Sometimes I fancy me married--a responsible wife, a housekeeping
matron: with my window-sills full of potted plants.
I have a woman quality which seems uxoresque: I am someway a Right
Shape and Size to be somebody’s wife. My bodily and astral dimensions
have outlines apparently suitable for something in the married-woman
way.
The wild piquance of being myself--who but for extreme saneness would
be mad--rises up and smashes that concept.
But being a Right Shape and Size I involuntarily imagine it.
Fleetingly I imagine a flat in the West Seventies in New York,
or a bungalow on the Jersey side, or a middle-sized house in
a middle-sized town in Middle-West Illinois--whichever might
happen--with me set marriedly down in the midst of it like a suitable
maggot in a suitable nut. Suitableness, diametrically opposed to
Romance, is its keynote.
I fancy me walking about my married house mornings after breakfast
in a neat linen dress and high-heeled satin slippers: snipping dead
leaves off my window-sill plants, dusting bits of porcelain, giving
my maid some tame household directions. My Body looks slender and
supple and newly-married and in-the-drawing in the linen house-dress.
The geometric gods regard me with immense satisfaction as being an
exact proved theorem. I go to the telephone to order some Little
Neck clams and some vermouth cocktails for dinner, and a roast and
some Brussels sprouts and the assemblings of a salad: and in it I am
ingrainedly domestic, dreadfully useful, a strong pillar of the vast
good nice world.
Afternoons I go out to a modiste’s to fit a gown, or to a mild
bridge-party along with other suitable women, or to a matinée with a
suitable neighbor.
Everything is perfectly right in my insides and in my thoughts:
my thoughts run in little troughs in which there is no leakage or
deviation, thoughts of a dreadful niceness, thoughts which ever
presuppose potted plants on my window-sills.
Evenings I go out with my husband, or sit around with my husband, or
take leave of him for a few hours at the hall door.
My husband would be the sort of man that is called a Good Scout. And
he would have married me not for my wistfulness or wickedness or
weirdness but for that I am a proper Shape and Size, with a smooth
proper covering of flesh, to make a suitable sizable wife. And he
would be a heavy grappling anchor to hold me fast in an ocean of
domesticness.
Men of the genus Good Scout are all fiercely alike. All women, no
matter what their genus, are exceptions to the rule. But men--rich
men, poor men, beggar-men, thieves: so only they are Good Scouts--are
of marvelous sameness. It comes from the want of minute lifelong
pinpricking care of petticoats and potted plants--a detailed
intensely personal sort of pain which touches dull solid tones of
individuality with vivid various spots of color.
Men are made in ‘job lots’ like their own cravats. Their cravats will
differ in texture and color and quality and price. But each one is
innately necktie. Use it as a garter or a tourniquet or a strangler’s
noose: it still is a man’s deadly necktie. Its use may be ruined but
its necktique is deathless. Except poets--and perhaps scientists--men
are themselves like that. They cannot get away from the Adam. Nor can
women get away from the Eve. But Eve was not a type but a somewhat
pleasant human ensemble. While Adam was a type and a sufficiently
nasty one: a rotter and a welcher: doubtless the Good Scout type of
his day.
A Good Scout is the sort of man who if a woman trusts him with one
one-hundredth of her heart will take the whole heart and twist and
batter it: and read the paper and smoke his pipe and pay the bills:
serenely unaware.
Which is beside the point in this. For in this image all my
marriedness is a thing of outer Shape and Size and Suitableness. The
odd but natural sequence is that I make an excellent wife. Excellent
is the word. I keep a neat house with no dust left in the corners and
no dead leaves on the potted plants. My husband is well looked after
as to breakfasts and dinners and bodily comfort, and I am rigidly
square with him and chastely true to him.
If, some dinnertime, as I sit opposite him in a soft pretty chiffon
gown, my secret thoughts overflow their troughs and I passionately
forget the potted plants and the window-sills and want horribly to
rise up and bloodily murder my husband for being such a Good Scout:
that would be a genuinely powerless matter, a cobweb trifle, compared
with my actual potent Shape and Size which are so suitable for a wife.