CHAPTER XXVII.

FIVE POINTS OF VIEW.

At five o’clock Mrs. Dykman, Helen Simms, and Cryder dropped in for a cup of tea, and Miss Starbruck came down-stairs.

Quintard insisted that, in spite of Miss Starbruck’s open disapproval of him, she was his proudest conquest; and her abuse was certainly growing milder. She rarely failed to appear at these informal tea-drinkings; there was just enough of the worldly flavor about them to fascinate without frightening her; and it was noticeable that to whatever Quintard chose to say she listened with a marked and somewhat amusing interest. The poor old lady was no more proof against personal magnetism and the commanding manliness which was Quintard’s most aggressive characteristic than her less rigid sisters. Quintard threatened to marry her and deprive Hermia of her only natural protector, but Miss Starbruck was as yet innocent of his designs.

“This is quite a family party,” said Helen; “let us draw our chairs close to the fire and warm ourselves with brotherly affection; it is so beastly cold out. But by this great log fire one thinks himself in the hall of an old English castle; and the streets of New York are not. I feel almost romantic.”

“Let us tell stories,” suggested Cryder.

“No,” replied Helen, promptly, “I don’t want to listen to long stories. You would tell your own, and I can’t understand dialect. Besides, I want to talk about myself—I beg that prerogative of your sex. As this is a family party, I am going to tell my woes and ask advice. I want to get married! Shall I, or shall I not?”

“Who is the man?” asked Cryder. “How can we advise until we know whether he is worthy to buy your bonnets?”

“I have not decided. The man is not much of a point. I simply want to be married that I may be free,” and she heaved a sigh.

“Free of what?” asked Hermia, sarcastically. “Of freedom?”

“Oh, this is not freedom, my dear. A girl always has to be chaperoned. A married woman chaperones. Oh, the difference!”

“But where do you propose to keep the future Mr. Helen Simms?” asked Cryder, laughing.

“At his club, or in a rose-colored boudoir. Mine will be blue.”

“Helen Simms! you are the most immoral young woman I ever—ever——.” The wrathful voice broke down, and all turned to Miss Starbruck with amused sympathy.

“Are you not yet used to our wicked Gotham?” asked Quintard, taking a chair beside her.

“No!” Miss Starbruck had recovered her voice. “And I think it abominable that the holy institution of matrimony should be so defamed.”

“Oh, dear Miss Starbruck,” cried Helen, good-naturedly. “It is time you left Nantucket. That primitive saying has long since been paraphrased into ‘the unholy institution of whithersoever thou goest, in the other direction will I run.’ And a jolly good revolution it is, too. Please do not call me immoral, dear Miss Starbruck. You and I were born on different planets, that is all.”

“Marriage is a necessary evil,” said Mrs. Dykman’s soft, monotonous voice. “You have done well to defer it as long as possible, but you are wise to contemplate a silken halter. No woman’s position is established, nor has she any actual importance until she has a husband. But marry nothing under a million, my dear. Take the advice of one who knows; money is the one thing that makes life worth living. Everything else goes—youth, beauty, love. Money—if you take care that does not go too—consoles for the loss of all, because it buys distractions, amusement, power, change. It plates ennui and crystallizes tears to diamonds. It smoothes wrinkles and keeps health in the cheek. It buys friends and masks weakness and sin. You are young, but the young generation is wiser than the old; my advice, I feel sure, will not be thrown away.”

“And this!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck, hoarsely; “this is what life has come to! I am an old maid, and have done with all thought of marriage; but I am not ashamed to say that many years ago I loved a young man, and had he lived would have married him, and been a true and faithful and loving wife. That a woman should marry from any other motive seems to me scandalous and criminal.”

“What do truth and duty mean?” demanded Hermia scornfully. “Monotony and an ennui worse than death. You are happy that you live your married life in imagination, and that your lover died before even courtship had begun to pall. Still”—she shrugged her shoulders as she thought of Bessie—“perhaps you wouldn’t have minded it; some people don’t.”

“No,” said her aunt; “I wouldn’t have minded it. I would have appreciated it.”

Hermia turned to her with a curious glance. “How differently people are made,” she said with a sigh. “The monotony of married life would drive me mad.”

Quintard rose and rested his elbow on the mantel. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that monotony is not an absolutely indispensable ingredient of married life?”

Hermia shrugged her shoulders. “It ruins more wedded lives than jealousy or bad temper.”

“True; but if married life is monotonous, it is largely the fault of those who suffer from the monotony. It is true that the average human animal is commonplace; therefore monotony in the domestic relations of such men and women follows as a matter of course. They suffer the consequences without the power to avert them. Those who walk on the plane above, shiver under the frozen smile of the great god Bore as well—but they can avert it. The ennui that kills love is born of dispelled illusions, of the death of the dramatic principle, which is buried at the foot of the altar. When a man is attempting to win a woman he is full of surprises which fascinate her; he never tarries a moment too long; he is always planning something to excite her interest; he watches her every mood and coddles it, or breaks it down for the pleasure of teaching her the strength of his personality; he does not see her too often; above all, he is never off guard. Then, if he wins her, during the engagement each kiss is an event; and, another point, it is the future of which they always talk.”

“How is it after marriage? We all know.”

Cryder gave an unpleasant little laugh, common to him when some one else had held the floor too long. “Taking your own theory as a premise,” he said, “I should say that the best plan was not to get married at all. People who marry are doomed to fall between the time-honored lines. Better they live together without the cloying assurance of ties; then, stimulus is not wanting.”

“That is all very well for people who are independent of the world’s opinion,” said Mrs. Dykman, “but what are they to do who happen to have a yearning for respectable society?”

Cryder shrugged his shoulders. “They must be content with water in their claret. You can’t get intoxicated and dilute your wine, both.”

“I deny that,” said Quintard. “I believe that matrimony can be made more exciting and interesting than liaison, open or concealed, because it lacks the vulgarity; it can be made champagne instead of beer.”

“You ought to know,” murmured Mrs. Dykman.

“Mr. Quintard!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck; “I am glad to hear you say that, although I do not think it is a very proper subject to discuss before both men and women.”

“My dear Miss Starbruck,” broke in Helen, with a laugh; “this is the progressive nineteenth century, and we are people of the world—the wild, wicked world. We are not afraid to discuss anything, particularly in this house, where the most primitive and natural woman in the world is queen. It has come to be a sort of Palace of Truth. We don’t offend the artistic sense, however.”

“Miss Simms has been right more than once to-day,” said Quintard. “She said a moment ago that one must be married to be free. May I venture the assertion that, in the present state of society, the highest human freedom is found in the bonds of matrimony alone?”

“Explain your paradox,” said Hermia, who had made no comment to Quintard’s remarks.

“It is easily explained. I say nothing whatever of passing fancies, infatuations, passions, which are best disposed of in a temporary union. I refer to love alone. When a man loves a woman he wants her constant companionship, with no restraint but that exercised by his own judicious will and art. He wants to live with her, to travel with her, to be able to seek her at all hours, to follow his own will, unquestioned and untrammeled. This, outside of conventional bonds, is impossible without scandal, and no man who loves a woman will have her lightly spoken of if he can help it. But let the priest read his formula, and the man so bound is monarch of his own desires, and can snap his fingers at the world. I have neither patience nor respect for the man who must have the stimulus of uncertainty to feed his love. He is a poor, weak, unimaginative creature, who is dependent upon conditions for that which he should find in his own character.”

“I never expected to hear you talk like this, Mr. Quintard!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck, “for you have been a very immoral man.”

Quintard looked at her with an amused smile. “Why immoral, Miss Starbruck?”

“You have—well, people say——” stammered poor Miss Starbruck, and then broke down.

Mrs. Dykman came to the rescue. “Miss Starbruck means that you have lived with a number of women and have not taken any particular pains to hide the fact.”

“Is that immoral? I think not. I have lived with no woman who had anything to lose, and I have lived with no woman who was not my equal intellectually. Companionship was quite as much an object as passion. I never took a woman out of the streets and hung jewels upon her and adored her for her empty beauty, and with a certain class of women I have never exchanged a dozen words since my callow youth. Furthermore, I never won a woman’s affections from her husband. If I ever got them he had lost them first. Therefore, I protest against being called immoral.”

“If you want to go into the question of moral ethics,” said Cryder, “you cannot plead guiltless altogether of immorality. In openly living with a woman who is not your wife you outrage the conventions of the community and set it a bad example. It may be argued that you do less harm than those who pursue the sort of life you let alone; but the _positive_ harm is there.”

All looked at Quintard, wondering how he would reply. Even Hermia felt that he was driven into a corner.

“The question is,” replied Quintard, slowly, “What is morality? The world has many standards, from that of the English Government to that of the African barbarian, who follows his instincts, yet who, curiously enough, is in all respects more of a villain than his artificial brother. That point, however, we will not discuss. A man’s standard, of course, is determined by the community in which he lives. We will consider him first in relation to himself. Man is given a temperament which varies chiefly according to his physical strength, and tastes which are distinctly individual. And he not only is a different man after the experiences of each successive decade, but he frequently waits long for the only woman for whom he is capable of feeling that peculiar and overwhelming quality of love which demands that he shall make her his wife. But in the mean time he cannot go altogether companionless, and he meets many women with whom life is by no means unennobling. As to the community, I deny that he sets it a bad example. It is a wiser, more educating, and more refined life than insensate love-making to every pretty weak woman who comes along, or than associations which degrade a man’s higher nature and give him not a grain of food for thought. If more men, until ready to marry, spent their lives in the manner which I have endeavored to defend, there would be less weariness of life, less drinking, less excess, less vice of all sorts.”

Miss Starbruck shuddered, but felt that the conversation had gone out of her depth, and made no reply. Hermia looked at Quintard with a feeling of unconscious pride. Until he finished speaking, she did not realize how she would hate to have him beaten.

Cryder rose and began walking up and down the room. “When you argue,” he said fretfully, “I always feel as if you were hammering me about my ears. You have such a way of pounding through a discussion! One never knows until the next day whether you are right or whether you have simply overwhelmed one by the force of your vitality. Personally, however, I do not agree with you, and for the same reason that I would never marry; I dislike responsibilities.”

Quintard gave him a glance of contempt, under which Hermia shrank as if a lash had cut her shoulders; but before he could reply Helen rushed to the front. “And all this discussion has come out of my poor little bid for sympathy and advice!” she cried. “You have frightened me to death! I am afraid of the very word matrimony with all your analysis and philosophy. To me it was a simple proposition: ‘Marry and chaperon; don’t marry, and be chaperoned.’ Now I feel that, if a man proposes to me, I must read Darwin and Spencer before I answer. I refuse to listen to another word. Mrs. Dykman, I am going home; let me drive you over.”

They all went in a few moments, and Hermia was left alone with her reflections.

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