Part 11

“Oh, come now! Cheer up!” cried he, with laughing irony. “After all, you can’t blame the American woman. She has no training for the career of woman. She has no training for any serious career. She’s got to do something, hasn’t she? Well, what is there open to her but the career of lady? That doesn’t call for brains or for education or for taste. The dressmaker and milliner supply the toilet. The architect and decorator and housekeeper and staff supply the grand background. Father or husband supplies the cash. A dip into a novel or book of culture essays supplies the gibble-gabble. A nice easy profession, is lady--and universally admired and envied. No, Loring, it isn’t fair to blame her.”

We strolled down Fifth Avenue. After he had watched the stream of elegant carriages and automobiles, some of the too elegant automobiles having their interiors brightly lighted that the passersby might not fail to see the elaborate toilets of the occupants--after he had observed this procession of extravagance and vanity, with only an occasional derisive laugh or “Look there! Don’t miss that lady!” he burst out again in his pleasantly ironical tone:

“How fat the women are getting!--the automobile women! And how the candy shops are multiplying. Candy and automobiles!--and culture. Let us not forget culture.”

“No, indeed,” said I grimly. “Let’s not forget the culture.”

“I was telling my wife yesterday,” said Armitage, “what culture is. It is talking in language that means nothing about things that mean less than nothing. But watch the ladies stream by, all got up in their gorgeous raiment and jewels. What have they ever done, what are they doing, that entitles them to so much more than their poor sisters scuffling along on the sidewalk here?”

“They’ve talked and are talking about culture,” said I. “And don’t forget charity.”

“Ah--charity!” cried he gayly. “Thank you. I see we understand each other.” He linked his arm affectionately in mine. “Charity! It’s the other half of a lady’s occupation. Charity! Having no fancy for attending to her own business, she meddles in the business of the poor, tempting them to become liars and paupers. Your fine lady is a professional patronizer. She has no usefulness to contribute to the world. So, she patronizes--the arts with her culture--the poor with her charity, and the human race with her snobbishness.”

He was so amused by his train of thought that he lapsed into silence the more fully to enjoy it; for, every thought has its shadings that cannot be expressed in words yet give the keenest enjoyment. When he spoke again, it was to repeat:

“And what have these ladies done to entitle them to this luxury? Are they, perchance, being paid for giving to the world, and for inspiring, the noble sons and daughters who drive coaches and marry titles?”

“But what do we men do? What do _I_ do--that entitles me to so much more than that chap perched on the hansom? I often think of it. Don’t you?”

“Never,” laughed Armitage. “I never claw my own sore spots. There’s no fun in that. Always claw the other fellow’s. There’s a laugh and distraction for your own troubles in seeing him wince.”

“Is that why you’ve been clawing mine?” said I.

We were pausing before his big house, at the corner of the Avenue. “If I have been I didn’t know it,” said he. He glanced up at his windows with a satirical smile. “This evening I’ve been breaking my rule and clawing at my own.” He put out his hand. “Let the social business take its course,” advised he with impressive friendliness. “You and I can’t make the world over. To fight against the inevitable merely increases everyone’s discomfort.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said I.

I agreed with his conclusion that it was best to let things alone, though I reached that conclusion by a different route. I had in mind my forlorn hope of good results from a homeopathic treatment. I saw how impossible it was to undo the practically completed training of a grown girl. I appreciated the absurdity of an attempt radically to change Edna’s character--an absurdity as great as an attempt to make her a foot taller or to alter the color of her eyes. The one hope, it seemed to me--and I still think I was right--was that, when they had social position, when there should no longer be excuse for fretting lest some one were thinking them common, they might calm down toward some sort of sanity.

Bear in mind, please, that at the time I did not have the situation, nor any idea of it, and of how to deal with it, definitely and clearly in mind. I was groping, was seeing dimly, was not even sure that I saw at all. I was like a thousand other busy American men who, after years of absorption in affairs, are abruptly and rudely awakened to the fact that there is something wrong at home where they had been flattering themselves everything was all right.

The things Armitage had said occupied my mind, almost to the exclusion of my business. The longer I revolved them, the better I understood the situation at home. I could not but wonder what wretched catastrophe in his domestic life had made him so insultingly bitter against women. I felt that he was unfair to them; any judgment that condemned a class for possessing universal human weakness must be unfair. At the same time I believed he had excuse for being unfair--the excuse of a man whose domestic life is in ruins. I began to see toward the bottom of the woman question--the nature and the cause of the crisis through which women were passing.

The modern world, as I had read history enough to know, had suddenly and completely revolutionized the conditions of life. The male sex, though poorly where at all equipped to meet the new conditions, still was compelled to meet them after a fashion. A river that for ages has moved quietly along in a deep bed, all in a night swells to many times its former size and plays havoc with the surrounding country. That was a fairly good figure for the new life science and machinery had suddenly forced upon the human race. The men living in the inundated region--where floods were unknown, where appliances, even ideas for combating them did not exist--the men, hastily, hysterically, incompetently, but with resolution and persistence, because forced by dire necessity, would proceed to deal with that vast new river. Just so were the men of our day dealing with the life of steam and electricity, of ancient landmarks of religion and morality swept away or shifted, of ancient industrial and social relations turned upside down and inside out. The men were coping with the situation after a fashion. But the women?

These unfortunate creatures, faced with the new conditions, were in their greater ignorance and incapacity and helplessness, trying to live as if nothing had occurred!--as if the old order still existed. And the men, partly through ignorance, partly through preoccupation with the new order, partly through indifference and contempt veiled as consideration for the weaker sex, were encouraging them in their fatal folly. Was it strange that the women were deceived, remained unconscious of their peril? No, it was on the contrary inevitable. When men, though working away under and at the new conditions, still talked as if the old conditions prevailed, when preachers still preached that way, and orators still eulogized the thing that was dead and buried as if it lived and reigned, when in order to find out the change you had to disregard the speech, the professions, the confident assertions of all mankind and observe closely their actions only--when there was this universal unawareness and unpreparedness, how could the poor women be condemned?

I could not but admit to myself that in his account of the doings of the women Armitage was only slightly if at all exaggerating. But with my more judicial temperament that had won me fortune and leadership while hardly more than a youth, I could not join him in damning the women for their folly and idleness and uselessness.

So, the immediate result of Armitage’s talk was a gentler and thoroughly tolerant frame of mind toward my wife, both as to herself and as to what she had done to our daughter. After all, I had for wife only the typical woman--and a rarely sweet and charming example of the type. And my daughter was no worse, perhaps was better, than the average girl of her age and position. What did I think I had--or ought to have--in the way of wife and daughter, anyhow? What was this vague, sentimental dream of family life? If I were by some magic to find myself possessed of the sort of family I thought I wanted, wouldn’t I be more dissatisfied than at present? When I had a wife and a daughter who _looked_ so well and did nothing but what everyone around me regarded as right and proper, was I not unjust in my discontent?

I had not seen Edna or Margot for several days before my talk with Bob Armitage. I did not see Edna for several days afterwards, though I dined at home every evening and did not go out after dinner. I was debating how to make overtures toward a reconciliation when she came into my study. She had an air of coldness and constraint--the air of the woman who is inflicting severe punishment upon an offending husband by withholding herself from him. She said:

“Mrs. Robert Armitage has asked me to dine on Thursday evening.”

I replied hesitatingly: “Thursday-- I’ve an engagement for Thursday--a dinner.”

In her agitation she did not note that I had not finished. Dropping her coldness, she flashed out fiercely:

“We’ve simply _got_ to accept! It’s our chance. We may not have it again. It’s what I’ve been waiting for ever since we moved to this house. And I can’t go alone. Oh, how selfish you are! You never think of anything but your own comfort. And you can’t or won’t realize any of the higher things of life for which I’m striving. It is too horrible!”

If any male reader of this story has known a woman who was, up to a certain time, always able to rouse a strong emotion in him--of love or anger, of pleasure or pain--a woman toward whom he could not be lukewarm, and if that reader can recall the day on which he faced that woman in a situation of stress and found himself calm and patient and kind toward her----

I was surprised to find that Edna was not moving me. Her loveliness did not stir a single tiny flame of passion. Her abuse did not excite resentment or dread. “Just a moment, my dear,” said I with the tranquillity of a judge. “I was trying to say that I would break my engagement.”

I saw that she did not believe me but imagined her outburst had terrified and cowed me into submission. How dispassionately I observed and judged!

“Accept, if you wish,” I went on. “I like Armitage. We’ve been friends for years.”

“Why didn’t you tell me so?” demanded she. “Why have you been plotting against me all this time?”

“You forbade me to speak of business,” said I. “So I have never spoken of my business friends.”

Her anger against me was almost beyond control. If she had been a lady born, if she had not had a past to live down, a childhood of vulgar surroundings and actions, she would have given way and abused like a fish wife. A lady born dares excesses of passion that a made lady, with her deep reverence for the ladylike, would shrink from. She said through clinched teeth:

“I find out that Mrs. Armitage, the leader of the younger set, the most fashionable woman in New York, has been eager to know me for a long time. And _you_ have been preventing it!”

“How?” said I, amused, but not showing it.

“She called here the other day. She was as friendly as could be. We became friends at once. She said that for months she had been at her husband to get her leave to call on me, but that he and you, between you, had neglected to arrange it.”

I saw how this notion of the matter delighted her, and that the truth would enrage her, would make her dislike me more than ever. So, I held my peace and thought, for the first time, I believe, how tiresome a woman without a sense of humor could become--how tryingly tiresome.

“She and I are going to do a lot of things together,” continued Edna in the same intense humorless way. “I always knew that if I got a chance to talk with one of those women who could appreciate me, I’d have no further trouble. I knew I was wasting time on those religious fakirs and frumps, but I was always hoping that through them I’d somehow meet a woman of my own sort. Now I’ve met her, and something tells me I’ll have no further trouble.”

“Probably you’re right,” said I.

“How it infuriates me,” she went on, “to think I’d have been spared all the humiliations and heartaches I’ve suffered, if you had used your influence with Robert Armitage months--years ago. But no--you don’t want me to get on. You wanted to stick in the mud. So I had to suffer--and Margot, too.”

“Well, it’s all right now,” said I, probably as indifferently as I felt. Why had God seen fit to create women without the sense of humor? Perhaps to save men from falling altogether under their rule.

“The sufferings of that poor child!” cried Edna. “And the very day after Mrs. Armitage came, Gracie Fortescue asked her to a party, and all the girls have taken her up. Gracie Fortescue is a niece of Hilda Armitage. Her brother married a Fortescue.”

“Really?” said I. “And Margot is happy?”

“No thanks to you,” retorted Edna sourly.

“Well, plunge in, my dear,” said I, beginning to examine the papers before me on the desk. “Only--spare me as much as possible. I need all my time and strength for my work.”

“But you’ll have to go with me to dinners, and to the opera occasionally. I can’t do this thing altogether alone.”

“Say I’m an invalid. Say I’m away. They don’t want me, anyhow. Armitage doesn’t go with his wife.”

“But that’s different,” cried she in a fever. “_She_ has always had social position. It doesn’t matter if people do talk scandal about her. _I_ can’t afford to cause gossip.”

“Why should they gossip? But no matter. I don’t want to worry with that--that higher life, let us call it. Or to be worried with it. Do the best you can for me. I’m a man’s man--always have been--always shall be. If you’ve got to have a man to take you about, dig up one somewhere. I’m willing to pay him well.”

“Always money!” exclaimed she in deep disgust.

I laughed. “Not a bad thing, money,” said I.

“It would never have got me Mrs. Armitage’s friendship,” said she loftily.

“You think so?” said I amiably. “All right, if it pleases you. But--take my advice, my dear--enjoy yourself to the limit with highfaluting _talk_ about the worthlessness of money and that sort of rot. But don’t for a minute lose your point of view and convince yourself.”

“Thank God I’ve got a vein of refinement, of idealism in my nature,” said Edna. “I wouldn’t have as sordid an opinion of human nature as you have for anything in the world.”

“You can afford not to have it, my dear,” said I. “So long as I know the truth, and so make the necessary money to keep us going, you are free to indulge your lovely delusions. Have your beautiful, unmercenary friendship with Mrs. Armitage and the other ladies. I’ll continue to make it financially worth their husbands’ while to encourage the friendships.”

“I thought so!” cried she. “You believe Mrs. Armitage has taken me up for business reasons.”

“If you had been some poor woman--” I began mildly.

“Don’t be absurd!” cried my wife. “How could there be an equal and true friendship between Mrs. Armitage and a woman with none of the surroundings of a lady, and with no means of gratifying the tastes of a lady? But that doesn’t mean that Mrs. Armitage is a low, sordid woman. She has a beautiful nature. Money is merely the background of high society. It simply gives ladies and gentlemen the opportunity to set the standards of dress and manners and taste. And of course they’re careful whom they associate with. Who wants to be annoyed by adventurers and climbers and all sorts of dreadful mercenary, self-seeking people?”

“Who, indeed?” said I.

It gently appealed to my sense of the ridiculous, to see my wife thus changed in a twinkling into a defender and exponent of fashionable society. It was so deliciously feminine, as fantastically humorless, her sincere belief in the poppycock she was reeling off--the twaddle with which Mrs. Armitage had doubtless stuffed her. The sordidness, the vulgarity, the meanness, the petty cruelty, the snobbishness of fashionable people--all forgotten in a moment, hastily covered deep with the gilt and the tinsel of hypocritical virtues. What an amusing ass the human animal is! How stupidly unconscious of its own motives! How eagerly it attributes to itself all kinds of high motives for the ordinary, or scrubby, or downright mean actions--and attributes the same motives to its fellow asses, to make its own pretenses the more plausible! An amusing ass--but it would be more amusing if it were not so monotonously solemn, but laughed at itself occasionally.

However----

The atmosphere of our home now steadily improved. The servants began to respect us, where they had despised and had scarcely troubled themselves to conceal their contempt. The cook sent up more attractive--though I fear even less digestible--dishes. The butler addressed me with a gratifying servility. The maids developed unexpected talents, showing acquaintance with the needs and customs of a fashionable household. The housekeeper’s soul dropped from its theretofore insolently erect posture to all fours, and she attended to her duties. Edna became sweet and gracious. Margot grew merry and affectionate. All the result of Mrs. Armitage. We had been pariahs; we were of the elect.

I saw and felt the change distinctly at the time. But it is only in retrospect that I take the full measure--get its full humor--and pathos.

* * * * *

That Armitage dinner was _the_ event of Edna’s life. She had been born; she had married; she had given birth--all memorable and important occurrences. But this formal début in fashionable society topped them as the peak tops the foothills. Having seen her quivering and hysterical excitement when we were leaving the house, I feared a breakdown. I marveled at her apparent calmness and ease as we entered the dining room of the Armitages. Never had she looked so well. If Mrs. Armitage had not been a self-satisfied beauty of the dark type she might have demolished Edna’s dream in its very realizing. But no doubt Edna, the shrewd, had duly measured Hilda Armitage and had discovered that it was safe to make her proud of the woman she had taken under protection and patronage.

There were but a dozen people in all at the dinner. It did not seem to be much of an affair. The drawing-room was plain--nothing gaudy, nothing costly looking. Our own dining room was much grander--to our then uneducated taste. The guests were--just people--simple, good-natured mortals, perfectly at their ease and putting us at our ease. You would have wondered, after five minutes of that company, how anyone could possibly find any difficulty in getting intimately acquainted with them. But, as Edna knew at a glance, she and I were in the midst of the innermost and smallest circle of the many circles one within another that make up New York fashionable society. If on the recommendation of the Armitages we should have the good fortune to be accepted by that circle of circles, that circle within the circles, there would be nothing of a social nature left for us to conquer in New York. I was ignorant of all this at the time; had I known, I imagine I should have remained tranquil. But Edna knew at a glance; she had been studying these matters for years. It shows what force of character she had that she conducted herself as if it were the most ordinary and familiar occasion of her life. She had always said, even away back in the days of the grand forty-dollars-a-month flat in Passaic, that she belonged at the social top. She was undoubtedly right. The way she acted when she arrived there proved it.

You do not often have the chance, gentle reader, to get so well acquainted with any human being as I have enabled you to get with Edna. Probably you do not even know yourself so well. Therefore I suspect that you have a wholly false notion of her--think her in every way much worse relatively than she was. Through your novels and through the reports your dim eyes bring to your narrow and shallow mind, you have acquired certain habits of judging your fellow beings.

You attach inflated importance to their unimportant surface qualities--physical appearance, pleasant voice and manner--and to their amiable little hypocrisies of apparent sweetness and generosity and friendliness. You do not see the real person--the human being. You, being by training a hypocrite and a believer in hypocrisies, scorn human beings. Now I prefer them to the sort of people with whom you and your false literature populate the world. In making you acquainted with Edna--and the others in my story--I have not introduced you to bad people, monsters, but to real beings of usual types, probably on the whole superior to your smug self in all the good qualities. Had you seen Edna in the Armitage house that evening you would have thought her as incapable of calculation and snobbishness as--well, as any of the others in that company whose whole lives were made up of calculation and snobbishness. She--and they--looked so refined and elevated. She--and they--talked so high-mindedly. I, who knew almost nothing at that time except business, was listener rather than talker; and you may be sure such a man as I, having such ignorance as mine to cover up, had in years of practice become somewhat adept in that saving art for the intelligent ignorant. But Edna----

She, the most expert of smatterers, fairly shone. With her beauty and vivacity, her eloquent eyes and dazzling smile, and exquisite bare shoulders, to aid her, she created an impression of brilliancy.

“You had a good time?” said I, when we were in the motor for the home journey.

“I never had as good a time in my life,” she exclaimed, her voice tremulous with ecstasy. “Did I look well?”

“Never so well,” said I. “And you made a hit.”

“I was careful to cultivate the women,” said she. “I’ve got to get the women.”

“You’ve got them,” I declared sincerely.

“You’re sure I didn’t make some of them jealous? Did you see any signs?”

“They liked you,” said I.

“I had to play my cards well,” pursued she. “It was a difficult position. I was far and away the best looking woman there, with the possible exception of Mrs. Armitage. Did you hear her call me Edna?”

“You and Mrs. Armitage look well together. You are of about the same figure, and the contrast of coloring is very good.”

“That’s why we took to each other so quickly. Each of us sets off the other.”

“How did you like Armitage?” I asked.

“Oh, well enough,” said she indifferently. “I hardly noticed him--or the other men. I had my game to play. The men don’t count in the social game. It’s the women. I shall be nervous until I find out whether I really got them. They are such cats!--so mean and sly and jealous. I _detest_ women!”

“I prefer men, myself,” said I.

“Men!” She laughed scornfully. “I think men are intolerable--American men. They say foreigners are better. But American men--they know nothing but dull business or politics. They have no breadth--no idealism. The women are far superior to the men.”

I laughed. “No doubt you women are too good for us,” said I carelessly. “We’re grateful that you don’t scorn us too much even to accept our money.”

“How coarse that is! Don’t spoil the happiest evening of my life.”