Sadie Leitzel looked as though she were about to collapse with the
pressure of all that she had to communicate to Jennie when next morning
she returned alone, at noon, from a shopping excursion upon which she
had started out just after breakfast with Margaret.
Dropping her bundles upon the centre table in the sitting-room, where
Jennie sat in the bay window darning Daniel's socks, she dropped
herself upon the sofa with a long breath of mingled excitement and
exhaustion.
"Well, did she get her dress? And where is she at?" Jennie inquired.
"No, she didn't get her dress!" breathed Sadie, taking off, one by one,
her veil, gloves, hat, furs, overshoes, and coat. "I guess she didn't
have an _intention_ of getting a dress when she started out with me! I
had the hardest time to get her to even look at their things at
Fahnestock's. She seems to think, Jennie, that New Munich hasn't
anything good enough for her to wear!"
"Did she say that?" demanded Jennie.
"Well, when she had only just gave a careless glance at some of their
_ready_-made evening dresses, she shook her head and said to me,
'There's nothing here; I'll have to wait until I go to Philadelphia
some time.' And when I wanted her, then, to get goods and take it to
Miss Snyder, she said Fahnestock's had such a cheap, poor quality of
goods, not worth making up!"
"Well," pronounced Jennie, "I guess if our New Munich stores are good
enough for you and me, they're plenty good enough for as plain a
dresser as what she is! Our clothes are a lot dressier than hers! The
idea!"
"Yes, the very idea!"
"And after Danny's telling her he _wanted_ her to have a new dress!
And me telling her that her dresses that she's got give us all a shamed
face!"
"All she got new for herself," said Sadie, "was another pair of those
long white kid gloves at four-fifty a pair. I told her silk ones would
do just as good, and them you can wash. But she didn't listen to me;
she just took my hand and held it out to the saleslady and told her to
measure it and," added Sadie, a veiled pleasure coming into her eyes,
"she got _me_ a pair of long white kid gloves, too, and paid for them
out of that twenty-dollar check Danny gave her!"
"Oh!" cried Jennie, shocked, "when Danny gave it to her for a dress
yet! What'll he say anyhow?"
"She knows he's so crazy about her, she don't seem afraid to do
anything!" said Sadie.
"He'll soon stop giving her money if she spends it on other ones
instead of for what he tells her to buy!"
"Yes, I guess! But me--I never had any long white kid gloves before,
Jennie!" Sadie could not repress her beaming pleasure. "They'll feel
grand, I guess."
"Four-fifty is too much to put into a pair of gloves; your white silk
ones would do plenty good enough."
"But she got you a pair, too, Jennie! Here they are," added Sadie,
fumbling among her packages on the table. "She asked me your size and
got you a pair, too."
"I won't wear them! I'll get the money back and give it to Danny!"
declared Jennie, who, according to her lights, was as scrupulous as she
was "close." "It ain't right to Danny for her to squander his money
like that. My gracious! Thirteen-fifty for just gloves! You ought to
take yours back, too, Sadie!"
"But the saleslady tried one of mine on and stretched them," returned
Sadie, not very regretfully. "And mind, Jennie," she hastily diverted
her sister from her suggestion, "mind what she did with the rest part
of the twenty dollars!"
"What?" demanded Jennie.
"She spent every cent of it buying presents for her sister's children
in Charleston! When I told her Danny wouldn't like it at all for her
to do that, she said, 'Oh, but Daniel loves my little nephew and
nieces; he will be glad to have me send them something from us both';
and she put in the package a card, 'From Daniel and Margaret for the
three dearest babies in the world.'"
"My souls!" Jennie exclaimed. "What'll Danny say yet--her using up all
that twenty dollars and nothing to show for it!"
"Except three pairs of white kid gloves." Sadie shook her head
pensively, but still with a covert gleam of pleasure in her own share
of the "rake-off."
"Well," said Jennie with emphasis, "I'll certainly give her a piece of
my mind! Where is she at?"
"She said as it was twelve o'clock, she'd go to Danny's office and walk
home with him for dinner; and what do you think she gave me as her
reason for doing that?"
"Well, what?"
"She said she wanted a chance to see that Hamilton girl again that
works for our Danny! Did you ever?--when we all _told_ her already she
can't associate with Danny's clerk!"
"Well, Sadie," said Jennie grimly, "Margaret's easy-going and she
thinks we're the same. She'll have to learn her mistake, that's all.
She ain't going to run with that Hamilton girl, and that's all there is
to it! Enough said!"
"Och, Jennie, if you'd been along this morning you'd have wondered at
her the way she acts, speaking so awful friendly and pleasant to the
girls that waited on us in the store and even saying, 'Thank you, my
dear,' to a little cash-girl! Yes, making herself that familiar! And
then when Mrs. Congressman Ocksreider come along through the store and
I poked Margaret that she should stop and speak to her, Margaret just
nodded and walked right a-past her, though you could see that Mrs.
Ocksreider was going to stop and talk to us! And, Jennie, I wanted the
store-girls to see us conversing with Mrs. Ocksreider. I would have
stopped and talked with her myself, _whether_ or no, but she looked mad
and sailed right a-past me the way Margaret had sailed a-past _her_,
and I heard two girls at the button counter tittering and saying, 'Did
you ever get left?' I was so cross at Margaret, I told her, 'You
hardly spoke to her and she's Mrs. Congressman Ocksreider and worth a
half a million dollars!' and Margaret answered me, 'I didn't think she
was worth two cents any time I've talked with her. But if she's a
member of Congress! Why, Sadie, you are deceiving me, Pennsylvania is
not yet a Suffrage state!' she said, and I told her I didn't say it was
and certainly hoped it never would be. 'But,' I said, 'that's neither
here nor there, whether Pennsylvania's a Suffrage state! What _I_ wish
is that if you have to cut any one, let it be cash-girls and not our
most high-toned lady-friends,' I said."
"And what," asked Jennie, "did she answer to _that_?"
"She said, 'Oh, Sadie, I feel quite too humble to want to 'cut' _any_
one, even pretentious people like your Congressman's ordinary little
wife!' 'Well,' I said. '_You're_ got no need to feel humble, now that
you're married to our _Danny_!' But, Jennie," said Sadie, looking
bewildered, "think of calling Mrs. Ocksreider 'ordinary little wife!'"
"Well, I think! It was enough to give you the headache, Sadie, such a
morning as you've had!"
"But _do_ you think, mebby," Sadie asked, a little awe-struck, "that
Governors are higher than Congressmen--Margaret thinking herself better
than Mrs. Ocksreider yet!"
"It would look that way," said Jennie, also impressed.
"Here she and Danny come!" Jennie announced at the sound of the opening
of the front door. "They're _laughing_; so I guess he don't know yet
about that twenty dollars!"
"And I guess she listened to me after all," added Sadie, "about going
in there to his office and acting familiar with Miss Hamilton, or else
Danny wouldn't be _laughing_ with her!"
Had they known what had really taken place in Daniel's office while
they had been sitting here discussing Margaret (who, to tell the truth,
was far more of an enigma to them than they were to her), they would
have considered Daniel's laughter, just now, as he entered the house
with her, to be nothing short of lunacy.
A half-hour earlier Daniel, on returning to his private office from a
tour of inspection through his other offices, had heard, to his
surprise, from the adjoining room where his secretary was supposed to
be working, her voice in earnest conversation with some one. The door
between his room and hers was ajar and he could distinctly hear what
she was saying, the character of which was so far removed from any
phase of the legal business of his office that Daniel was dumbfounded.
It was sacrilege to introduce here anything that did not pertain
strictly to the work of the firm.
"The religious introspection," Miss Hamilton was saying, "so widely
engendered by Emerson's writings in men and women of a high type, has
come to seem to us, in these days, rather morbid; we consider it as
unwholesome, now, to think too much about our spiritual, as about our
physical, health. Then, too, the struggle for existence being sharper,
people have less time to sit down and investigate their souls; they've
got to keep going, or be left behind in the race."
"In their effort to win in the race, however--what they call
winning--they're very likely to lose their own souls; and 'What
profiteth it a man?'" spoke another voice in reply, a voice that
brought a quick flush to Daniel's face; a flush of strangely mingled
emotions: of anger that she was here with his secretary, and of the joy
with which the sound of her voice, the mere ripple of her skirts, never
failed to thrill him.
"The art of Mrs. Humphry Ward," Miss Hamilton was again speaking (he
had missed a connecting link through the shock of discovering
Margaret's presence), "has been a steady, upward growth and
development: every novel produced by her is more artistic than its
predecessor. But though her art is now at its climax, she is no longer
read as she used to be, because her point of view is one that the world
has passed by; the women of her books are the ideal feminine creations
of fifty years ago and they don't interest us any longer. Now most of
us have not yet grown up to Bernard Shaw's point of view, yet we are
nearer to him than to Mrs. Ward. To my mind the whole feminist problem
is an economic one. No man or woman can be spiritually free who is
economically dependent, Emerson and Marcus Aurelius and the Christian
Scientists to the contrary notwithstanding. Even the vote isn't going
to help women until they make up their minds to 'get off of men's
backs,' as Charlotte Perkins Gilman says."
"How about married women who are bearing children?" asked Margaret.
"They've got to be financially dependent on some one."
"Since the state does not support women who are giving citizens to it
and who are thereby disabled from self-support, they should have a
legal right over a fair proportion of their husband's income."
"But in America men don't need to be coerced by laws to treat women
generously," suggested Margaret.
"That's your Southern idea. A self-respecting human being does not
want generosity; she does not want to stretch out her hand and ask for
what she needs. It is humiliating, degrading. Fancy a grown woman
asking a man, '_May_ I buy a hat to-day?' I'd rather take in stairs to
scrub!"
"Well," Margaret returned, "I shall educate _all_ my daughters to
professions, because, quite apart from the economic side of it, women
become such drivelling fools when they live in aimless idleness, when
they have no definite interest in life. And they are so discontented
and restless. An occupation, an interest, surely makes for happiness
and for a higher personal development."
"I believe," said Miss Hamilton, "that a mother wrongs a daughter, just
as much as she would wrong a son, when she fails to educate her for a
self-supporting occupation. Look at these women of New Munich who live
only to kill time--how they lack the personal dignity, the character,
that a life of service, of _producing_, gives to either man or woman!
Of course mere work doesn't ennoble--beasts of burden can work--it's
work that vitally interests us, as you say, and that we love for its
own sake, that is the joy and health of any soul."
"Do you love being Mr. Leitzel's secretary like that?"
"Of course not. Being Mr. Leitzel's secretary is two thirds drudgery
and only one third humanly interesting. I'm threatening to take to the
platform to expound the Truth that women who have to support themselves
are invariably overworked, while women who live on men haven't enough
to do to keep them wholesome. Middle-aged married women, for instance,
whose children are grown up, go almost insane for want of an interest
in life. No wonder human creatures so situated grow fretful and petty
and small-souled."
"Perhaps the window-smashing Suffragette is only reacting from too long
want of occupation," suggested Margaret. "The emptiness of her life
makes her hysterical and she shrieks with rage and throws things! But,
my dear, why do you, clever as you are, remain in a position that is
two thirds drudgery? Drudgery is for dull people, who of course prefer
it to work that would tax them to think."
"It is a stepping-stone for me to the bigger work I shall some day do,
Mrs. Leitzel."
"What is that?"
"Something splendid!" Miss Hamilton responded in a voice of quite
girlish delight. "Something in which you shall have a share, if you
will, a very big share! I'll tell you all about it one of these days.
We haven't time now. It's lunch time and I have only a half-hour."
"When can we get together again?" Margaret eagerly asked. "I am just
living for these times with you!"
"And you must know," responded Miss Hamilton with feeling, "what they
mean to me, starved as I've been for companionship in a place like New
Munich! Well, I'm free every evening. And we could take walks any
afternoon between five and seven that you were not engaged."
"Then as soon as people have finished giving parties in my honour, I
shall be free to be with you as much as you'll let me be, Miss
Hamilton. I shan't have to go to parties that are not given specially
for me."
"Of course not. You couldn't keep it up. For a woman like you it
would be too deadly."
This, to Daniel, was a new and upsetting point of view; he was so sure
that all women in Miss Hamilton's position were envious of the social
rioting of women placed as his wife was. And here was Margaret
planning to discard "society" for evenings and rambles with his
stenographer! As if Miss Hamilton were not uppish enough already from
her constant offers of higher salaries! Why, even as it was, he could
hardly put up with her air of independence; and if he permitted his
wife to take her up as an intimate friend--well, of course he would
have to emphatically put a stop to the thing. He thought he had
expressed himself definitely enough to Margaret last Saturday while
they were automobiling, but evidently he had not.
"I'll make myself unmistakably clear this time!" he resolved. "I'll
let Margaret know that I am not accustomed to having my wishes set
aside as of no importance!"