IX

So it seems that there are times when a man may raise up a graven image

and worship it, and yet receive an answer to his prayer. For Anne did

not die.

At dawn they took him up into that unfamiliar room of hers, and led him

carefully to her bed so he would not strike against it, and after a time

they left him there. He hardly left it for weeks.

He spent hours, they said, locating the little things in the room, so

that whatever she wanted he could get it quickly for her. Before they

let her up, he had practised the movement from the bed to the chair

where she was to sit, so that when the time came he lifted her and

deposited her with one movement.

I am not trying to prove that he had changed fundamentally. He has never

done that. A good many people, by and large, detest him, and others only

tolerate him for his genius. For genius it is, of course. He still

blusters and bellows, he still boasts when he is happy and sulks when he

is hurt.

I have heard him enter the house at Saint Cloud—they are back there

now—and call Anne at the top of an angry and imperious voice. And I

have seen her come, as quietly as ever, and as ready to serve him.

But I have seen something of Anne in everything worth while that he has

done since. And whether he makes love to her or not, every new bit of

work he does is a love song to her, imperishable in marble or in bronze.

He will always be faithful to her, in his fashion.

IV

THE GREAT SUCCESS: The Singer

Yesterday I happened to read an editorial on careers for women, and when

I had finished I sat back and thought about the strange case of Peggy

Wentworth. That of course is not the name she has made famous, but it

happens to be her own.

Not that Peggy’s case was typical. I know of a good many women who have

been able to reconcile a substantial family life with distinguished

success in their own particular lines; who have reared creditable

families, been artists, wives and mothers at the same time, and

apparently were able to succeed in the one as well as in the other.

But for one I know who has been able to do this, ten have failed. The

younger generation is making better going of it, apparently, for the

younger generation of men has less of the old and now outgrown idea that

a man is not fully a man unless his wife is entirely dependent on him

for money. It is the older generation which has had to go through the

re-adjustment period, and Jim Wentworth belonged to that generation.

Even the older generation, of course, was more easily reconciled when

the woman earned while remaining in her home. The writing women, for

instance, have been able to manage their houses and raise their

children, and to get to their desks during school hours or after the

family bedtime, and apparently the only difference it has made in the

home life is that a good many of them have burned the candle at both

ends. Which explains, perhaps, why there are no great women writers.

They have had to give to their work the rag tag and bobtail of their

time.

But the theatrical women and the successful singers are different.

Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that writers are always more or

less anonymous figures; it is not themselves, but their work that

counts. The actress and the singer, when successful, achieve a personal

popularity. They belong, in a curious way, to the public.

This story of Peggy Wentworth’s covers a considerable space of years. It

is the story of a great success, with its rewards and penalties. But it

is, I have always felt, primarily a love story.

I met Peggy first in a _pension_ in Berlin—a bare place with cold

porcelain stoves and old furniture rubbed to the last degree of polish;

and she used to sing for us once in a while in the evenings, while the

two _fräuleins_ who ran the _pension_ knitted, and Peggy’s older sister,

Anne, sat with her hands folded in a sort of depressed silence.

Anne must have been almost forty at that time, a drab woman always badly

dressed, and with a curiously unhealthy looking skin. Peggy once told me

that Anne had been quite a pretty girl, but it was hard to believe.

“We were a big family,” Peggy said, “and when mother died Anne took hold

and raised us. She had a chance to get married once, but she felt she

shouldn’t leave.”

So it appeared that Anne had become the family martyr. Most families can

boast of one.

It appeared, too, that Anne had determined that there should be only one

martyr in the family, and that Peggy should have her chance. Just what

fierce saving had achieved it no one can know, but when Peggy’s voice

outgrew her local teachers Anne had somehow managed to take her abroad.

By the time I met them, however, Anne was beginning to doubt the wisdom

of her course. Peggy’s voice was doing all and more than had been

expected, and she was likely to get a chance to sing at the Munich Opera

House, with a prospect of Berlin later. But Anne was getting along in

life, and her ideas of what constituted happiness were changing.

In a word, out of her starved and impoverished years she had dreamed of

success and wealth for Peggy. But as time went on she began to feel less

sure that they would be enough.

I remember going into her room one night to find her sitting up in bed,

almost barricaded behind one of the thick, red-covered feather

mattresses which the _pension_ served out in cold weather, and which

covered either the legs or the body, but never both. She looked dreary

and old.

We talked of Peggy’s undeniable future, and Anne showed no enthusiasm

whatever.

“I brought her over,” she said, “but sometimes I’m sorry I did it.”

“Why?”

“Where is it going to take her?”

I said that if things went on as they were going, I believed that she

would be the greatest all-American prima donna; that she would, in that

case, earn vast sums of money, and that Anne herself would be extremely

proud of her. But Anne only looked at me from under eyelids that already

showed the fine wrinkles of her age.

“It depends on what you want out of life. Happiness, I should say.”

“Different people find happiness in different ways, Anne. With Peggy it

may be that to give pleasure to thousands—”

“Nonsense,” she broke, in bitterly. “I’m not talking about giving.

What’s she to get?” And before I could reply: “There are just three

courses open to a woman. There used to be only two. I’m a product of the

two period. I couldn’t go out and earn a living, so I stayed at home and

dried up.” She swept me with unhappy eyes. “I didn’t want Peggy to do

that, so I brought her over here. And I’m sorry I did.”

I remember that she said the three courses were marriage, a career, and

what she savagely termed “drying up.” And for reasons which she gave in

her monotonous voice, she had chosen the career course for Peggy.

“I represent the drying up,” she said. “And as to marriage—I’d seen my

own mother drudged to death with a house and children. I can look back

and see her, cooking and washing endless dishes. I’ve seen her beating a

heavy Brussels carpet. I’ve seen her hanging curtains at night while my

father read the newspaper, and putting the ladder into the cellar

herself afterwards. She used to mend after he’d gone to bed. After she

died, I did the same thing.”

“Then,” I objected, going back to careers, “you see only three courses

open for women, and all of them are unhappy?”

I was writing myself at that time, small inoffensive stories for the

cheaper magazines, and I felt called upon to defend both careers and

marriage, and even a combination of the two. But she remained unmoved.

“You’re different,” she said. “You’ve got your family already. And you

can work at home. A singer’s different, or an actress. If they get to

the top they stay in New York most of the time and have too much money.

Men don’t like that. And if they don’t succeed they have to travel most

of the time, and make a home in a hotel room. When they’re away too

much, their husbands are unfaithful.”

She had, you see, reduced it to a formula.

“There’s no trouble if a woman doesn’t want to marry,” she said. “It’s

when she tries to be two things at once that the trouble comes.”

“Peggy may not want to marry.”

She smiled grimly.

“With my example before her? Never. She wants to marry, and to have a

lot of children. But she wants to sing, too . . .”

Peggy made her American début at the Metropolitan in the early fall five

years later, and I need say nothing of her success. Only the other

night, while the family was away, I got out one of her records and

played it quietly. And suddenly I was back in the old _pension_, with

Peggy at the piano, and Anne sitting with her hands folded, watching her

with inscrutable eyes.

I wrote and asked Anne to spend the following Christmas with us, and she

accepted. Peggy’s five years in Europe since I had seen them had been

earning years, and the Anne I met at the station was a smarter Anne, not

with more assurance, for she had never lacked that, but with more poise.

She looked no older than before, and it was rather surprising to find

that she sometimes hesitated for a word, and then used its German

equivalent.

But she was very tired. The début had been a strain, and since Peggy’s

enormous success they had no privacy whatever.

“Of course, she belongs to the public now. She doesn’t particularly need

me now.”

“She always needs you. You know that.”

She gave me an odd glance, and changed the subject.

Anne fell into our quiet ways quickly, and with what seemed like relief.

She took what we felt was a rather pitiful pleasure in trimming the tree

on Christmas eve, and afterwards we sat in her room and talked. She had

brought an enormous photograph of Peggy in a silver frame, and it was on

her toilet table.

“She has grown very beautiful, Anne,” I said.

“Yes. That doesn’t do her justice.”

“I suppose she is very happy.”

“She’s rather—triumphant,” Anne said slowly; and after a pause: “She’s

going to be married.”

Her tone made me look up.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Do you like the man?”

“I do. That’s the trouble.” She smiled when she saw my face. “Not that

way; don’t worry. But I’m anxious. He’s a strong man, a—a real person.

And he’s madly in love with her. That will help for a while, but after

that—”

Her voice trailed off. “She’s making a lot of money,” she said after a

time, apropos of nothing.

“More than he does?”

“She will make more than he does. But it isn’t that; he has a good bit.

It’s that she belongs to the public pretty much now. She always will, as

long as she sings. He—you know what I mean. He’ll have to share her.”

“The money thing’s important, too, Anne.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “They like their women dependent.”

But she changed the subject soon. Peggy’s prosperity was a wonderful

thing for them all. She had bought her father a house, “a little place,

but it’s his, you know.” And a young brother still at home was to go to

Columbia, living at Peggy’s apartment while he did so.

“In that way I’m glad,” was Anne’s comment. “She’s giving us all a leg

up.”

It appeared that Peggy could afford to. She had already signed a

contract with a company, making phonograph records, and it meant a

considerable amount of money. Later, as she became even better

established, it would bring in a fortune. But Anne was not greatly

interested in the money end of Peggy’s success.

“The only value of money,” she said, “is independence. But of course to

father and Harry, and to me, it means dependence. I don’t resent it, but

it’s a fact.”

During the remainder of Anne’s visit I was able to gather a little, here

and there, as to Peggy’s love affair. I learned, for instance, that

Peggy had offered to abandon her career, but that Mr. Wentworth—Jim, as

Anne called him—had been unwilling to ask that sacrifice. Others had

made a go of it, he said, and they were going to put two

above-the-average minds to it. He seemed to have no anxiety

whatever. . . .

From its very nature, this record must be episodic. At intervals I saw

Anne or Peggy. Then, for long periods at a time I had to rest content

with newspaper knowledge. But with each period of contact the story took

a step forward.

For instance, the next one was at Peggy’s wedding. I had finished a

novel, and was in New York for a round of theatres and concerts, when

the invitation was forwarded to me. And I promptly accepted.

Peggy had taken a summer place up the Hudson, and they were married

there, outdoors. The full development of her beauty struck me when I

first saw her in her wedding dress, and there were a certain steadiness

and maturity about the eyes. Both their responses were clear and solemn,

and I noticed that that sort of reverential attitude persisted in them

both during the reception afterwards.

All of important musical America was there, and a scattering of

substantial business men and their families. The two groups did not mix,

however; after the ceremony the musical people, prosperous, a trifle

foreign, either by birth or affectation, noisily and demonstratively

enjoyed themselves, by themselves. Equally prosperous, militantly native

and rather ostentatiously quiet, Wentworth’s relatives and friends

likewise remained together. They were as far apart as the poles; two

worlds between which the orchestra pit was a gulf as wide as stellar

space.

Peggy and her husband moved hospitably between them, but I had an odd

impression that when they met it was as two emissaries, each from his

own camp, to which when the parley was over each would retire again.

Peggy sent for me when she went in to change into her travelling things,

sending the message by Anne, and I followed her into the house. Anne had

looked different to me throughout the afternoon; I could not tell just

how. But in the sunny hall, before we went upstairs, I discovered what

it was, and it rather shocked me. Anne had had her hair dyed.

She caught my eyes on it and gave her grim smile.

“Yes, my dear,” she said. “You’re right. How do you like it?”

“I don’t, very much, Anne dear.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Peggy nearly had a fit,” she told me. “I rather like it, myself. There

are a good many dyed heads out there.” She nodded through the open door.

“I’m just beginning to learn that age is an unnecessary liability.” But

she added, as we went up the stairs: “It’s frightfully expensive to keep

up.”

Looking back, I can see how symbolic that dyed hair of Anne’s actually

was. Up to that time she had been too busy, too anxious, too serious, to

think very much of herself. If she had regretted the passing of her

youth she had buried her regret. But now she was in a world which

worshipped youth and beauty, and which demanded of its women their

nearest approach to one or the other.

In the sheer instinct for survival Anne was beginning to think of

herself.

Probably nothing that day pointed the difference in Peggy’s worldly

affairs so clearly as her bedroom suite upstairs, compared with her

_pension_ room on the Alserstrasse. In the _pension_ there had been a

bare high room, cold and bleak even in summer; a narrow wooden bed; a

wardrobe; a washstand with bowl and pitcher, placed on a strip of brown

oilcloth; a chair or two, and leading into Anne’s chamber, a door

covered with wall paper to match the rest of the wall. Now—

* * * * *

In a large boudoir-dressing room, lined with built-in wardrobes with

glass doors, Peggy stood. Her toilet table was a litter of gold and

ivory. On a great _chaise longue_ a toy dog lay on a satin pillow, and

lounging beside him, cigarette in hand, was Mazzari, the tenor. Flowers

and bright cushions, tables with lamps, photographs in silver frames,

her wedding veil with its coronet of orange blossoms over the back of a

chair, made a luxurious litter.

Peggy herself was on the hearth rug, wrapped in a loose robe of quilted

rose satin. A maid in uniform was hovering over a dressing case, and

Peggy, quite oblivious of Mazzari, was dictating notes of thanks for

gifts to a secretary at a desk. She smiled at me and went on.

Anne sat down beside the tenor and borrowed a cigarette from him, eyeing

me with a sort of amused defiance.

“I’m on the downward path,” she told me, nonchalantly.

I had an impression that Anne was deliberately emphasizing to me the

least attractive side of her new environment; as if, recalling our talk

in Berlin, she was saying: “You saw us then and you see us now. This is

success. How do you like it?”

She was not jealous, at that period, of Peggy and the fulness of her

life. She was cynical, however, and somehow disillusioned, if she had

ever had any illusions.

“Mazzari has been married four times,” she said coolly. “That’s what a

voice can do.”

Peggy stopped dictating and saw Anne’s cigarette.

“Anne, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why? It can’t hurt _my_ voice.”

There was something in her tone, a faint acidity, a new note from her to

Peggy, that worried me. Anne had changed a great deal in her attitude

toward her sister. It was as though she said: “Don’t try any of the

_diva_ stuff on me. I know you. I remember Indiana, if you forget it,

and I made you what you are. Remember that.”

I was sorry for Anne, and angry with her. What was it? Jealousy? I have

said that it was not, but I am not so sure. Consider that the very

clothing Anne wore Peggy had paid for; remember Peggy’s success and the

fruits of that success; her beauty; the clamorous crowd that overran the

house and the garden; the gifts, ranged in rows of gold and silver and

what not on their long white-draped tables; the reporters and camera men

waiting below; the maid and the secretary; and Mazzari, the great, the

golden, sitting at his ease on the _chaise longue_, and figuratively at

the _Prima donna’s_ feet.

But eliminate all those, and remember only that in a room across the

hall Peggy’s husband was changing into his travelling clothes, and that

Peggy herself was about to enter that world Anne was denied, the

mysterious realm of love.

I began to see that while Peggy’s success had not touched her, it had

touched Anne, and on the raw.

Peggy finished her letters, and turned to Mazzari.

“Run away now, Luigi,” she said briskly. “I want to dress, and I want to

talk to an old friend.”

He got up slowly, for he was a corpulent man, and waddled to her.

“I am a very sad man to-day, my Peggy,” he said. “You should have chosen

me.” He took her hand and held it. “At least we speak the same language,

think the same thoughts.”

Peggy laughed.

“Language, yes. Thoughts! Don’t dare to say we think the same thoughts.”

He looked slightly flattered, and with a magnificent sort of gesture he

bent and kissed her hand.

“No,” he said, when he straightened. “Not the same thoughts. My best are

less than your worst. That is why I love you.”

He stooped over her hand again with a sort of ludicrous solemnity, bowed

and went with heavy dignity out of the room. Peggy looked at me and

smiled.

“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He doesn’t care for me, but he loves

to dramatise himself. He will go down now and drink a great deal of

champagne and eat enormously. Anne.” She looked at her sister. “Where is

Harry?”

“Wherever the wine is,” Anne replied briefly.

“Can’t you get him away from it?”

“You would have it. It’s all over the place by now, anyhow. I can’t lock

him up.”

Peggy made her strange helpless gesture again, and turned to me.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Jim and I talked it over, but

people do expect wine at a wedding, especially—” Whatever she was going

to say, she checked herself. “A good many of my musical friends are

Europeans, and of course a festivity to them means wine.”

When she was dressed she got Anne and the others out of the room and

came over and sat down near me.

“You’ve made a success of your marriage,” she said. “That’s why I sent

for you. I want so terribly to have this go right. How can it be done?

_How can it be done?_”

And while I tried to co-ordinate my own ideas, she went on:

“You saw the crowd downstairs. They didn’t mix. They never will mix. But

Jim and I have got to live in a common world. He can’t have his friends

and I mine.”

“It’s a sort of compromise,” I said. “Of course, things are different

with us. We don’t live in New York. I don’t see many literary people.”

“Then it is you who have given up your own people, the ones who talk

your language, as Mazzari said?”

“No. The difference is that I can carry on my work alone. I need them,

of course, but only once in a while. You have to have them all the

time.”

She sat without speaking for a time, smoothing her gloves in her hands.

“Jim doesn’t like them, much,” she said at last. “He doesn’t understand

them. They are fine and wonderful, but of course they are different.

“He’s very conventional,” she added, after another pause. “He wouldn’t

have come in, for instance, while I was changing my things. Mazzari—”

She did not follow that line. She went to the window and looked out, and

then called me to her side. The grounds, beautiful with the midsummer

colours of the borders and the light green of new cut lawns, lay below,

and the two camps were clearly outlined. Near the tennis court lounged

and laughed Peggy’s musical friends and associates from the opera, while

Jim Wentworth’s family and his guests were decorously talking close to

the sunken garden. The tennis court group was far the more lively and

colourful. And just then Mazzari, standing with a wine glass in his

hand, commenced to roll out in Italian what I took to be a love song.

His voice rose to us, clear and mellow, and Peggy drew a long breath.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Apart. Doing different things. Thinking

different thoughts. . . .”

Anne spent the following Christmas with us again. She was very smart by

that time, and Peggy’s Christmas gift to her had been a wonderful set of

sables. She was living with Peggy and Jim, and so was Harry, she said.

But Harry had left the university and was looking around for something

to do. The father was in Florida.

“Isn’t he working?” I asked.

“Peggy allowances him. He didn’t make much, you know. Tax collector in a

poor county. And he can’t stand the northern winters.”

“Peggy stands them,” I said, rather sharply.

“She doesn’t know it’s winter,” Anne said, with a return of the acidity

I had noticed before. “From steam-heated dressing room in a closed

theatre to a warm house. Flowers everywhere—usually sent, but if not

she buys them. Who couldn’t stand her sort of winters?”

I began to get a picture of Peggy, gradually. Not at once. The first

picture was of Anne. She asked for breakfast in her room, and looked at

me in amazement when I asked her not to smoke before the children.

“How provincial you are!” she said.

But she managed somehow, and a certain hardness in her seemed to melt

away gradually during the week that followed. So it was from her that I

finally got my picture of Peggy. She trailed into my room one night in a

negligée, and sat down by my fire.

“I’d give a good bit to know just what you think of Peggy and the rest

of us,” she said, out of a clear sky.

“I’m very fond of you all.”

“Not that. The way we hang onto her. She’s done so much for us that now

if she tried to do less we’d have a grievance. But I’m not concerned

with her just now. She gets a lot of pleasure out of giving. That’s not

it. It’s what it is doing to the rest of us.”

And after a silence, when she sat lost in thought and staring at the

fire.

“I used to be a self-respecting human being. I wasn’t happy, but I was

myself. Now I’m happy, if a cat on a warm hearth is happy—and I’m

nothing. Take Harry, too. I’d like to wager that he won’t take a job

unless it’s exactly to his taste. He doesn’t have to. Do you suppose

father has lived seventy years in Indiana without learning to bear up

under its winters? Nonsense.”

“What about Jim?”

“Oh, that doesn’t touch him. He has plenty of money. But he’s not happy.

Take an average day. He’s gone before she’s awake, if she’s sung the

night before, and he says good-morning over the telephone to her from

the office. If she’s studying a part she works a part of the day, but

he’s downtown, so that does not matter. But if she’s singing that night,

and you’ve seen how many nights she has been singing, what happens? She

has a light supper at five o’clock. Jim gets home about six. She’s off

at seven and whom does he dine with? Harry and me. I tell you there are

weeks when he hardly sees her, except from the box in the opera house.”

She was more talkative than I had ever seen her, and she gave a very

faithful picture of the conditions. The house was never empty, and

somehow the attempt to mix Jim’s world with Peggy’s had not worked. They

always divided off, “like a children’s party,” Anne explained. And

whereas Peggy’s friends stood ready to take Jim Wentworth

whole-heartedly to them, his friends stood aloof from Peggy. For all the

crowd, Peggy was often very lonely.

Anne got up at last.

“I suppose most successes mean some failures,” she said. “Well, don’t

worry. It may work out all right. We’re none of us absolutely yellow,

and Peggy may come to her senses and throw us out.” She moved to the

doorway and stopped there. “But it’s not a good arrangement when a wife

has to leave another woman to be her husband’s hearth-mate.” She saw my

face and laughed. “Oh, good heavens,” she exclaimed, “it’s not what

you’re thinking. He never sees me.”

I studied Anne during the remainder of her visit, and an impression

gained just before she left the room that night was strengthened as time

went on.

I do not know certainly that Anne knew she cared for Jim Wentworth. I do

know that neither Jim himself or Peggy ever suspected it. Possibly Anne

knew, for I could see at times in her a bitterness, not against the

world or her people, although she always railed more or less, but

against herself. The explanation, if she did care for him, was simple

enough to me. Anne was greatly maternal, and for years she had lavished

her aborted maternity on Peggy; she had never cared much for her

brother. The time had come, however, when Peggy no longer needed her and

Jim somehow did. She had to love somebody.

In all of this I am aware that Jim himself has been rather a shadowy

figure. I did not know him well, and my chief recollection was of a

square and solid figure, over middle height and faultlessly dressed for

his marriage, submitting after the wedding with amused reluctance to

being photographed with his famous wife.

“You fellows don’t want _me_,” he said, cheerfully enough. “Come on,

Peggy. Stand out.”

He had a sort of steadiness and dependability, and he stood with his

feet planted pretty squarely on the ground. There has never been any

doubt in my mind but that he went into marriage soberly and after much

thought, and that he cared intensely for Peggy. He was a serious sort of

person, but he had humour and a most engaging smile. His main

characteristic, however, was a sort of quiet strength.

It was a year or so before I went to New York again. I don’t know

exactly what I had expected, but certainly I had not anticipated the

change I found in Peggy. She was thin and fine-drawn, and her girlish

look had gone. In her make-up on the stage, with borders and lights, the

change escaped detection. She even looked, because of her slimness,

younger, and her voice had certainly gained something. I am no musician,

so I don’t know what, unless it was depth and maturity.

I sat with Jim in their box that night, and since from the moment she

entered he never took his eyes from her, I had a good chance to study

him. I have heard of hungry eyes, have even written of them, but I had

never really seen them until then. It gave me a queer feeling, rather as

though life was separating them and that he felt that she was only his

when, as now, she sang to him.

Sing to him she certainly did. Perhaps she felt the same thing he did,

that in their home they were somehow drifting apart, but that here, in

that great auditorium, for a little space they were together. All the

crowd, but really only the two of them.

When she finished, he was very pale, and he got out a handkerchief and

mopped his face.

I stayed with them for several days, and saw that they were almost never

alone together. On off nights Mazzari and others of the company would

lounge in, bringing with them visitors to meet her. There was a welter

of music, tobacco and food, and then more music. Peggy was always

surrounded; and since they kept late hours and Jim had to rise fairly

early, at midnight or thereabouts he would slip quietly away. It is a

tragic fact that no one ever inquired for him or seemed to miss him.

Not once while I was there did any of Jim’s people or friends appear.

It was after one of those crowded evenings that I had a short talk with

him. The guests had gone, but Anne, Harry and the father, who was there

for a day or two, were still in the drawing room. I got an impression

that some question was at stake; Harry, perhaps, or that the old man

wanted something—he usually did—and I left them together.

On the way to my room I passed Jim’s study to see him sitting alone in

front of the fire. I believe he thought I was Peggy, for he turned

eagerly when he heard me; then his face settled again into a sort of

apathy. He got up.

“May I come in?”

“Certainly.”

He drew a chair to the fire for me, and settled himself.

“Family love feast still going on?” he inquired.

“Yes. You don’t have her much to yourself, do you?”

“Much?” His voice was savage. “Never.”

“Couldn’t that be arranged, Jim? I think she misses it, too.”

He said nothing to that for a moment, but sat staring at the fire. Then:

“Once, perhaps. Not now. Her life is too crowded. The plain truth is

that she doesn’t need me. She’s got her people, and her following, and

her success. She doesn’t even need me to support her.”

I had an answer to that last, and gave it to him promptly. I said that a

good many marriages had survived in the past because women were

financially dependent on their men. But that when a woman who was

economically free elected to marry and stick by her husband, it was

because she wanted to. In other words, because she loved him. He seemed

to think that over.

“You leave out an important element,” he said finally. “Habit. She has

formed the habit of being married to him.”

He was rather determinedly withdrawing himself from her. The idea that

she did not need him had grown, in his sensitive state, to a belief that

she did not want him; and the result was a sort of proud coldness on his

part that left her hurt and bewildered.

She was having trouble enough without that, too. For Harry was drinking

pretty steadily, and was out of a position again.

“He’ll never amount to a row of pins,” Anne said to her once rather

brutally. “There was a time when fifteen dollars a week and a chance to

go to night school was the best thing he could think of. But he’s like

the rest of us. Our ideas of money have changed. He’s worth about

twenty-five dollars a week right now, but he goes downtown with Jim in

an expensive car. He lives here, to the tune of— I don’t know what you

spend, but it’s a fortune. And the salary he’s worth looks like a joke

to him.”

“I can’t throw him out.”

“No,” Anne said slowly. “No, you can’t. But you’d save his immortal soul

if you did.”

Peggy herself gave me no confidence whatever. Once or twice I thought

she was going back to our talk the day of her wedding, but she never

did. The nearest she came was when, apropos of my own children, she said

suddenly:

“Sometimes I think if we had children it would help. They would be one

thing in common.”

But Anne was there, and she said nothing further. By that time I saw

that the old intimacy between the sisters was almost gone; that Anne

resented her own dependence, and let Peggy see it. But she made no move

to go away, and as far as that goes, she had no place to go. She hated

her father.

Peggy, on the other hand, undoubtedly saw that, with every other element

to drag them apart, her own family also stood between Jim and herself.

They were never alone together. Harry went about, living his own

probably not very creditable masculine life, but Anne was always there.

And Anne always would be there, ghastly relic of an outworn system which

made its own martyrs; the helpless dependent, the unfortunate parasite.

In view of the situation that developed later on, undoubtedly Peggy had

already begun to distrust her voice. If she had not buried that distrust

things might have been different, but she would not talk even to me. She

saw, helplessly, that Anne was somehow lost to her, and bitterly unhappy

into the bargain, and that Jim, whom she wildly loved, was drifting

away. And that her voice was somehow responsible.

With Anne her method was precisely the wrong one. She tried to win her

back by acts and gifts of external generosity, but these only served to

increase Anne’s sense of dependence. As for Jim, she cared too much, was

too much hurt, to make any overtures. Probably she knew, subconsciously

at least, that the only thing to do there was to surrender her work, and

she was not prepared to do that. It was a part of her. Not only the

applause, but the work itself, the hard study, the hours with her

accompanist, when the servants walked about with stealthy feet, and her

maid waited to spray her throat—all that was a part of her, and a vital

part.

Peggy had employed a housekeeper by that time, and Anne’s last small

pretence at usefulness had gone when she ceased to run the city and

country houses. She had nothing whatever to do. . . .

For two years I heard little or nothing of them except through the

newspapers. Then, one day, to my surprise, I received a letter from

Anne.

_I hardly know why I am doing this_, she wrote, _except that I

must talk to some one. Things really are about as usual, and yet

somehow we seem to be moving on toward a catastrophe of some

sort. I don’t know what._

_Peggy is pretty tired, for one thing. Tired of the everlasting

crowds and of work, and tired of Harry and me. Harry has been

doing very badly. As for me—well, I am always around, and I

haven’t the strength of character any more or any training to

start out for myself. I have made the effort, asked Peggy to

give me a small allowance and begged Harry to go with me to a

boarding-house somewhere. But he won’t do it._

_I know Jim would be happier without us. He could have her to

himself once in a while, and a lot of things would clear up, I

think. But perhaps I am morbid about this. The real truth is not

only that Peggy’s family has been ruined by her success, but

that it has come between her and her husband. I told you once

that men like their women dependent, but it is deeper than that.

A good many of them resent any outside interest, except what

occupies the time they are in their offices, and they want the

main interest to be themselves._

_When I tell you that Jim is often at his club now on Peggy’s

evenings at home, you will see what I mean. The whole question

is whether she sacrifices one or the other, Jim or her work._

_As for myself, I don’t see much ahead. If I was brought into

the world to produce a great artist, I have done my work. And

that has failed, too, for what is her success without happiness?

Quite frankly, I would deliberately let go of life if I felt

sure there was something to come after._

I wrote to Anne and to Peggy too. Both letters were frank, and Peggy’s

was almost brutally so.

_Every successful woman_, I wrote, _sooner or later finds

herself at the forks of the road. Perhaps this will not always

be, for men will learn to make for the wife’s affairs the same

understanding allowance women have always made for the business

interests of their men. But the fault is also with the women.

They cannot apparently reconcile the two, the home and the

career, but, they must somehow learn to do it._

_You asked me once how we managed, and I replied that it was by

mutual compromise. I might have added, and I do now, that it was

only possible by detaching my work from my family life, and by

putting the family life first. I might have gone higher, the

other way about, but it would not have been worth the cost._

I advised her strongly, too, to find something for Anne to do, and to

face the fact that generosity may be a vice and a self-indulgence. That

it could wreck lives and character.

Her reply was prompt and very humble.

_I know it is true, but what can I do? I have watched it coming

until I am almost desperate. But the plain truth is that when I

make overtures to Jim he thinks I am sorry for him, and draws

into a shell of pride. As for Anne, all my life I have looked

forward to making things easy and happy for her, and you must

see that I cannot turn her out. My home must be her home, so

long as we both live. She deserves that, at the very least._

Within the next year or two things moved rather rapidly. The old father

suddenly re-married and I got a bitterly cynical letter from Anne. Then

Harry got into some sort of trouble and had to leave the country. Peggy

and Mazzari went on a concert tour just after that, and she stayed with

me when they came to our city. Her obsessing idea was that she had

wrecked every one she loved, without seeing how.

“Even Anne,” she finished. “And I depended so on Anne to see me

through.”

Mazzari came out to an early dinner that night, and he had not been in

the house five minutes before I saw that he was a new and possibly

important element in the situation. On her wedding day I had laughed at

him, but I could not do that now. He had a sort of new dignity about

him, an almost—it sounds queer, but it was true—an almost majestic

pride in the sheer hopelessness of his devotion.

He drew me aside after dinner, while Peggy was upstairs, and opened up

his heart with an engaging abandon.

“She is a wonder-woman,” he said. “And I love her. You know that. But

she loves only that—that business man of hers.” I cannot hope to

reproduce the scorn in his voice for Jim. “Me, I speak her language, I

am of her people, we have the same God. He? He does not even love her.”