she has said ‘no’ to several young men who had not the pleasure of being
acquainted with her father. And she certainly means ‘no’ when she says
‘no.’ Sometimes it appears that she almost means ‘yes’ when she says
‘yes.’ I suppose it makes a good deal of difference whether in the series
of young men she is to meet a girl encounters the worst ones first or
last. Alice told me yesterday, with her adorable chuckle, that I must
admit there was a steady improvement in the quality of the young men she
was being engaged to. I told her I could stand the succession, but that
if she wanted to be my friend she must have them one at a time. ‘But, my
dear Margaret,’ she said, ‘can’t you see that it often happens—’ ‘Yes, I
know. You would die of an unengaged interval, and of course you can’t
discharge one until you are securely committed to the other.’ ‘How can
I?’ she demanded. ‘How do I know that I shall have to discharge one
until I _am_ securely committed to the other? And then the other one
isn’t always where I can get at him to tell him. That is how it happens,
Margaret dear.’ What can you do with such a girl?”
“What does her father say?”
“He _doesn’t_ say any more. Once he had theories of an old-fashioned
formality. He had a good talk with the first man she was engaged to.
After that he got dazed. Last fall he told her not to send any one else
to him until she was quite sure. This amused her immensely. ‘It is so
hard to be sure!’ she says, as if she had taken up being sure as a study.”
“It may be,” I said, “that she will get through all right. One of
the cleverest and most happily married women I know was engaged six
times. You never can tell. It is not fair to expect that the personal
responsibility of choice which we have placed upon the American girl
will not sometimes be attended with aberrations. There may be much of
entertainment in being successively engaged. Yet I have no doubt but that
the habit is degenerate.”
Miss Rittingway looked uncommonly serious for a moment. “We all know,”
she said, “that the most dangerous period in a girl’s life is that
immediately following a broken engagement. The periods following Alice’s
broken engagements have always been so much enlivened by the excitements
of new engagements that she has escaped a certain form of danger,
whatever different danger she may have tumbled into.”
“And whatever may have been the danger of the men she has thrown over.”
“Yes, it would be fair to think of them. They say that Mortie Weldworth
took it very hard. But do you know, I have an idea that Alice lets them
down so delicately and prettily that most of them don’t get savage about
it.”
“A polite executioner is a great mitigation,” I observed.
“Really, you know, Alice is the acme of graceful perversity. I think that
if I were a man I should rather be rejected by Alice than accepted by
some others.”
“That is an equivocal compliment to her, for the man who really gets her,
who carries her off before she has a chance to engage herself to any one
else—”
“Oh, the man who actually gets her will be made very happy.”
“That is real faith.”
“The curious thing is that Alice is not a flirt at all. She certainly
will make a charming and loyal wife for some fellow.”
“You won’t mind if I remain incredulous on that point?”
“You are a man.”
[Illustration]
“Yet I can see that she might be in some respects a more comfortable girl
to be married to than to be engaged to. Her past must make an informed
betrothed much more uneasy than it ever can make her husband.”
“Well, I assure you that I am as bad as all the men—I like Alice. I have
tried to manage other girls who annoyed me much more. There was Miss—we
shall say Miss Huron, a Wisconsin girl, who was with us at Nantucket.
Probably I am telling you too much. It is a tribute to your admirably
feigned interest. Well, Miss Huron had the funniest habit of staying up
late. She hated to see her company go home. You couldn’t frown or nudge
her into letting them go when they wanted to. She was the most owlish
of night birds. When it came to going in the barge to a dance (‘barge’
is Nantucket for bus or carryall) it was she who always kept the barge
waiting at the dance. If she couldn’t be out late in any other way she
seemed to be able to have accidents happen, and if she had to walk home
over four miles of dark road after a carriage break-down she was as happy
as a child, though the man might be worried and fagged. Yet she was the
soul of prudence, and never got engaged to anybody.”
“Do you know,” I said, “a man takes a peculiar pleasure in hearing
of such idiosyncrasies in women. These traits give individuality to
them. Women are apt to seem too much alike. I am going to suggest to
Jaxton that he write something in the Darwinian spirit on ‘The Petty
Depravities of Modern Women.’ It would be very instructive. You could be
a great help to Jaxton.”
Miss Rittingway doubtless would have rebuked me had she not at that
moment caught sight of Miss Pansy Marshford and Crewton crossing from the
ball grounds toward the booths. “Poor Pansy!” she murmured.
“If you will forgive me for that momentary flippancy,” I said, “I should
like to know why you are poor-ing Pansy. I thought every one was envying
her.”
“Do you know Crewton?”
“Not well enough to refuse your opinion.”
“Probably you know that Crewton is very good. That is not the trouble,”
she added with her enigmatical laughter of the eyes. “As he has lots of
money it is a great credit to him to be so good. But Pansy wanted another
man.”
“Did she hold off Crewton?”
“As long as she could.”
“Well, she at least has Crewton.”
“Is that optimism?” she asked.
“No; it is long division. What is the use of watching for miracles?
Probably Pansy will be just as happy with Crewton as Alice will be with
the last man she becomes engaged to.”
Miss Rittingway tweaked the handle of her parasol. “I have knocked about
a good deal,” she said, catching my look at the “knocked about,” “but I
hope I have retained that sense of moral proportion which makes a woman
like to see another woman get the right man.”
“Presently,” I said, “I shall decide that you are not a chaperon at all,
but a matchmaker. I approve of your last sentiment—”
“You are so good!”
“—and I should like to be credited with the same notion. I like to see a
man get the right woman. But it is a wearing thing to try to direct the
course of sentimental lightning. My feeling would be that in order to be
a successful chaperon,—that is, to please the guardian, the girl, the
man, and yourself,—you should undertake to regulate the social rather
than the moral proprieties. I should go on believing, unless you were to
contradict me, that it is not so much the business of a chaperon to see
whom a girl meets and marries as to see how she meets and marries. Yours
is essentially the supervisorship of form.”
“If you will stop teasing,” said Miss Rittingway, “I may tell you about
the experiment of Mrs. Rudderson. It is not apropos of anything you have
said, which is, perhaps, a good reason for introducing it.”
“This is better than I deserve.”
“Mrs. Rudderson told me one day that she was going to try a social
experiment. She was then a widow, thirty-six, good to look at, good
natured, and comfortably off. To amuse herself she was going to bring a
poor girl from a small town, fit her out, and give her a winter. The poor
girl was attractive and clever, and Mrs. Rudderson gave her the most
worldly advice she knew how to give,—and Mrs. Rudderson knows the world
pretty well. Before Christmas the experiment was moving along swimmingly.
Mrs. Rudderson saw to it that her _protégée_ met some of the most
desirable men in the city, including Austin Crimwell, who had several
times been reported as being committed to Mrs. Rudderson. Probably Mrs.
Rudderson didn’t deserve what happened, for, if she had amused herself
with the experiment, she took a benevolent pleasure in watching the
success of the girl; but Crimwell fell plump in love with the _protégée_.
Mrs. Rudderson should have known better. It is easy to say that now.”
[Illustration]
“I haven’t said it.”
“Somebody must say it if I have to say it myself. It was tempting
Providence.”
“That is to say, Crimwell.”
“You understand,” pursued Miss Rittingway, without swerving, “she was a
nice girl, and Mrs. Rudderson’s idea was to give her a great chance.”
“But not Crimwell.”
“You couldn’t say it was the ingratitude of the girl. She didn’t know.
It simply was the ingratitude of circumstances.”
When I suggested that Circumstances were old offenders, Miss Rittingway
went on, looking past me: “I can imagine Mrs. Rudderson, when she saw
Crimwell drifting, studying herself in the mirror. You know she was only
thirty-six.”
“An ideal age.”
“Seriously,” demanded Miss Rittingway, “at what age do you consider a
woman to be at her best?”
“At the age when she meets the man who falls in love with her.”
[Illustration]
“Mrs. Rudderson is one of those women who always seem to find it easy to
vindicate their age. But I shall ask you another question. You see, there
was something about the girl’s family which the girl should have told
to any one whom she was to marry, and when the engagement actually was
fixed, Mrs. Rudderson found that the girl had neither the courage nor
the character to tell it. Mrs. Rudderson herself would have felt bound to
tell it to any one but Crimwell. You can see how telling it to Crimwell
would look. Even Crimwell must have known that Mrs. Rudderson was in love
with him. What do you think Mrs. Rudderson should have done?”
“She should have told Crimwell.”
“She didn’t. She couldn’t. The thing which should have been told was
nothing against the girl, and Mrs. Rudderson gave her a handsome wedding
last June.”
“That is typical realism,” I said, “perhaps typical life; for there is
no hero, no villain, a heroine who should have known better, and an
_ingénue_ without a conscience; and as for living happily ever after—”
“Oh, I believe the match will be a great success! And Mrs. Rudderson is
to marry Senator Wrensel. I saw her at Newport and she was looking her
best.”
“That is what I like about the modern woman. She is so beautifully
adjustable. To be sure, it has been the office of women from the
beginning to acquire adjustability, and every uncynical person has
resented the demands which have been made on this quality. But the modern
woman, in a greater degree than any of her predecessors, enjoys the
graces of chance, knows how to turn defeat into victory. She can marry
the wrong man and never even let him know it. She can marry the right
man and not upset him by making that too plain either. She can elude
marriage altogether and make that seem not merely manifest destiny but
a triumph of beneficent fate. She can be self-respectingly married and
enchantingly single—”
Miss Rittingway checked me with a look.
“A man,” she said, “not only is greatly hampered in his view of these
things, but he always appears to resent a woman’s ability to dominate
social circumstances. It really distresses him to find that his
initiation is not a finality, to discover that her last word is more
potent than his first.”
“A cruel tirade,” I declared, “when I was only expressing my admiring
astonishment or something of that import. As for her last word, even when
you don’t say it—”
At this I saw the Judge coming back. “Judge,” I called down to him,
“Miss Rittingway was just saying that she would like to have from you a
judicial opinion on chaperons.”
“Well,” said the Judge, failing to observe Miss Rittingway’s protest,
“there is a legal pleasantry which expresses itself in the query, ‘Who is
to watch the trustee?’ I am going over there to arrange about the lunch
for this interesting party, and then I am coming back to do some watching
myself.”
“Don’t you think,” I asked Miss Rittingway when the Judge had gone
again, “that there is a touch of _particular_ amiability in the Judge’s
manner?”
“I think you had better go and help him about the luncheon,” was what
Miss Rittingway said.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VIII
WITH A NICE MAN
[Illustration]
We sat in the “cave,” the smallest of Tranton’s rooms, and the one
consecrated to his choicest company. Mere acquaintances were never asked
into the “cave,” and even friends found that the place expressed certain
moods in the owner. When Tranton said, “Let us go into the cave,” or
shuffled mutely into the place in his barbarically embroidered slippers,
and lighted the candles, the favored one understood. It was impossible
to tell precisely why candles were used here rather than more modern
agencies of illumination. When I once ventured to ask Tranton he simply
said, “I like them.”
In the candle light the “cave” looked to be a cross between a condensed
studio and a business office. Rugs, skins, weapons, pipes, and trinkets
littered the walls. There were other elements of conventional disorder.
Over an oak desk in the corner were several photographs of women, an
etching of Napoleon, a bow of yellow satin and a Turkish slipper filled
with joss sticks. On the desk itself was a mess of literature and
tobacco. Punctuating the triteness of the room were many little touches
that were distinctively Trantonian, but which I spare publicity, lest
they be repeated and thereby become trite in turn. Tranton himself
personified something of the same conventionality relieved by difference.
In the outer world he was so well dressed that no one ever spoke of his
clothes, just as his place in society was so important and secure that
no one ever called him a “society man.” He was old enough to have met a
great many people; young enough still to have an open account with the
affections.
As Tranton always took the chair by the desk, and as this when occupied
blocked the path of retreat, he first sent me to the couch among the
pillows. Then he drew over some pipes and a curious Egyptian jar
containing his favorite weed. The pipe he chose for himself was of the
sort you will see an Italian trench laborer biting, a black, hardened,
surly-looking pipe which Tranton caressed with a tenderness that is
lavished only upon inexplicable pets.
“When I left them,” said Tranton, resuming the talk we had begun in the
other room, “they were all quarreling over the question of Kipling’s
treatment of women. It was a great circus. That Miss Fanchell said she
didn’t think that Kipling could have known many good women—I think she
said _any_ good women—at the beginning, and that since he married an
American girl, rather than modify his literary attitude, he preferred to
write about men, beasts and locomotives. Mrs. Arch thought that he only
used women as literary accessories, and Mrs. Gameston said she had heard
that Kipling was very timid with women and that of course he _couldn’t_
understand them very well. Little Miss Stillberry said it was quite
inevitable that men should know more of forward women. They appealed to
me before I got away, and I told them I could be of no help whatever,
because I didn’t understand either women or Kipling, though I liked both.
I ventured to say, however, that if the American girl Kipling had married
didn’t make him like women, in my opinion there was no hope for him. That
let me out.”
“I should think it ought to,” I said.
“Women,” went on Tranton, with his eyes critically directed toward the
bowl of his pipe, “will forgive a man for not understanding them, but
never for not wanting to. Every debate of that sort has this explanation.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“I didn’t have time to stay and tease them. Perhaps I didn’t think of it
until I got away. That often happens, doesn’t it?”
“It is better to think of a good thing we might have said than of an
awkward thing we wish we hadn’t. If they had been wise women, Tranton,
they would have spent their time devising ways to get you to tell the
truth about them. Admitting that you don’t understand women, your
knowledge of them, your command of data, give you the means of being
hugely entertaining.”
“Do you think so?” asked Tranton, still studying the pipe bowl. “I wish I
could translate them as well as they can translate us.”
“You would do it with an unction, Tranton, and I am entirely certain that
you never would be accused of _lèse majesté_.”
“Speaking of translating,” said Tranton, “a girl told me about a book
the other day—outlined for me the Brother Henry chapter of ‘My Lady
Nicotine,’ which somehow I never had read, but which I certainly shall
read a good many times. I got the book, and I give you my word that,
making allowance for the fact that she had the first try, the chapter,
delicious as it is, is not so good as her translation was, hasn’t the
flavor that her exquisite humor got into it. I could not help thinking
how lucky Barrie would have been if there was some way in which he could
have written that chapter after she had told him about it.”
“Hence,” I said, “the greatest luck that can befall a man is that he
shall have a translator in the house.”
[Illustration]
“Pshaw!” returned Tranton. “The translator would probably lose her zest
if she were in the house. My translator was willing to be a translator.
You married men—”
“Now hold on, Tranton. That is an abstract proposition. Don’t make it
personal. Have you acquired that from—”
“Hold on, yourself!” retorted Tranton. “Your proposition is abstract
enough, but—well, we are both open to suspicion, I suppose. A man and
a woman who meet occasionally are one thing—I mean that they are two;
whereas if the same were married—to each other—they would be quite
another,—that is to say, one. When they are one they must lose the charm,
the entertainment, the stimulus of being two.”
“Rot!” was my friendly comment on this. But Tranton went on:—
“Can’t you see,” he pursued, playfully knocking the pipe against the
desk as if it were my head, “can’t you see the interest of intermittent
associations in which all themes are relatively new and are never quite
exhausted? What is it that makes marriage so stupid except to the
accidentally right pair?—the certainty that the two who have become one
will get talked out. It must be like talking to one’s self. In society it
is different. You can’t get talked out. You can hardly get started, and
a person must be a tremendous bore to give himself away with so small a
chance. Thus you see it is very democratic and levelling. The brilliant
don’t have too much swing and the stupid are not crushed. There are men
who are immense fun—once; girls who are witty and fascinating—the first
time. Others have a long run,—for weeks, months, even years. But you
can’t say how long a run they would have if you married them.”
“Tranton,” I said, “that is the way you talk to them. I know you. I
simply won’t listen to your make-believe.”
“Oh, I am told that girls change a good deal during their married era,”
went on Tranton, blowing the smoke at his bronze mandarin; “that would
help keep it from being monotonous. Marriage itself is bound to change
us when less revolutionary things are so potent. Take Grimsedge. Before
he had his butler he was one man. After he had his butler he was quite
another. He recognizes it himself. If he were writing his life I have
no doubt but that he would divide the whole scheme into B. B.—Before
Butler, and A. B.—After Butler. A woman’s married life, as I have been
told repeatedly by women themselves, is full of change. Her constantly
fluctuating estimate of her husband is one influence,—perhaps enough to
account for everything. A friend of mine on the exchange told me the
other night that his wife had gone through so many phases that when he
reviewed his domestic career he felt as if he had been married to half a
dozen different women. Now a man without a bigamous mind—”
“Tranton,” I interposed, “I have heard women speak of you as a nice
man;—what did they mean?”
“Ye gods!” murmured Tranton to the mandarin, “he asks me what a woman
_means_!” Then he turned to me. “Let me give you another pipe. I have
always been suspicious of that one. Once when I was smoking that pipe I
wrote a drivelling letter to a girl in—take this one. It has a longer
stem. The heat won’t be so near your brain centre. When you smoke that
pipe cogent thoughts will come into your head. It is curious about
smoking. You can pull a long stem in one place and you can’t in another.
There is a great deal in locality. A very proper woman may smoke in
Savannah, but a very proper woman may not smoke in Philadelphia. That is
the way it goes.”
“Tranton, suppose I were a woman—”
“I can’t,” retorted Tranton promptly, “I haven’t that kind of an
imagination. And it would be wrong in principle.”
“Suppose I were a woman,” I went on, “and had asked you how you justified
yourself for being a nice man—”
“A woman wouldn’t ask any such fool thing. And what right have you to the
secrets of the confessional? Here I am indicted for being a nice man on
hearsay evidence. It isn’t fair.”
“Ah! my dear Tranton, you had better plead guilty and be done with it. We
never could find an unbiased jury!”
“What is my sentence? Am I sentenced to be confined in marriage with the
girl for the rest of my natural life?”
“It would be a pity, Tranton, for you really are a sort of social father
confessor. A great many girls would miss you if you were to marry. They
have had you to practise on, to say their nicest things to, and you
have never made them worry at the thought that you possibly could mean
anything yourself.”
[Illustration]
“Go on,” said Tranton staring down into the fuming abyss of his pipe.
“You have been so much nicer than the fellows who were in love, because
you are always self-possessed and considerate and cheerful. Above all you
have let them—the girls—be self-possessed and considerate and cheerful.
They wouldn’t dare be so nice to the fellows they were in love with. Your
easiness and effectiveness with them and their responsive easiness and
effectiveness with you are a constant incitement to the men who are in
the race for fair. You pace the lover.”
“Not so bad,” muttered Tranton to the mandarin.
“You are regarded as extremely useful. You are usher, best man,
friend in need. You balance the table with the nice girl who is to be
conservatively brought into the game. Single men tell you their hopes,
married men their troubles. You can run a german or a chafing-dish. You
always let a girl with a bad complexion have her back to the window, and
when they ask you to make a light, you don’t set things flaring like a
barroom. You flatter them by well-timed antagonisms. You never let it
seem that you have permitted them to win, and you never beat them badly.
You never flatter in words if there is a way of doing the thing by an
action. You please the plain and tease the pretty. You ask nothing and
you get everything—everything but the greatest thing of all.”
[Illustration]
“You have left out some things,” said Tranton, smiling, “several
important things.” He seemed to be going over these in his mind.
“It is quite natural. You couldn’t know. We all have to persuade
ourselves—unless we are a complaining bore—that life has great
compensations for us. We _have_ to stay satisfied. An optimist such as I
am is like one of those story-telling liars who repeatedly increase the
figures, not merely to assure the astonishment of each new listener, but
to keep up their own interest.”
“Are you an optimist?”