that almost
every one was vulgar; certainly there were few to whom she would have
cared to intrust the defence of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was
precisely at this point that Westall, discarding his unspoken
principles, had chosen to descend from the heights of privacy, and
stand hawking his convictions at the street-corner!
It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed
upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment. In the first place,
the girl had no business to be there. It was "horrid"--Mrs. Westall
found herself slipping back into the old feminine vocabulary--simply
"horrid" to think of a young girl's being allowed to listen to such
talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and sipped an occasional
cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency which
made her appear the victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents'
vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something
ought to be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl's mother.
And just then Una glided up.
"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!" Una fixed her with large
limpid eyes. "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked with seraphic
gravity.
"All--what, my dear child?"
The girl shone on her. "About the higher life--the freer expansion of
the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self," she glibly recited.
Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.
"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what it's
all about!"
Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. "Don't _you_,
then?" she murmured.
Mrs. Westall laughed. "Not always--or altogether! But I should like
some tea, please."
Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed. As
Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully. It was
not such a girlish face, after all--definite lines were forming under
the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty,
and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock of ideas she would
have as her dower! If _they_ were to be a part of the modern girl's
trousseau--
Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one
else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she
felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism.
Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and Una's tea too sweet,
she set down her cup, and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes
had long been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but
only, as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically in a
larger flight. She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner
to which Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van
Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment
later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl's side.
She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the
depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him to
swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite.
Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.
On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his
wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. "Did I open their eyes a
bit? Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he asked gaily.
Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. "What _I_
wanted--?"
"Why, haven't you--all this time?" She caught the honest wonder of his
tone. "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not talking more
openly--before--You've made me feel, at times, that I was sacrificing
principles to expediency."
She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What made
you decide not to--any longer?"
She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. "Why--the wish to
please you!" he answered, almost too simply.
"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.
He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.
"Not go on--?"
"Call a hansom, please. I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden rush
of physical weariness.
Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally
hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once or
twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to another Saturday. She
felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence of his
concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a
conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her
hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let
them fall. It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!
That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
subject of his talk. He combined a man's dislike of uncomfortable
questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew
that if he returned to the subject he must have some special reason for
doing so.
"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put
the case badly?"
"No--you put it very well."
"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go
on with it?"
She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening
her sense of helplessness.
"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."
"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She
was not sure that she understood herself.
"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.
Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the
scene of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the
quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers
scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres,
recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of
her first marriage had been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and
upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece,
and a Greek slave in "statuary marble" between the folding-doors of the
back drawing-room. It was a room with which she had never been able to
establish any closer relation than that between a traveller and a
railway station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left that
other room--she was startled by the same sense of strangeness and
unfamiliarity. The prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old
porcelains, seemed to typify a superficial refinement that had no
relation to the deeper significances of life.
Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.
"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.
He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth.
The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face, which had a
kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the surface-refinement of its
setting.
"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.
"In our ideas--?"
"The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
stand for." He paused a moment. "The ideas on which our marriage was
founded."
The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure
now that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it was
founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his house to
examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of course--the house
rests on it--but one lives abovestairs and not in the cellar. It was
she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the
situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified
her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the
religion of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel the
need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage as
frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the primitive
needs of the heart, and needed no special sanction to explain or
justify it.
"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.
"Then I repeat that I don't understand. It was a part of your theory
that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of
marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?"
She hesitated. "It depends on circumstances--on the public one is
addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them
don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are attracted
simply by its novelty."
"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and
learned the truth from each other."
"That was different."
"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that such
things never _are_ discussed before young girls; but that is beside the
point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl in my audience
to-day--"
"Except Una Van Sideren!"
He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.
"Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--"
"Why naturally?"
"The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with her
governess?"
"If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in my
house!"
Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile. "I
fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself."
"No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it's too late."
"And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
self-defence?"
"What do you call the surest means of self-defence?"
"Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to the
marriage tie."
She made an impatient gesture. "How should you like to marry that kind
of a girl?"
"Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects."
She took up the argument at another point.
"You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect young
girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--" She broke
off, wondering why she had spoken.
Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the beginning of
their discussion. "What you tell me is immensely flattering to my
oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its effect. I can assure you
that Miss Van Sideren doesn't have to have her thinking done for her.
She's quite capable of doing it herself."
"You seem very familiar with her mental processes!" flashed unguardedly
from his wife.
He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.
"I should like to be," he answered. "She interests me."