Part 9

“I’ve always treated her as a duchess, and have made the servants do it, and have trained her to treat them as if she were a duchess.” A proud smile came into her face, transforming it suddenly back to its loveliness. “The first time I ever read about a duchess--read, knowing what I was reading about--I decided that I would have a daughter and that she should be a duchess.”

At any previous time such a sally would have made me laugh. But not then, for I saw that she meant it profoundly, and for the first time I was realizing what had been going on in my family, all unsuspected by me.

“But first,” proceeded Edna, “she shall have the highest social position in New York. And you must help if I am to succeed.” The fury burst into her face again. “Those little wretches, snubbing her!--dropping her! I’ll make them pay for it.”

“Do you mean to tell me that Margot realizes all this?” said I.

“Poor child, she’s wretched about it. Only yesterday she said to me: ‘Mamma, is it true that you and papa are very common, and that we haven’t anything but a lot of stolen money? One of the girls got mad at me because I was so good-looking and so proud, and taunted me with it.’”

“Incredible!” said I, dazed.

“She’s horribly unhappy,” Edna went on. “And it cuts her to the heart to be losing all her dearest friends. I did my duty and taught her which girls to cultivate, and she was intimate only with the right sort of New York girls.”

“I expect she has been indiscreet,” said I. “They’ve found out why she made friends with them and----”

“You will drive me crazy!” cried Edna. “_Can’t_ you understand? All the mothers and the governesses--all the grown people in respectable families teach the children. Those mothers who don’t teach it directly see that it’s taught by the governesses, or else select the proper friends for their little girls and see that they drop any who aren’t proper.”

I dropped back in my chair. I was stunned. It seemed to me I had never heard anything quite so infamous in my life. And as I reflected on what she had said I wondered that I had not realized it before. I recalled a hundred significant facts that had come out in talks I had had with men, women, and children in this fashionable world from which we were excluded, yet with which we were in constant and close communication.

“The question is, what are _you_ going to do,” proceeded Edna.

I shook my head, probably looking as dazed as I felt.

“What does that headshake mean?” demanded she.

“_You_--taught _Margot_ to be a--a--like those other girls?” said I.

“Oh, you fool!” cried Edna. And in excuse for her, please remember I had ever been a dotingly bored slave of hers--as uxorious a husband as you ever saw--and therefore inevitably despised, for women have so little intelligence that they despise a man who loves them and lets them rule. “You fool!” she repeated. “Yes, I brought her up like a lady--taught her to cultivate nice things and nice people. What should I teach her? To associate with common people? To drop back toward where we came from--where _you_ belong?”

“Yes, I guess I do,” said I.

Up to that time I had interested myself in only one aspect of human nature--the aspect that concerned me as a business man. But from that time I began to study the human animal in all his--and her--aspects. And it was not long before I learned what that animal is forced to become when exposed to the powerful thrusts and temptings of wealth and social position. In our alternations of pride and humility we habitually take undue credit or give undue blame to ourselves for what is wholly the result of circumstance. The truth is, we are like flocks of birds in a high wind. Some of us fly more steadily than others, some are quite beaten down, others seem almost self-directing; but all, great and small, weak and strong, are controlled by the wind, and those who make the best showing are those who adapt themselves most skillfully to the will of the wind.

At the time when Edna and I were talking I had not become a philosopher. I was in the primitive stages of development in which most men and nearly all women remain their whole lives through--the stage in which you live, gentle reader, with your shallow mistaken notions of what is and your shallower mistaken notions of what ought to be. So, as Edna uncovered herself to me, I shrank in horror. It was fortunate--for her, at least--that I had always trained myself never to make hasty speeches. My expertness in that habit has probably been the principal cause of my business success, of my ability to outwit even abler men than myself. I did not yield to the impulse to burst out against her. I compressed my lips and silently watched as she lifted the veil over our family life and revealed to me the truth about it.

“What are you going to do?” she asked impatiently, yet with a certain uneasiness born no doubt of a something in my manner that made her vaguely afraid, for while she knew I was her slave and despised me, as I was to learn, for being so weak before a mere woman, she also knew that, outside of her domain, I was not her slave nor anybody’s, but planned and executed at the pleasure of my own will.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said I slowly. “I must think. All this is new to me.”

“If you haven’t any pride in yourself, or in me,” said she, “still you surely must have pride for Margot.”

“I think so,” said I.

“If you could know how they have made the poor child suffer!”

I made no reply, nor did I encourage her to talk further. In fact, when she began again I stopped her with: “I’ve heard enough, my dear. And I’ve some important business to attend to.”

She, preparing to leave me alone with my papers, came and put her arms round my neck and pressed her cheek against mine. I think she was uneasy about the posture of the affair in my mind--feared stupid commercial I could not appreciate these vital things of life. I suspect my tranquil reception of her caresses did not tend to allay her uneasiness. Never before had she failed to interest me in her physical self; and the only reason she then failed was that in the general upsetting of all my ideas of what my family life was there had been tossed up to the surface an undefined suspicion of her sincerity as a wife. I was not altogether blind as to the relations of men and women, as to the fact that women often coolly played upon the passions of men for their own purposes of money getting in its various forms. My wife was right in her sneer at the innocence of married men. But there are exceptions, and a woman with a husband intelligent in every way except in seeing through women would do well to take care how she tempts his intelligence to shake off its indifference in that respect.

The next morning I was breakfasting alone as usual. No, gentle reader, I am not girding at my poor wife as you hastily accuse. I am sure I do not deceive myself when I say I never was of those men who fuss about trifles. Thank heaven, as soon as we had a servant my wife kept away from breakfast. It was one of the things I loved her for. If I had been married to a woman who appeared at breakfast looking lovely and smiling sweetly, I should have become a bad-tempered tyrant. I want no sentimentalities in the early-morning hours. I wake up uncomfortable and sour, and I quarrel with myself and look about for trouble until I have had something to eat and coffee. Further in the same direction, I took particular pleasure in my wife’s small personal slovenlinesses, in her curl papers, in her occasional overlaying of her face with cold cream and the like, in her careless negligee worn in her own rooms. There is, I guess, no nature so prodigal that it has not some small economies. Edna had, probably still has, a fondness for wearing out thoroughly, in secluded privacy, house dresses, underclothes, and night gowns.

It took nothing from my delight in her beauty that she was not invariably beautiful. I’ve rarely seen her lovely early in the morning. Who is? I should have taken habitual early-morning loveliness as a personal insult. I’ve seen her homely all day long, and for several days at a time. She was as attractive to me than as at her most beautiful. I detest monotony. Thank heaven, she was never monotonous to look at; one rather expects _mental_ monotony in women unless one is a fool. I didn’t mind her times of homeliness, because she could be so far, far the opposite of homely. I did not mind her way of getting herself up in odds and ends, mussily, but, mind you, never after the Passaic days unclean--never! I did not mind her dishevelments because, when she set out to dress, she did it so bang up well. She was born with a talent for dress; she rapidly developed it into an art. You know what I mean. You’ve seen the girl with hardly five dollars’ worth of clothing on her, including the hat, yet making the woman from the best dressmaker in Paris look a frump.

I never had to join the innumerable and pitiful army of men who give the woman their money to squander upon bad fits and bad taste, and are bowed down with shame when they have to issue forth with her. I can honestly say, and Edna will bear me out, that I gave her money freely. No doubt the reason in part was I found it so easy to make money that I was indifferent to extravagance. But the chief reason, I believe, was Edna’s skill at dress. The woman who is physically alluring to her husband, and who knows how to dress, rarely has difficulty in getting money from him, though he be a miser. But, gentle lady reader, can you in your heart blame a man for grudging his earnings to a woman who isn’t fit to dress and who doesn’t know how, either?

As I had begun to tell when I interrupted myself, I was breakfasting alone the morning after that memorable talk with Edna, and Margot came down to glance in for a smile at me on her way to school.

In theory Margot was still classed as a child, and would be so classed for two years longer. In fact she was, and had been for two years and more, a full-fledged young lady. That is the way American children of the rank for which my wife was training Margot are being brought up nowadays. She had her own apartment, dressing room and bath, sitting room, reception room--as many rooms as my wife and I had altogether when we began married life, and about four times the room. As for luxury, a comparison would be ridiculous. Also Margot had her own staff of servants--companion, maid, maid’s assistant--and her own automobile with chauffeur, used by no one else. It would be hard to find more helpless creatures than these young aspirants to aristocracy. And they prided themselves upon their ignorance of the realities, and their mothers, often with hypocritical pretense of distress, boasted it. At that time I thought it amusing. The serious side of it was entirely out of my range. We American men of the comfortable and luxurious classes are addicted to the habit of regarding our wives and children as toys, as mere sources of amusement not to be taken seriously. It isn’t strange that the children should not mind this, but what a commentary upon the real mentality of the women that they tolerate and encourage it! Our women are always, with a fine show of earnestness, demanding that they be taken seriously. But woe unto the man who believes them in earnest and tries to treat them as his equals instead of as dainty toys, odalisques. How he will be denounced, hated, and, if proper alimony can be got, divorced!

Margot’s parties differed in no respect from grown-up parties, except that there were restrictions in the matter of hours and also as to the serving of drinks. For, I believe my wife did not follow the extreme of fashionable custom, but forbade wines and punch at these parties. In this matter, as in the matter of using slang and in many others, she held that only people of long-established social position, people with what is called tradition, could safely make excursions beyond the bounds of conventionality; that it was safest, wisest for people like herself to stay well within the bounds, to be prim even, and so to avoid any possible criticism as vulgar. A very shrewd woman was Edna. If her intelligence had been equal to her shrewdness and energy, and if she had possessed a gleam of the sense of humor! However----

In no essential respect did Margot’s routine of life differ from that of her mother--and her mother’s routine of inane and worthless time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable women and apers of fashionable women. Edna did a vast amount of studying, with and without teachers. It was all shallow and showy. Margot’s studies were also beneath contempt. I amused myself from time to time by inquiring--with pretense of gravity--into what they were teaching her at the Ryper school for the turning out of fashionable womanhood. Such a mess of trash! She was learning much about social usages, from how to sit in a carriage--a rare art that, I assure you, gentle reader--to how to receive guests at a large dinner. She was studying some of the vulgarities--science, history, literature, and the like--but in no vulgar way. She would get only the thinnest smatter of talkable stuff about them--nothing “unsettling,” nothing that might possibly rouse the mind to think or distract the attention from the “high” things of life. She was dabbling in music, in drawing, in several similar costly fripperies. And the sum total of expense!--well, no wonder Miss Ryper was fast becoming as rich as some of the asteroids in the plutocracy she adored.

I regarded Margot’s education as a species of joke. It never occurred to me that our pretty baby had the right to be educated to become a wife and a mother. And why should it have occurred to me? Where is that being done? Who is thinking of it? In all the oceans of twaddle about the elevation of woman where is there a drop of good sense about _real_ education? You say I was criminally negligent as to my daughter’s education. But how about your own? The truth is, we all still look upon education as a frill, an ornament. We never think of it, whether for our sons or for our daughters, as nothing more or less than teaching a human being how to live. It is high time to end this idiotic ignorant exaltation of tomfoolery into culture!

Poor Margot! How the little girls in plain clothes--and machine-made underwear--must have envied her as she swept along in her limousine, dressed with that enormously costly simplicity which only the rich can afford. No wonder many of the other girls at the Ryper school hated her. For, her mother was in one respect unlike most of the fashionable mothers who are too busy doing things not worth doing to attend to their children. Her mother gave her loving care, spent many hours--of anxious thought, no doubt--in planning to make her the most luxurious, the most helpless, the most envied girl in the school. We hear unendingly about the good that love does in the world. Not too much--no, indeed! But at the same time might it not be well if we also heard about the harm love can do--and does? How many sons and daughters have been ruined by loving parents! How many husbands have been wrecked by the flatteries and the assiduities of loving wives! How many wives have been lured to decay and destruction by the over-indulgent love of their husbands! What we need in this world is not more sentiment, but more intelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and crazily in _both_ directions, gentle reader, unless it has well-balanced intelligence to guide it.

Margot, smiling in the doorway of the breakfast room, put me at once into a less somber humor. She was tall and slim--an inch taller than her mother and with the same supple, well-proportioned figure. She had her mother’s small, tip-tilted face and luminous eyes, but they were of an intense dark gray that gave her an expression of poetic thoughtfulness and mystery. Whiter or more perfectly formed teeth I have never seen. In former days children’s teeth were neglected. But my wife, with her peculiar reach for all matters having to do with appearances, had learned the modern methods of caring for the body when Margot was still in the period when the body is almost as formable as sculptor’s clay. Thus Margot’s teeth had been looked after and made perfect and kept so. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders like a wonderful changeable veil of golden brown. Often at first glance you are dazzled by these carefully fed and carefully groomed children of the rich, only to note at the second glance that the best showing has been made of precious little in the way of natural charm. But this was not true of Margot. The longer you looked, and the more attentively, the finer she seemed to be--like a rare perfect specimen from a connoisseur’s greenhouses. There’s no doubt about it, Edna did know the physical side of life. She would have got notable results even had we been poor. As it was, with all the money she cared to spend, she performed what looked like miracles.

“Come and kiss me, Margot,” said I.

She obeyed, with a charming air of restrained eagerness that is regarded as ladylike. “My car is waiting,” said she. “I’m late.”

“Is that Therese”--her maid--“out in the hall waiting to go with you?”

“Yes. Miss Parnell”--her companion--“has a headache, poor creature!”

Margot had caught to perfection the refined, elegant, fashionable tone of speaking of the servile classes. Though I was in a critical mood that morning, I was not critical of my beloved little Margot, and her airs entertained me as much as ever. Said I:

“Sit down, little duchess”--the familiar name slipped out unconsciously--“and talk to me a few minutes.”

“But I’m shockingly late, papa,” pleaded she.

“No matter. I’ll telephone Miss Ryper, if you wish.” To the butler, who was serving me: “Sackville, go tell Therese that I’m detaining Miss Margot. And close the door behind you.”

Sackville retired. Margot seated herself with alacrity. She did not like her useless school any better than other children like more or less useful schools. “Are you taking me to the theater Saturday afternoon, as you promised?” said she. “And do get a box and let me ask two of the girls.”

“Certainly,” said I. “If I can’t go, Miss Parnell will chaperon you.”

“No, I want you, papa. It’s so nice to have a man.”

“How are you getting on at school? Not with the studies”--I laughed at the absurdity of calling her fiddle-faddle studies--“but with the girls?”

Her face clouded. “Has mamma told you?”

“Told me what?”

She hesitated.

“Go on, dear,” said I. “What’s the trouble?”

“Oh, it’s always the same thing,” she sighed, with a grown-up air that was both humorous and pathetic. “Some of the girls are down on me--about--about social position. You see, we don’t go _socially_ with their families.”

“Why should we?” said I. “We don’t know them nor they us. Naturally, they don’t care anything about us, nor we about them.”

She hung her head. “But I want to go with them,” said she doggedly.

“Why?” said I.

“Because--because--it’s the proper thing to do. If you don’t go with them everybody looks down on you.” She lifted her head, and her flashing eyes reminded me of her mother. “It makes me just _wild_ to be looked down on.”

“I should say so,” said I. “Those little girls at Miss Ryper’s must be an ill-bred lot. We must take you away from there and put you in a school with nice girls.”

“Oh, no, father!” she cried in a panic. “Those girls are the _nicest_--the only nice girls in any school in New York. All the other schools look up to ours. I’d cry my eyes out in any other school.”

“Why?” said I.

“I’d feel--_low_.” Her eyes had filled and her cheeks were flushed. “I’d be out of place except among the richest and most aristocratic girls.”

“But you don’t like them,” said I gently. I began to feel a sensation of sickness at the heart.

“I _hate_ them!” cried she with passionate energy. “But I want to stay on there and _make_ them be friendly with me. I’ve got too much pride, papa, to run away.”

“Pride,” said I, and my tone must have been sad. “That isn’t pride, dear. You ought to choose your friends by liking. You ought to feel above girls with such cheap ideas.”

“But I’m not above them,” protested she. “And I couldn’t like any girl I’d be ashamed to be seen with, unless she were a sort of servant. Oh, papa, you don’t appreciate how proud I am.”

“Proud of what, dear? Of your parents? Of yourself?”

She hung her head.

“Of what, dear?” I urged.

“It hurts me not to be treated as--as the inside clique of girls in our secret society treat each other.” She was almost crying. “They don’t even call me by my first name any more. They speak to me as Miss Loring--and _so_ politely--exactly as I speak to Miss Parnell or one of the teachers or a servant. Oh, I’m so proud! I’d love to be like Gracie Fortescue. She speaks even to Miss Ryper as I would to Miss Parnell.”

My digestion wasn’t any too good, even in those days. My whole breakfast suddenly went wrong--turned to poison inside me, I suppose. A hot wave of rage against I knew not whom or what rolled up into my brain. I pushed away my plate abruptly. “Run along, child,” I said in a hoarse voice I did not recognize as my own.

She threw her arms round my neck with a gesture and an expression that made me realize how close a copy of her mother she was. “You wouldn’t take me away from my school, would you, papa dear?” she pleaded.

“All I want is to make you happy,” said I, patting and stroking that thick and lovely veil of flowing hair.

She assumed that I meant she was to stay on with the viperous Ryper brood, and went away almost happy. She had awakened to the fact that there were fates even worse than being snubbed and addressed like a teacher or a companion or a servant or some other lower animal--yes, far worse fates. For instance, not being able to feel that she was, on whatever degrading terms, at least associated with the adored fashionables.

That evening when my wife again accompanied me to my study, after dinner, I said to her:

“I’ve been turning over our talk last night. I haven’t been able to reach a conclusion as yet, except on one point. I can’t help you socially in the way you suggested.”

I glanced at her as I said this. She was looking at me. Her pale, intense expression fascinated me.

“I don’t think you have thought about it fully,” said she slowly.

“Yes,” said I, with my utmost deliberateness; “and my decision is final.”

She rose, stood beside her chair, rubbing her hand softly along the top of the back. “Very well,” said she quietly. And she left me alone.

V

In refusing Edna her heart’s desire thus promptly and tersely I had an object. I assumed she would protest and argue; in the discussion that would follow some light might come to me, utterly befogged as to what course to take about my family affairs. I knew something should be done--something quick and drastic. But what? It was no new experience to me to be faced with complex and well-nigh impossible situations. My business life had been a succession of such experiences. And while I had learned much as to handling them, I had also learned how dangerous it is to rush in recklessly and to begin action before one has discovered what to do--and what _not_ to do. The world is full of Hasty Hals and Hatties who pride themselves on their emergency minds, on knowing just what to do in any situation the instant it arises; and fine spectacles they are, lying buried and broken amid the ruins they have aggravated if not created.

How recover my wife? How rescue my daughter? I could think of no plan--of no beginning toward a plan. And when Edna, by receiving my refusal in cold silence, defeated my hope of a possibly illuminating discussion, I did not know which way to turn.