That winter many other entertainments were given in our honour. But the
conviction grew upon me that Maude had no real liking for the social side
of life, that she acquiesced in it only on my account. Thus, at the very
outset of our married career, an irritant developed: signs of it, indeed,
were apparent from the first, when we were preparing the house we had
rented for occupancy. Hurrying away from my office at odd times to
furniture and department stores to help decide such momentous questions
as curtains, carpets, chairs and tables I would often spy the tall,
uncompromising figure of Susan Peters standing beside Maude's, while an
obliging clerk spread out, anxiously, rugs or wall-papers for their
inspection.
"Why don't you get Nancy to help you, too!" I ventured to ask her once.
"Ours is such a little house--compared to Nancy's, Hugh."
My attitude towards Susan had hitherto remained undefined. She was Tom's
wife and Tom's affair. In spite of her marked disapproval of the modern
trend in business and social life,--a prejudice she had communicated to
Tom, as a bachelor I had not disliked her; and it was certain that these
views had not mitigated Tom's loyalty and affection for me. Susan had
been my friend, as had her brother Perry, and Lucia, Perry's wife: they
made no secret of the fact that they deplored in me what they were
pleased to call plutocratic obsessions, nor had their disapproval always
been confined to badinage. Nancy, too, they looked upon as a renegade. I
was able to bear their reproaches with the superior good nature that
springs from success, to point out why the American tradition to which
they so fatuously clung was a things of the past. The habit of taking
dinner with them at least once a week had continued, and their arguments
rather amused me. If they chose to dwell in a backwater out of touch with
the current of great affairs, this was a matter to be deplored, but I did
not feel strongly enough to resent it. So long as I remained a bachelor
the relationship had not troubled me, but now that I was married I began
to consider with some alarm its power to affect my welfare.
It had remained for Nancy to inform me that I had married a woman with a
mind of her own. I had flattered myself that I should be able to control
Maude, to govern her predilections, and now at the very beginning of our
married life she was showing a disquieting tendency to choose for
herself. To be sure, she had found my intimacy with the Peterses and
Blackwoods already formed; but it was an intimacy from which I was
growing away. I should not have quarrelled with her if she had not
discriminated: Nancy made overtures, and Maude drew back; Susan presented
herself, and with annoying perversity and in an extraordinarily brief
time Maude had become her intimate. It seemed to me that she was always
at Susan's, lunching or playing with the children, who grew devoted to
her; or with Susan, choosing carpets and clothes; while more and more
frequently we dined with the Peterses and the Blackwoods, or they with
us. With Perry's wife Maude was scarcely less intimate than with Susan.
This was the more surprising to me since Lucia Blackwood was a
dyed-in-the-wool "intellectual," a graduate of Radcliffe, the daughter of
a Harvard professor. Perry had fallen in love with her during her visit
to Susan. Lucia was, perhaps, the most influential of the group; she
scorned the world, she held strong views on the higher education of
women; she had long discarded orthodoxy for what may be called a
Cambridge stoicism of simple living and high thinking; while Maude was a
strict Presbyterian, and not in the least given to theories. When, some
months after our homecoming, I ventured to warn her gently of the dangers
of confining one's self to a coterie--especially one of such narrow
views--her answer was rather bewildering.
"But isn't Tom your best friend?" she asked.