Part 11

"As though she expected me to say, 'Hurrah! Good for Mother!'" thought Margaret wonderingly.

"_Did_ you inherit, too, from your parents?" persisted her inquisitor.

"All my virtues and all my vices, I believe," answered Margaret, turning away and walking to the door. "Shall we go down now?"

Lizzie took a step after her: "Maybe you think I spoke too soon?" she asked anxiously.

"'Spoke too soon?'"

"Asking you what you're worth. To be sure it ain't any of my business. But I thought I'd ask you once. Hiram would be so pleased if after you go I could tell him. He wonders so, did his brother Danny do as well as he did. But I guess I spoke too soon."

She paused expectantly.

"Never mind," said Margaret dully, again turning away.

"Say!" said Lizzie solicitously, "you look tired and a little pale. Would you feel for a cup of tea before you go?"

"No thank you, Lizzie."

Just here the door opened softly and Jennie and Sadie came into the room and went to the crib of the slumbering baby.

"Yes, he looks good," nodded Jennie approvingly. "You have got the room nice and warm, Lizzie. Just you keep the air off of him and he'll never get sick for you. There's a doctor's wife lives near us and you ought to see, Lizzie, the outlandish way she raises that baby! Why, any time you pass the house you can see the baby-coach out on the front porch standing, whether it's cold _or_ warm! A doctor's wife, mind you, exposing her young baby like that! Till they're anyhow eight months old already, they shouldn't be taken into the air, winter or summer. If you didn't keep little Danny in the house all the time, you'd soon see how he'd ketch cold for you!"

Lizzie looked at Margaret solemnly, with an expression that might have been interpreted as a wink.

"He certainly is a fine boy!" murmured Sadie fondly, looking upon the little pink and white baby with a vague yearning in her old face.

"Yes," said Jennie pensively, "babies are such nice little things. I often think it's such a pity there ain't a more genteel way of getting them."

Lizzie nudged Margaret behind Jennie's back.

"It's a pity they have to grow up to be men," said Margaret.

As they all went downstairs, Lizzie held Margaret back for an instant to whisper to her: "I don't know what loosened up my tongue to-day, to say the things to you I did! Hiram would be cross if he knew how free I told you things."

"About his step-mother, you mean?"

"No, I mean about Jennie and Sadie. You might go and _tell_ them what I said!"

"Yes, I might, if I were the villainess of a play and wanted to make them cut your children out of their wills!"

"You _won't_ tell, will you?" Lizzie pleaded. "It ain't that _I'd_ care so much (though to be sure, I'd like to think the children would inherit all they could), but it's Hiram would be so displeased at me talking to you the way I did."

"Don't give yourself any anxiety, Lizzie; of course I shall not 'tell.'"

Margaret reflected, on the way home, as, quiet and rather white, she leaned back in her seat in the train, pleading fatigue and a headache to escape conversation, that this day, somehow, marked an epoch in her understanding of the Leitzel family. She had suddenly, after two months of incredible obtuseness, recognized that they measured everything in life--duty, friendship, religion, love--by just one thing.

"Yet Daniel married a dowerless wife!" she marvelled.

The wild suspicion crossed her mind that Walter might have misled Daniel into thinking her an heiress, even as he had let her assume that her lover was well-born.

But she was instantly ashamed of herself for even conceiving of such treachery on Walter's part.

XIV

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!"

XV

Ten minutes later he and Margaret sat facing each other from either side of his flat-topped office-desk.

Miss Hamilton's conscience-clear self-possession as she had passed through his office to go to her luncheon, and his wife's equally guiltless aspect as she had greeted him with cheerful affection, had been a little disarming, it is true, to his determined purpose. But Daniel was not readily diverted from a line he had decided upon, and Margaret's easy indifference to his expressed wish as to her associating with Miss Hamilton had aroused his obstinacy. And Daniel's obstinacy was a snag to be reckoned with.

So, seated opposite her at his desk, he had expounded to her very forcibly his reasons for prohibiting any social relations whatever with any one of his office staff.

"And now," he concluded his harangue, "I _lay my command_ upon you, my dear."

"Oh, but, my dear!" laughed Margaret, "that's rather absurd, you know! Now listen, Daniel. If you warned me against Miss Hamilton as a person who was immoral or illiterate or ill-bred, I should of course see the reasonableness of your objection to her. But when she is really superior in every respect to every one of the people you do want me to be intimate with: better born, better bred, more intelligent; when my intimacy with her is going to mean to me more than I have words to express--a close friendship with a congenial and stimulating mind and character--you can't expect me to give it up for such reasons as you offer me, Daniel, chief among them being that she works for her living. But in the South we are so used, since the war, to seeing gentlewomen work for their living, and we are so unused to meeting, socially, people like the Ocksreiders and the Millers, who tell me (one of them did) that her house is 'het by steam' and who say, 'Outen the light'--well, dear, you see," she concluded, rising, "it is ridiculous to discuss it. Let us go home to luncheon."

"Sit down, Margaret."

"But I'm famishing, Daniel. I'm weak with hunger. You'll have to take me home in a taxicab if you don't take me soon."

"Sit down! You've got to promise to obey me in this matter, Margaret."

"Oh!" her voice rippled with laughter, "this is the twentieth century A.D., not B.C., Daniel. You're mixed in your dates! And you seem to forget you married me, you didn't adopt me."

"You must drop at once any further relations with my secretary."

"But, dear," she exclaimed in surprise, "haven't I yet made it clear to you that I don't intend to?"

"I am accustomed to being obeyed, Margaret!"

"By whom? Your wives?"

"Come, come, I want your promise."

"Daniel," she plead with him, "please don't be so tiresome! I am sure that you, clever lawyer that you are, must recognize that my position is quite impregnable and yours weak and indefensible, asking me to be friends with people who 'outen the light' and to cut one with whom I can have such improving conversations as that to which you ignominiously listened just now! Why didn't you honourably close your door? Could you _understand_ our deep remarks, Daniel?"

"I'm waiting for your promise, Margaret."

Again Margaret rose. "I'm hungry and I'm going home."

"Margaret," said Daniel incredulously, "surely you are not deliberately refusing what I ask of you?"

"As surely as I'd refuse to walk a tight-rope at your behest, my lord."

"You defy me?" he asked quietly, his lips white.

It was her turn, now, to look incredulous. "But, Daniel, how can you take it to heart like this? How can you suppose yourself better qualified than I am to choose my friends? Next thing," she laughed, "you'll be telling me what books I may not read!"

"Do you intend to obey me?"

"I hope I know my wifely duty too well to spoil you, my dear. 'Obey' you indeed!" She tweaked the tip of his nose derisively.

"You will obey me, Margaret, or----" He paused helplessly.

"Obey me!" she mocked him, "or die, woman! Well, Daniel, if it comes to force"--she looked at her pink finger nails--"I can scratch!"

She suddenly bent and kissed his forehead. "Do come home!"

"When I've had your promise."

"Daniel, a woman in these days who 'obeys' her husband ought to be ostracized, or arrested and confined in an institution for dangerous lunatics!"

Daniel looked at her meditatively. "I'm certainly up against it!" he was saying to himself. "I could be firm against tears or temper; but when she just jokes about it and laughs at me and goes on doing as she pleases, what can I do with her?"

"Margaret," he said, "I've never quarrelled with any one in my life, but," he added, a little icy gleam in his eyes that did chill her for the moment, "I've _always had my own way_!"

"Which has, of course, been dreadfully bad for you. It's well you've married a wife that is going to be _very firm_ with you!"

Daniel bit his lip to keep from laughing. Not for an instant did he think of yielding. The difficulty of the situation served only to aggravate his obstinacy. There was more than one way of getting a thing, and Daniel was not at all above resorting to cunning. Half the successes of his career had been the result of his cunning. He did not call it that; he named it subtlety, far-sightedness.

"I want to ask you something, Margaret; sit down."

She sighed and dropped again into the chair opposite him.

"You bought your new dress--frock--gown, this morning?"

She shook her head, too weary and hungry to speak.

"You didn't?"

"I told you I didn't intend to get anything."