LIBRARY JNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ SANTA CRUZ Gift oi Lera C. Brown SANTA CRUZ HUSBAND'S STORY The Husband's Story A NOVEL BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS AUTHOR OF THE FASHIONABLE ADVENTURES OF JOSHUA CRAIG, OLD WIVES FOR NEW THE SECOND GENERATION, ETC. NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published September, 1910 Printed in the United States of America T THE HUSBAND'S STORY WHY SEVERAL years ago circumstances thrust me into a position in which it became possible for the friend who figures in these pages as Godfrey Loring to do me a favor. He, being both wise and kindly, never misses a good chance to put another under obligations. He did me the favor. I gratefully, if reluctantly, acquiesced. Now, after many days, he collects. When you shall have read what follows, you may utterly reject my extenu ating plea that any and every point of view upon life is worthy of attention, even though it serve only to confirm us in our previous ideas and beliefs. You may say that I should have repudiated my debt, should have refused to edit and publish the manuscript he confided to me. You may say that the general racial obligation to mankind and to womankind takes precedence over a private and personal obligation. Unfortunately I happen to be not of the philanthropic temperament. My sense of the personal is strong; nry sense of the general weak that is to say, weak in comparison. If " Loring " had been within reach, I think I should have gone to him and pleaded for release. But as luck will have it, he is off yachting, to peep about in the remote 1 THE HUSBAND'S STORY inlets and islets of Australasia and the South Seas for several years. To aggravate my situation, in the letter accompany ing the manuscript, after several pages of the discrimi- ^nating praise most dear to a writer's heart, he did me the supreme honor of saying that in his work he had " striven to copy as closely as might be your style and your methods to help me to the hearing I want and to lighten your labors as editor." I assure him and the public that in any event I should have done little edit ing of his curious production beyond such as a proof reader might have found necessary. As it is, I have done practically no editing at all. In form and in sub stance, from title to finis, the work is his. I am merely its sponsor and in circumstances that would forbid me were I disposed to qualify my sponsorship with even so mild a disclaimer as reluctance. Have I said more than a loyal friend should? If so, on the other hand, have I not done all that a loyal friend could ? I AM tempted to begin with our arrival in Fifth Ave nue, New York City, in the pomp and circumstance be fitting that region of regal splendor. I should at once catch the attention of the women; and my literary friends tell me that to make any headway with a story in America it is necessary to catch the women, be cause the men either do not read books at all or read only what they hear the women talking about. And I know well none knows better that our women of the book-buying class, and probably of all classes, love to amuse their useless idleness with books that help them to dream of wasting large sums of money upon luxuries and extravagances, upon entertaining grand people in grand houses and being entertained by them. They tell me, and I believe it, that our women abhor stories of middle-class life, abhor truth-telling stories of any kind, like only what assures them that the promptings of their own vanities and sentimental shams are true. But patience, gentle reader, you with the foolish, chimera-haunted brain, with the silly ideas of life, with the ignorance of human nature including your own self, with the love of sloppy and tawdry clap trap. Pa tience, gentle reader. While I shall begin humbly in the social scale, I shall not linger there long. I shall pass 3 THE HUSBAND'S STORY on to the surroundings of grandeur that entrance your snobbish soul. You will soon smell only fine perfumes, only the aromas of food cooked by expensive chefs. You will sit in drawing-rooms, lie in bedrooms as mag nificent as the architects and decorators and other pur veyors to the very rich have been able to concoct. You will be tasting the fine savors of fashionable names and titles recorded in Burke's and the " Almanach de Gotha." Patience, gentle reader, with your box of cara mels and your hair in curl papers and your household work undone patience ! A feast awaits you. There has been much in the papers these last few years about the splendid families we my wife and I came of. Some time ago one of the English dukes a nice chap with nothing to do and a quaint sense of humor assembled on his estate for a sort of holiday and picnic all the members of his ancient and proud family who could be got together by several months of diligent search. It was a strange and awful throng that covered the lawns before the ducal castle on the ap pointed day. There was a handful of fairly presentable, more or less prosperous persons. But the most of the duke's cousins, near and remote, were tramps, bartend ers, jail birds, women of the town, field hands male and female, sewer cleaners, chimney sweeps, needlewomen, curates, small shopkeepers, and others of the species that are as a stench unto delicate, aristocratic nostrils. The duke was delighted with his picnic, pronounced it a huge success. But then His Grace had a sense of humor and was not an American aristocrat. All this by way of preparation for the admission 4 THE HUSBAND'S STORY that the branch of the Loring family from which I come and the branch of the Wheatlands family to which the girl I married belongs were far from magnificent, were no more imposing then, well, than the families of any of our American aristocrats. Like theirs, our genea logical tree, most imposingly printed and bound and proudly exhibited on a special stand in the library of our New York palace that genealogical tree, for all its air of honesty, for all its documentary proofs, worm- eaten and age-stained, was like an artificial palm bedded in artificial moss. The truth is, aristocracy does not thrive in America, but only the pretense of it, and that must be kept alive by constant renewals. Both here and abroad I am constantly running across traces of illegiti macy, substitution, and other forms of genealogical flim~ flam. But let that pass. Whoever is or is not aristo cratic, certainly Godfrey Loring and Edna Wheatlands are not or, rather, were not. My father kept a dejected little grocery in Passaic^ N. J. He did not become a " retired merchant and capi talist " until I was able to retire and capitalize him. Edna's father was No, you guess wrong. Not a, butcher, but an undertaker ! . . . Whew ! I am glad to have these shameful secrets " off the chest," as they say in the Bowery. He this Wheatlands, undertaker to the poor and near-poor of the then village of Passalc was a tall, thin man, with snow-white hair and a smooth, gaunt, gloomy face and the best funeral air I have ever seen. Edna has long since forgotten him ; she has an admirable ability absolutely to forget anything she may for whatever reason deem it inconvenient to re- 5 THE HUSBAND'S STORY member. What an aid to conscience is such a quality ! But I have not forgotten old Weeping Willy Wheat- lands, and I shall not forget him. It was he who loaned me my first capital, the one that But I must not anticipate. In those days Passaic was a lowly and a dreary vil lage. Its best was cheap enough; its poorest was wretchedly squalid. The " seat " of the Lorings and the " seat " of the Wheatlands stood side by side on the mosquito beset banks of the river two dingy frame cot tages, a story and a half in height, two rooms deep. We Lorings had no money, for my father was an honest, innocent soul with a taste for talking what he thought was politics, though in fact he knew no more of the reali ties of politics, the game of pull Dick pull Devil for licenses to fleece a " free, proud and intelligent people " he knew no more of that reality than than the next honest soul you may hear driveling on that same sub ject. We had no money, but "Weeping Willie" had plenty and saved it, blessings on him! I hate to think where I should be now, if he hadn't hoarded ! So, while our straightened way of living was compulsory, that of the Wheatlands was not. But this is unimpor tant; the main point is both families lived in the same humble way. If I thought " gentle reader " had patience and real imagination and, yes, the real poetic instinct I should jgive her an inventory of the furniture of those two cot tages, and of the meager and patched draperies of the two Monday wash lines, as my mother and Edna's another and Edna, too. when she grew big enough 6 THE HUSBAND'S STORY decorated them, the while shrieking gossip back and forth across the low and battered board fence. But I shall not linger. It is as well. Those memories make me sad put a choke in my throat and a mist before my eyes. Why? If you can't guess, I could not in spoiling ten reams of paper explain it to you. One detail only, and I shall hasten on. Both families lived humbly, but we not quite so humbly as the Wheatlands family, be cause my mother was a woman of some neatness and en ergy while Ma Wheatlands was at or below the do-easy, slattern human average. We had our regular Saturday bath in the wash tub. We did not ever eat off the stove. And while we were patched we were rarely ragged. In those days even in those days Edna was a " scrapper." They call it an " energetic and resolute personality " now ; it was called " scrappy " then, and scrappy it was. When I would be chopping wood or lugging in coal, so occupied that I did not dare pause, she would sit on the fence in her faded blue-dotted calico, and how she would give it to me ! She knew how to say the thing that made me wild with the rage a child is f ashamed to show. Yes, she loved to tease me, perhaps really, I hope because she knew I, in the bottom of my heart, loved to be teased by her, to be noticed in any way. And mighty pretty she looked then, with her mop of yellowish brown hair and her big golden brown eyes and her little face, whose every feature was tilted to the angle that gives precisely the most fascinating- expression of pretty pertness, of precocious intelligence, or of devil-may-care audacity. She has always been a 7 THE HUSBAND'S STORY pretty woman, has Edna, and always will be, even in old age, I fancy. Her beauty, like her health, like that strong, supple body of hers, was built to last. What | is the matter with the generations coming forward now? Why do they bloom only to wither ? What has sapped their endurance? Are they brought up too soft? Is it the food? Is it the worn-out parents? Why am I, at forty, younger in looks and in strength and in taste for life than the youths of thirty? Why is Edna, not five years my junior, more attractive physically than girls of twenty-five or younger? But she was only eight or nine at the time of which I am writing. And she was fond of me then really fond of me, though she denied it furiously when the other children taunted, and though she was always jeer ing at me, calling me awkward and homely. I don't think I was notably either the one or the other, but for her to say so tended to throw the teasers off the track and also kept me in humble subjection. I knew she Scared, because when we played kissing games she would never call me out, would call out every other boy, but I if I called any other girl she would sulk and treat me ^as badly as she knew how. Also, while she had nothing but taunts and sarcasms for me she was always to be found in the Wheatlands' back yard near the fence or on it whenever I was doing chores in our back yard. After two years in the High School I went to work in the railway office as a sort of assistant freight clerk. She kept on at school, went through the High School, graduated in a white dress with blue ribbons, and then sat down to wait for a husband. Her father and mother 8 THE HUSBAND'S STORY were sensible people. Heaven knows they had led a hard enough life to have good sense driven into them. But the tradition the lady-tradition was too strong for them. They were not ashamed to work, themselves. They would have been both ashamed and angry had it been suggested to them that their two boys should be come idlers. But they never thought of putting their daughter to work at anything. After she graduated and became a young lady, she was not compelled would hardly have been permitted to do housework or sew- ing. You have seen the potted flower in the miserable tenement window the representative of the life that neither toils nor spins, but simply exists in idle beauty. That potted bloom concentrates all the dreams, all the romantic and poetic fancies of the tenement family. I suppose Edna was some such treasured exotic possession, to those toil-twisted old parents of hers. They wanted a flower in the house. Well, they had it. She certainly was a lovely girl, far too lovely to be spoiled by work. And if ever there was a scratch or a stain on those beautiful white hands of hers, it assuredly was not made by toil. She took music lessons Music lessons ! How much of the ridiculous, pathetic gropings after culture is packed into those two words. Beyond question, everyone ought to know some thing about music ; we should all know something about eve^thing, especially about the things that peculiarly stand for civilization science and art, literature and the drama. But how foolishly we are set at it ! Instead of learning to understand and to appreciate music, we are taught to " beat the box " in a feeble, clumsy f ash- 9 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ion, or to screech or whine when we have no voice worth the price of a single lesson. Edna took I don't know how many lessons a week for I don't know how many years. She learned nothing about music. She merely learned to strum on the piano. But, after all, the lessons attained their real object. They made Edna's parents and Edna herself and all the neighbors feel that she was indeed a lady. She could not sew. She could not cook. She hadn't any knowledge worth mention of any practical thing therefore, had no knowledge at all ; for, unless knowledge is firmly based upon and in the practical, it is not knowledge but that worst form of ignorance, mis information. She didn't know a thing that would help her as woman, wife, or mother. But she could play the piano ! Some day some one will write something true on the subject of education. You remember the story of the girl from Lapland who applied for a place as servant in New York, and when they asked her what she could do, she said, " I can milk the reindeer." I never hear the word education that I don't think of that girl. One half of the time spent at school, to estimate moderately, and nine tenths of the time spent in college class rooms is given to things about as valu able to a citizen of this world as the Lap girl's " edu cation " to a New York domestic. If anyone tells you that those valueless things are culture, tell him that only an ignorance still becalmed in the dense mediaeval fog would talk such twaddle ; tell him that science has taught ! us what common sense has always shown, that there is no ' beauty divorced from use, that beauty is simply the 10 THE HUSBAND'S STORY perfect adaptation of the thing to be used to the pur" pose for which it is to be used. I am a business man? not a smug, shallow-pated failure teaching in an anti quated college. I abhor the word culture, as I abhor the word gentleman or the word lady, because of the company into which it has fallen. So, while I eagerly disclaim any taint of " culture," I insist that I know what I'm talking about when I talk of education. And if I had not been too good-natured, my girl But I must keep to the story. " Gentle reader " wants a story ; he or she does not want to try to think. It was pleasant to my ignorant ears to hear Edna playing sonatas and classical barcaroles and dead marches and all manner of loud and difficult pieces. Such sounds, issuing from the humble and not too clean Wheatlands house gave it an atmosphere of aristocracy, put tone into the whole neighborhood, ele vated the Wheatlands family like a paper collar on the calico shirt of a farm hand. If we look at ourselves rightly, we poor smattering seekers after a little showy knowledge of one kind or another a dibble of French, a dabble of Latin or Greek, a sputter of woozy so-called philosophy how like the paper-collared farm hand we are, how like the Hottentot chief with a plug hat atop his naked brown body. But Edna pleased me, fully as much as she pleased herself, and that is saying a great deal. I wouldn't have had her changed in the smallest particular. I was even glad she could get rid of her freckles fascinating little beauty spots sprinkled upon her tip-tilted little nose! 11 THE HUSBAND'S STORY She was not so fond of me in those days. I had a rival. I am leaning back and laughing as I think of him. Charley Putney ! He was clerk in a largish dry goods store. He is still a clerk there, I believe, and no doubt is still the same cheaply scented, heavily poma tumed clerkly swell he was in the days when I feared and hated him. The store used to close at six o'clock. About seven of summer evenings Charley would issue forth from his home to set the hearts of the girls to flut tering. They were all out, waiting. Down the street lie would come with his hat set a little back to show the beautiful shine and part and roach of his hair. The .air would become delicious ( !) with bergamot, occa sionally varied by German cologne or lemon verbena. What a jaunty, gay tie! What an elegant suit! And he wore a big seal ring, reputed to be real gold and such lively socks ! Down the street came Charley, all the girls palpitant. At which stoop or front gate would he stop? Often only too often it was at the front gate next ours. How I hated him ! And the cap of the j oke is that Edna nearly married him. In this land where the social stairs are crowded like Jacob's Ladder with throngs ascending and descend ing, what a history it would make if the grown men and women of any generation should tell whom they almost married ! Yes, Edna came very near to marrying him. She was a lady. She did not know exactly what that meant. The high-life novels she read left her hazy on the sub ject, because to understand any given thing we must THE HUSBAND'S STORY have knowledge that enables us to connect it with the things we already know. A snowball would be an un fathomable mystery to a savage living in an equatorial plam. A matter of politics or finance or sociology or real art, real literature, real philosophy, seems dull and meaningless to a woman or to the average mutton- brained man. But if you span the gap between knowl edge of any subject and a woman's or a man's ignorance of that subject with however slender threads of connect ing knowledge, she or he can at once bridge it and begin to reap the new fields. Edna could not find any thread whatever for the gap between herself and that fairy land of high life the novels told her about. In those days there was no high life in Passaic. I suppose there is now or, at least, Passaic thinks there is and in purely imaginary matters the delusion of pos session is equal to, even better than, possession itself. So, with no high life to use as a measure, with only the instinct that her white smooth hands and her dresses modeled on the latest Paris fashions as illustrated in the monthly " Lady Book," and her music lessons, her taste for what she then regarded as literature with only her instinct that all these hallmarks must stamp her twenty- four carat lady, she had to look about her for a match ing gentleman. And there was Charley, the one person within vision who suggested the superb heroes of the high-life novels. I will say to the credit of her good taste that she had her doubts about Charley. Indeed, if his sweet smell and his smooth love-making Charley excelled as a love maker, being the born ladies' man if the man, or, rather, the boy, himself had not won her 2 13 THE HUSBAND'S STORY heart, she would soon have tired of him and would have suspected his genuineness as a truly gentleman. But she fell in love with him. There was a long time during which I thought the reason she returned to me or, rather, let me return to her was because she fell out of love with him. Then there was a still longer time when I thought the reason was the fact that the very Saturday I got a raise to four teen a week, he fell from twelve to eight. But latterly I have known the truth. How many of us know the truth, the down-at-the-bottom, absolute truth, about why she married us instead of the other fellow? Very few, I guess or we'd be puffing our crops and flirting our feathers less cantily. She took up with me again because he dropped her. It was he that saved her, not she or I. Only a few months ago, her old mother, dod dering on in senility, with memory dead except for early happenings, and these fresh and vivid, said : " And when I think how nigh Edny come to marryin' up with that there loud-smelling dude of a Charley Putney ! If he hadn't 'a give her the go by, she'd sure 'a made a fool of herself a wantin' me and her paw to offer him money and a job in the undertakin' store, to git him back. Lawsy me ! What a narrer squeak fur Princess Edny ! " Be patient, gentle reader ! You shall soon be read ing things that will efface the coarse impression my old mother-in-law's language and all these franknesses about our beginnings must have made upon your refined and cultured nature. Swallow a caramel and be patient. But don't skip these pages. If you should, you would THE HUSBAND'S STORY miss the stimulating effect of contrast, not to speak of other benefits which I, probably vainly, hope to confer upon you. She didn't love me. Looking back, I see that for many months she found it difficult to endure me. But it was necessary that she carry off with the neighbor hood rather than with me her pretense of having cast off Charley because she preferred me. We can do won ders in the way of concealing w r ounded pride ; we can do equal wonders in the way of preserving a reputation for unbroken victory. And I believe she honestly liked me. Perhaps she liked me even more than she liked her aromatic Charley; for, it by no means follows that we like best where we love most. I am loth to believe I do not believe that at so early an age, not quite seven teen, she could have received my caresses and returned them with plausibility enough to deceive me, unless she had genuinely liked me. And what a lucky fellow I thought myself! And how I patronized the perfumed man. And what a thrashing I gave him poor, harmless, witless creature! when I heard of his boastings that he had dropped Edna Wheatlands because he found Sally Simpson pret tier and more cultured! I must have been a railway man born. At twenty- two no, six months after my majority I was jumped into a head clerkship at twelve hundred a year. Big pay for a youngster in those days; not so bad for a youngster even in these inflated years. When I brought Edna the news I think she began to love me. To her that salary was a halo, a golden halo round me made 15 THE HUSBAND'S STORY me seem a superior person. She had long thought highly of my business abilities, for she was shrewd and had listened when the older people talked, and they were all for me as the likeliest young man of the neighbor hood. " I've had another raise," said I carelessly. We were sitting on her front porch, she upon the top step, I two steps down. " Another ! " she said. " Why, the last was only two months ago." " Yes, they've pushed me up to twelve hundred a year a little more, for it's twenty-five per." " Gee ! " she exclaimed, and I can see her pretty face now all aglow, beaming a reverent admiration upon me. I rather thought I deserved it. But it has ever been one of my vanities to pretend to take my successes as matters of course, and even to depreciate them. They say the English invariably win in diplomacy because they act dissatisfied with what they get, never grumbling so sourly as when they capture the whole hog. I can believe it. That has been my policy, and it has worked rather well. Still, any policy works well if the man has the gift for success. " Twenty-five per," I repeated, to impress it still more deeply upon her and to revel in the thrilling words. " Before I get through I'll make them pay me what I'm worth." " Do you think you'll ever be making more than that ? " exclaimed she, wonderingly . " I'll be getting two thousand some day," said I, far more confidently than I felt. " Oh Godfrey ! " she said softly. 16 THE HUSBAND'S STORY And as I looked at her I for the first time felt a cer tain peculiar thrill that comes only when the soul of the woman a man loves rushes forth to cling to his soul. In my life I have never had and never shall have a happier moment. Once more patience, gentle reader ! I know this bit of sordidness this glow of sentiment upon a vulgar ma terial incident disgusts your delicate soul. I am aware that you have a proper contempt for all the coarse de tails of life. You would not be gentle reader if you hadn't. You would be a plain man or woman, living busily and usefully, and making people happy in the plain ways in which the human animal finds happiness. You would not be devoting your days to making soul- food out of idealistic moonshine and dreaming of ways to dazzle yourself and your acquaintances into thinking you a superior person. " Do you know," said my pretty Edna, advancing her hand at least half way toward meeting mine, " do you know, I've had an instinct, a presentiment of this? I was dreaming it when I woke up this morning.'' I've observed that every woman in her effort to prove herself " not like other girls " pretends to some occult or other equally supranatural quality. One dreams dreams. Another gets spirit messages. A third has seen ghosts. Another has a foot which sculptors have longed to model. A fifth has a note in her voice which the throat specialists pronounce unique in the human animal and occurring only in certain rare birds and Sarah Bernhardt. I met one not long ago who had several too many or too few skins, I forget which, and 17 THE HUSBAND'S STORY as a result was endowed with I cannot recall what nervous qualities quite peculiar to herself, and somehow most valuable and fascinating. In that early stage of her career my Edna was " hipped " upon a rather com monplace personal characteristic the notion that she had premonitions, was a sort of seeress or prophetess. Later she dropped it for one less tiresome and over worked. But I recall that even in that time of my deep est infatuation I wished to hear as little as possible about the occult. Of all the shallow, foggy fakes that attract ignorant and miseducated people the occult is the most inexcusable and boring. A great many people, otherwise apparently rather sensible, seem honestly to believe in it. But, being sensible, they don't have any thing to do with it. They treat it as practical men treat the idiotic in the creeds and the impossible in the moral codes of the churches to which they belong that is, they assent and proceed to dismiss and to forget. However, I was not much impressed by Edna's at tempt to dazzle me with her skill as a Sibyl. But I was deeply impressed by the awe-inspiring softness and shapeliness of her hand lying prisoner in mine. And I was moved to the uttermost by the kisses and embraces we exchanged in the gathering dusk. " I love you," she murmured into my ecstatic ear. " You are so different from the other men round here." I dilated with pride. " So far ahead of them in every way." "Ahead of Charley Putney?" said I, jocose but jealous withal. She laughed with a delightful look of contemptuous 18 THE HUSBAND'S STORY scorn in her cute face. " Oh, Tie! " she scoffed. " He's getting only eight a week, and he'll never get any more." " Not if his boss has sense," said I, thinking myself judicial. " But let's talk about ourselves. We can be married now." I advanced this timidly, for being a truly-in-love lover I was a little afraid of her, a little uncertain of this priceless treasure. But she answered promptly, " Yes, I was thinking of that." " Let's do it right away," proposed I. " Oh, not for several weeks. It wouldn't be proper." "Why not?" She couldn't explain. She only knew that there was something indecent about haste in such matters, that the procedure must be slow and orderly and stately. " We'll marry the first of next month," she finally de cided, and I joyfully acquiesced. Some of my readers both of the gentle and of the other kind may be surprised that a girl of seventeen should be so self-assured, so independent. They must remember that she was a daughter of the people; and among the people a girl of seventeen was, and I suppose still is, ready for marriage, ready and resolved to de cide all important matters for herself. At seventeen Edna, in self-poise and in experience, judgment and all the other mature qualities, was the equal of the carefully sheltered girl of twenty-five or more. She may have been brought up a lady, may have been in all essential ways as useless as the most admired of that weariful and worthless class. But the very nature of her sur- 19 THE HUSBAND'S STORY roundings, in that simple household and that simple community, had given her a certain practical education. And I may say here that to it she owes all she is to day. Do not forget this, gentle reader, as you read about her and as she dazzles you. As you look at the gorgeous hardy rose do not forget that such spring only from the soil, develop only in the open. That very evening we began to look for a home. As soon as we were outside her front gate she turned in the direction of the better part of the town. Nor did she pause or so much as glance at a house until we were clear of the neighborhood in which we had always lived, and "were among houses much superior. I ad mired, and I still admire, this significant move of hers. It was the gesture of progress, of ambition. It was- splendidly American. Lmyself should have been content to settle down near our fathers and mothers, among the people we knew. I should no doubt have been better satisfied to keep up the mode of living to which we had been used all our lives. The time would have come when I should have reached out for more comfort and for luxury. But it was natural that she should develop in this direction before I did. She had read her novels and her magazines, had the cultured woman's innate fondness for dress and show, had had nothing but those kinds of things to think about; I had been too busy trying to make money to have any time for getting ideas about spending it. No ; while her motive in seeking better things than we had known was in the main a vanity and a sham, her action had as much initial good in it as if her motive 20 THE HUSBAND'S STORY had been sensible and helpful. And back of the motive lay an instinct for getting up in the world that has been the redeeming and preserving trait in her char acter. It was this instinct that ought to have made her the fit wife for an ambitious and advancing man. You will presently see how this fine and useful instinct was perverted by vanity and false education and the per nicious example of other women. " The rents are much higher in this neighborhood," said I, with a doubtful but admiring look round at the pretty houses and their well-ordered grounds. " Of course," said she. " But maybe we can find smething. Anyway, it won't do any harm to look." " No, indeed," I assented, for I liked the idea myself. This better neighborhood looked more like her than her own, seemed to her lover's eyes exactly suited to her beauty and her stylishness for the " Lady Book " was teaching her to make herself far more attractive to the eye than were the other girls over in our part of town. I still puzzle at why Charley Putney gave her up ; the only plausible theory seems to be that she was so sick in love with him that she wearied him. The most attract ive girl in the world, if she dotes on a young man too ardently, will turn his stomach, and alarm his delicate sense of feminine propriety. As we walked on, she with an elate and proud air, she said : " How different it smells over here ! " At first I didn't understand what she meant. But, as I thought of her remark, the meaning came. And I believe that was the beginning of my dissatisfaction with what I had all my life had in the way of surroundings. THE HUSBAND'S STORY I have since observed that the sense of smell is blunt, is almost latent, in people of the lower orders, and that it becomes more acute and more sensitive as we ascend in the social scale. Up to that time my ambition to rise had been rather indefinite a desire to make money which everyone seemed to think was the highest aim in life and also an instinct to beat the other fellows work ing with me. Now it became definite. I began to smell. I wanted to get away from unpleasant smells. I do not mean that this was a resolution, all in the twinkling of an eye. I simply mean that, as everything must have a beginning, that remark of hers was for me the begin ning of a long and slow but steady process of what may be called civilizing. Presently she said : " If we couldn't afford a house, we might take one of the flats." " But I'm afraid you'd be lonesome, away off from everybody we know." She tossed her head. " A good lonesome," said she. " I'm tired of common people. I was reading about re incarnations the other day." " Good Lord! " laughed I. What are they? " She explained as well as she could probably as well as anybody could. I admired her learning but the thing itself did not interest me. " I guess there must be something in it," she went on. " I'm sure in a former life I was something a lot different from what I am now." " Oh, you're all right," I assured her, putting my arm round her in the f Fondly darkness of a row of side walk elms. When we had indulged in an interlude of love-mak- THE HUSBAND'S STORY ing, she returned to the original subject. "I wonder how much rent we could afford to pay," said she. " They say the rent ought never to be more per month than the income is per week." " Then we could pay twenty-five a month." That seemed to me a lot to pay and, indeed, it was. But she did not inherit Weeping Willie's tightness; and she had never had money to spend or any training in either making or spending money. That is to say, she was precisely as ignorant of the main business of life as is the rest of American womanhood under our ridiculous system of education. So, twenty-five dollars a month rent meant nothing to her. " We can't do anything to-night," said she. " But I've got my days free, and I'll look at different places, and when I find several to choose from we can come in the evening or on Sunday and decide." This suited me exactly. We dismissed the matter, hunted out a shady nook, and sat down to enjoy our selves after the manner of young lovers on a fine night. Never before had she given herself freely to love. I know now it was because never before had she loved me. I was deliriously happy that night, and I am sure she was too. She no less than I had the ardent temperament that goes with the ambitious nature ; and now that she was idealizing me into the man who could lead her to the fairy lands she dreamed of, she gave me her whole heart. It was the beginning of what was beyond question the happiest period of both our lives. I have a dim old photograph of us two taken about that time. At a glance you see it is the picture of two young people of THE HUSBAND'S STORY the working class two green, unformed creatures, badly dressed and gawkily self-conscious. But there is a look in her face and in mine To be quite honest, Fm glad I don't look like that now. I wouldn't go back if I could. Nevertheless How we loved each other ! and how happy we were ! I feel that I weary you, gentle reader. There is in my sentiment too much about wages and flat rents and the smells that come from people who work hard and live in poor places and eat badly cooked strong food. But that is not my fault. It is life. And if you believe that your and your romancers' tawdry imaginings are better than life well, you may not be so wise or so ex alted as you fancy. The upshot of our inspecting places to live and hag gling over prices was that we took a flat in the best quarter of Passaic the top and in those elevatorless days the cheapest flat in the house. We were to pay forty dollars a month a stiff rent that caused excite ment in our neighborhood and set my mother and her father to denouncing us as a pair of fools bent upon ruin. I thought so, myself. But I could have denied Edna nothing at that time, and I made up my mind that by working harder than ever at the railway office I would compel another raise. When I told my mother about this secret resolve of mine, she said : " If you do get more money, Godfrey, don't tell Edna. She's a fool. She'll keep your nose to the grind stone all your life if you ain't careful. It takes a better money-maker than you're likely to be to hold up against that kind of a woman." 24* THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Oh, she's like all girls," said I. " That's just it," replied my mother. " That's why I ain't got no use for women. Look what poor man agers they are. Look how they idle and waste and run into debt." " But there's a lot to be said against the men, too. Saloons, for instance." " And talkin' politics with loafers," said my father's wife bitterly. " I guess the trouble with men and women is they're too human," said I, who had inherited something of the philosopher from my father. " And, mother, a man's got to get married and he's got to marry a woman." " Yes, I suppose he has," she grudgingly assented. " Mighty poor providers most of the men is, and mighty poor use the women make of what little the men brings home. But about you and Edny Wheatlands You ought to do better'n her, Godfrey. You're caught by her looks and her style and her education. None of them things makes a good wife." " I certainly wouldn't marry a girl that didn't have them all three." " But there's something more," insisted mother. " One woman can't have everything," said I. " No, but she can have what I mean and she's not much good to a man without it. If you're set on marry ing her wait till you re ready, anyhow. She never will be." " What do you mean, mother ? " " Wait till you've got money in the savings bank. Wait till you've got used to having money. Then maybe 25 THE HUSBAND'S STORY you'll be able to put a bit on a spendthrift wife even if you are crazy about her. You're making a wrong start with her, Godfrey. You're giving her the upper hand, and that's bad for women like her mighty bad." It was from my mother that I get my ability at busi ness. She and I often had sensible talks, and her advice started me right in the railroad office and kept me right until I knew my way. So I did not become angry at her plain speaking, but appreciated its good sense, even though I thought her prejudiced against my Edna. However, I had not the least impulse to put off the mar riage. My one wish was to hasten it. Never before or since was time so leisurely. But the day dragged itself up at last, and we were married in church, at what seemed to us then enormous expense. There was a dinner afterward at which everyone ate and drank too much a coarse and common scene which I will spare gentle reader. Edna and I went up to New York City for a Friday to Monday honeymoon. But we were back to spend Sunday night in our grand forty-dollar flat. On Monday morning I went to work again a married man, an important person in the community. Never has any height I have attained or seen since equalled the grandeur of that forty-dollar flat. My common sense tells me that it was a small and poor affair. I remember, for example, that the bathroom was hardly big enough to turn round in. I recall that I have sat by the window in the parlor and without rising have reached a paper on a table at the other end of the room. But these hard facts in no way interfere with or correct the flat as my imagination persists in THE HUSBAND'S STORY picturing it. What vistas of rooms ! what high ceil ings what woodwork and plumbing ! and what mag nificent furniture ! Edna's father, in a moment of gen erosity, told her he would, pay for the outfitting of the household. 'And being in the undertaking business he could get discounts on furniture and even on kitchen utensils. Edna did the selecting. I thought every thing wonderful and, as I have said, my imagination refuses to recreate the place as it actually was. But I recall that there was a brave show of red and of plush, and we all know what that means. Whether her " Lady Book " had miseducated her or her untrained eyes, ex cited by the gaudiness she saw when she went shopping, had beguiled her from the counsels of the " Lady Book," I do not know. But I am sure, as I recall red and plush, that our first home was the typical horror inhabited by the extravagant working-class family. No matter. There we were in Arcadia. For a time her restless soaring fancy, wearied perhaps by its auda cious flight to this lofty perch of red and plush and forty dollars a month, folded its wings and was content. For a time her pride and satisfaction in the luxurious newness overcame her distaste and disdain and moved her to keep things spotless. I recall the perfume of cleanness that used to delight my nostrils at my evening homecoming, and then the intoxicating perfume of Edna herself the aroma of healthy young feminine beauty. We loved each other, simply, passionately, in the old- fashioned way. With the growth of intelligence, with the realization on the part of men that her keep is a large part of the reason in the woman's mind if not in 27 THE ^H^SBAND'S STORY her heart for marrying and loving, there has come a decline and decay of the former reverence and awe of man toward woman. Also, the men nowadays know more about the mystery of woman, know everything about it, where not so many years ago a pure woman was to a man a real religious mystery. Her physical being, the clothes she wore underneath, the supposedly sweet and clean thoughts, nobler than his, that dwelt in the temple of her soul these things surrounded a girl with an atmosphere of thrilling enigma for the youth who won from her lips and from the church the right to explore. All that has passed, or almost passed. I am one of those who believe that what has come, or, rather, is coming, to take its place is better, finer, nobler. But the old order had its charm. What a charm for me ! who had never known any woman well, who had dreamed of her passionately but purely and respectfully. There was much of pain of shyness, fear of offending her higher nature, uneasiness lest I should be condemned and cast out in those early days of married life. But it was a sweet sort of pain. And when we began to un derstand each other to be human, though still on our best behavior when we found that we were congenial, were happy together in ways undreamed of, life seemed to be paying not like the bankrupt it usually is when the time for redeeming its promises comes but like a benevolent prodigal, like a lottery whose numbers all draw capital prizes. I admit the truth of much the pessimists have to say against Life. But one thing I must grant it. When in its rare generous moments it 28 THE HUSBAND'S STORY relents, it does know how to play the host at the feast how to spread the board, how to fill the flagons and to keep them filled, how to scatter the wreaths and the garlands, how to select the singers and the dancers who help the banqueters make merry. When I remember my honeymoon, I almost forgive you, Life, for the shabby tricks you have played me. Now I can conceive a honeymoon that would last on and on, not in the glory and feverish joy of its first period, but in a substantial and satisfying human hap piness. But not a honeymoon with a wife who is no more fitted to be a wife than the office boy is fitted to step in and take the president's job. Patience, gentle reader ! I know how this sudden shriek of discord across the amorous strains of the honeymoon music must have jarred your nerves. But be patient and I will explain. Except ourselves, every other family in the house, in the neighborhood, had at least one servant. We had none. If Edna had been at all economical we might have kept a cook and pinched along. But Edna spent carelessly all the money I gave her, and I gave her all there was. A large part of it went for finery for her personal adornment, trash of which she soon tired much of it she disliked as soon as it came home and she tried it on without the saleslady to flatter and confuse. I in a good-natured way, for I really felt perfectly good-humored about it remonstrated with her for let ting everybody rob her, for getting so little for her money. She took high ground. Such things were be neath her attention. If I had wanted a wife of that dull, pinch-penny kind I'd certainly not have married 3 29 THE HUSBAND'S STORY her, a talented, educated woman, bent on improving her mind and her position in the world. And that seemed reasonable. Still, the money was going, the bills were piling up, and I did not know what to do. And she did the cooking. I think I have already said that she had not learned to cook. How she and her mother expected her to get along as a poor clerk's wife I can't imagine. The worst of it was, she believed she could cook. That is the way with women. They look down on housekeeping, on the practical side of life, as too coarse and low to be worthy their attention. They say all that sort of thing is easy, is like the toil of a day laborer. They say anybody could do it. And they really believe so. Men, no matter how high their position, weary and bore themselves every day, because they must, with routine tasks beside which dishwashing has charm and variety. Yet women shirk their proper and necessary share of life's burden, pretending that it is beneath them. Edna, typical woman, thought she could cook and keep house because she, so superior, could certainly do inferior work if she chose. But after that first brief spurt of enthusiasm, of daily conference with the " Lady Book's Complete Housekeeper's Guide," the flat was badly kept was really horribly kept was worse than either her home or mine before we had been living there many months. It took on much the same odor. It looked worse, as tawdry finery, when mussy and dirty, is more repulsive than a plain toilet gone back. I did not especially mind that. But her cooking I had not been accustomed to anything especially good in the 30 THE HUSBAND'S STORY way of cooking. Mother was the old-fashioned fryer, and you know those fryers always served the vege tables soggy. I could have eaten exceedingly poor stuff without complaining or feeling like complaining. But the stuff she was soon flinging angrily upon the slovenly table I could not eat. She ate it, enough of it to keep alive, and it didn't seem to do her any harm. How many women have you known who were judges of things to eat ? Do you understand how women continue to eat the messes they put into their pretty mouths, and keep alive ? I could not eat Edna's cooking. I ate bread, cold meats and the like from the delicatessen shop. When the meal happened to be of her own preparing I dropped into the habit of slipping away after a pretense at eat ing, to get breakfast or dinner or supper in a restau rant the cheapest kind of restaurant, but I ate there with relish. And never once did I murmur to Edna. I loved her too well; also, I am by nature a tolerant, even-tempered person, hating strife, avoiding the harsh word. In fact, my timidity in that respect has been my chief weakness, has cost me dear again and again. But- After ten months of married life Edna fell ill. All you married men will prick up your ears at that. Why is it that bread winners somehow contrive to keep on their feet most of the time, little though they know as to caring for their health, reckless though they are in eating and drinking? Why is it that married women unless they have to work spend so much time in sick bed or near it? They say we in America have more 31 THE HUSBAND'S STORY than nine times as many doctors proportionately to population as any other country. The doctors live off of our women our idle, overeating, lazy women who will not work, who will not walk, who are always getting something the matter with them. Of course the doctors parasites upon parasites fake up all kinds of lies, many of them malicious slanders against the husbands, to excuse their patients and to keep them patients. But what is the truth ? Edna, who read all the time she was not plotting to get acquainted with our neighbors they looked down upon us and wished to have nothing to do with us Edna who ate quantities of candy between meals and ate at meals rich things she bought of confectioners and bakers Edna fell ill and frightened me almost out of my senses. I understand it now. But I did not understand then. I believed, as do all ignorant people both the obviously ignorant and the ignorant who pass for enlightened I believed sickness to be a mys terious accident, like earthquakes and lightning strokes, a hit-or-miss blow from nowhere in particular. So I was all sympathy and terror. She got well. She looked as well as ever. But she said she was not strong. " And Godfrey, we simply have got to keep a girl. I've borne up bravely. But I can't stand it any longer. You see for yourself, the rough work and the strain of housekeeping are too much for me." " Very well," said I. The bills, including the doc tor's and drug bills, were piling up. We were more than a thousand dollars in debt. But I said : " Very THE HUSBAND'S STORY well. You are right." We men do not realize that there are two distinct and equal expressions of strength. The strength of bulk, that is often deceptive in that it looks stronger than it is ; the strength of fiber, that is always deceptive in that it is stronger than it looks. In a gen eral way, man has the strength of bulk, woman the strength of fiber. So man looks on woman's appearance of fragility and fancies her weak and himself the stronger. I looked at Edna, and said : " Very well. We must have a girl to help." I shan't linger upon this part of my story. I am tempted to linger, but, after all, it is the commonplace of American life, familiar to all, though understood appar ently by only a few. Why do more than ninety per cent of our small business men fail? Why are the savings banks accounts of our working classes a mere fraction of those of the working classes of other countries ? And so on, and so on. But I see your impatience, gentle reader, with these matters so " inartistic." We sank deeper and deeper in debt. Edna's health did not improve. The girl we hired had lived with better class people ; she de spised us, shirked her work, and Edna did not know how to manage her. If the head of the household is incompetent and indifferent, a servant only aggravates the mess, and the more servants the greater the mess. All Edna's interest was for her music, her novels, her social advancement, and her dreams of being a grand lady. These dreams had returned with increased power ; they took complete possession of her. They soured her disposition, made her irritable, usually blue or cross, only at long intervals loving and sweet. No, perhaps 33 THE HUSBAND'S STORY the dreams were not responsible. Perhaps probably the real cause was the upset state of her health through the absurd idle life she led. Idle and lonely. For she would not go with whom she could, she could not go with whom she would. " I'm sick of sitting alone," said she. " No wonder I can't get well." " Let's go back near the old folks," suggested I. " Our friends won't come to see us in this part of the town. They feel uncomfortable." " I should think they would! " cried she. " And if they came I'd see to it that they were so uncomfortable that they would never come again." I worked hard. My salary went up to fifteen hun dred, to two thousand, to twenty-five hundred. " Now," said Edna, " perhaps you'll get hands that won't look like a laboring man's. How can I hope to make nice friends when I've a husband with broken finger nails ? " Our expenses continued to outrun my salary, but I was not especially worried, for I began to realize that I had the money-making talent. Three children were born ; only the first Margot lived. Looking back upon those six years of our married life, I see after the first year only a confused repellent mess of illness, nurses, death, doctors, quarrels with servants, untidy rooms and clothes, slovenly, peevish wife, with myself watching it all in a dazed, helpless way, thinking it must be the normal, natural order of domestic life which, indeed, it is in America and wondering where and how it was to end. I recall going home one afternoon late, to find Edna 34 THE HUSBAND'S STORY yawning listlessly over some book in a magazine culture series. Her hair hung every which way, her wrapper was torn and stained. Her skin had the musty look that suggests unpleasant conditions both without and within. Margot, dirty, pimply from too much candy, sat on the floor squalling. " Take the child away," cried Edna, at sight of me.. " I thought you'd never come. A little more of this and I'll kill myself. What is there to live for, anyhow? " Silent and depressed, I took Margot for a walk. And as I wandered along sadly I was full of pity for Edna, and felt that somehow the blame was wholly mine for the wretched plight of our home life. When I was twenty-eight and Edna twenty-three, I had a series of rapid promotions which landed me in New York in the position of assistant traffic superin tendent. My salary was eight thousand a year. It so happened coincidence and nothing else that those eighteen months of quick advance for me also marked a notable change in Edna. There are some people many people so obsessed of the know-it-all vanity that they can learn nothing. Nor are all these people preachers, doctors, and teach ers, gentle reader. Then there is another species who pretend to know all, who are chary of admitting to learning or needing to learn anything, however small, yet who behind their pretense toil at improving them selves as a hungry mouse gnaws at the wall of the cheese box. Of this species was Edna. As she was fond of being mysterious about her thoughts and intentions, 35 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ^^^^CTBBMi^^ she never told me what set her going again after that long lethargy. Perhaps it was some woman whom she had a sudden opportunity thoroughly to study, some woman who knew and lived the ideas Edna had groped for in vain. Perhaps it was a novel she read or articles in her magazines. It doesn't matter. I never asked her ; I had learned that wild horses would not drag from her a confession of where she had got an idea, because such a confession would to her notion detract from her own glory. However, the essential fact is that she sud denly roused and set to work as she had never worked before went at it like a prospector who, after toiling now hard and now discouragedly for years, strikes by accident a rich vein of gold. Edna showed in every move that she not hoped, not believed, but knew she was at last on the right track. She began to take care, scrupulous care, of her person the minute intelligent care she has ever since been expanding and improving upon, has never since relaxed, and never will relax. Also she began to plan and to move definitely in the matter of taking care of Margot to look after her speech, her manners, her food, her person, especially, perhaps, the last. Margot's teeth, Margot's hair, Margot's walk, Margot's feet and hands and skin, the shape of her nose, the set of her ears all these things she talked about and fussed with as agitatedly as about her own self. Edna became a crank on the subject of food what is called a crank by the unthinking, of whom, by the way, I was to my lasting regret one until a few years ago. For a year or two her moves in this important direction were blundering, intermittent, and not always 36 THE HUSBAND'S STORY successful small wonder when there is really no reliable information to be had, the scientists being uncertain and the doctors grossly ignorant. But gradually she evolved and lived upon a " beauty diet." Margot, of course, had to do the same. She took exercises morning and night, took long and regular walks for the figure and skin and to put clearness and brightness into the eyes. I believe she and Margot, with occasional lapses, keep up their regimen to this day. The house was as slattern as ever. The diet and comfort and health of the family bread-winner were no more the subject of thought and care than well, than the next husband's to his wife. She gave some attention intelligent and valuable attention, I cheerfully con cede to improving my speech, manners, and dress. But beyond that the revolution affected only her and her daughter. Them it affected amazingly. In three or four months the change in their appearance was literally beyond belief. Edna's beauty and style came back no, burst forth in an entirely new kind of radi ance and fascination. As for little Margot, she trans formed from homeliness, from the scrawny pasty look of bad health, from bad temper, into as neat and sweet and pretty a little lady as could be found anywhere. You, gentle reader, who are ever ready to slop over with some kind of sentimentality because in your shal- lowness you regard sentimentality not sentiment, for of that you know nothing, but sentimentality as the most important thing in the world, just as a child re gards sickeningly rich cake as the finest food in the world you, gentle reader, have already made up your 37 THE HUSBAND'S STORY mind why Edna thus suddenly awakened, or, rather, re awakened. " Aha," you are saying. " Served him good and right. She found some one who appreciated her." That guess of yours shows how little you know about Edna or the Edna kind of human being. The people who do things in this world, except in our foolish Ameri can novels, do because they must. They may do better or worse under the influence of love, which is full as often a drag as a spur. But they do not do because of love. I shall not argue this. I shrink from gratui tously inviting an additional vial of wrath from the ladies, who resent being told how worthless they in their indolence and self-complacence permit themselves to be and how small a positive part they now play in the world drama. I should have said nothing at all about the matter, were it not that I wish to be strictly just to Edna, and she, being wholly the ambitious woman, has always had and still has a deep horror of scandal, intrigue, irregularity, and unconventionality of every sort. It was necessary that we move to a place more con venient to my business headquarters in New York City. A few weeks after I got the eight thousand a year, Edna, and little Margot and I went to Brooklyn to live took a really charming house in Bedford Avenue, with large grounds around it. And once more we were happy. It seemed to me we had started afresh. And we had. II WHY did we go to Brooklyn? By the time Edna and I had been married six years I learned many things about her inmost self. I was not at all analytic or critical as to matters at home. I used my intelligence in my own business ; I assumed that my wife had intelligence and that she used it in her business her part of our joint business. I believed the reason her part of it went badly was solely the natural conditions of life beyond her control. A rail road, a factory could be run smoothly ; a family and a household were different matters. And I admired my wife as much as I loved her, and regarded her as a wonderful woman, which, indeed, in certain respects she was. But I had discovered in her several weaknesses. Some of these I knew; others I did not permit my self to know that I knew. For example, I was per fectly aware that she was not so truthful as one might be. But I did not let myself admit that she was not always unconscious of her own deviations from the truth. I had gained enough experience of life to learn that lying is practically a universal weakness. So I did not especially mind it in her, often found it amus ing. I had not then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to their husbands about THE HUSBAND'S STORY big things and little, and that those women who pro fess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirec tions, such as omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising. Self-respect, real per sonal pride, I have discovered in spite of the reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern develop ment, is still in embryo ; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are either the most ignorant of our selves or the most hypocritical. But back to my acquaintance with my wife's char acter. When I told her we should have to live nearer rny work, my new work, than Passaic, she promptly said : " Let's go to Brooklyn." " Why not to New York? " said I. " At least until I get thoroughly trained, I want to be close to the office." " But there's Margot," said she. " Margot must have a place to play in. And we couldn't afford such a place in New York. I can't let her run about the streets or go to public schools. She'd pick up all sorts of low, coarse associates and habits." " Then let's go to some town opposite across the Hudson. If we can't live on Manhattan Island, and I think you're right about Margot, why, let's live where living is cheap. We ought to be saving some money." " I hate these Jersey towns," said Edna petulantly. " I don't think Margot would get the right sort of social influences in them." As soon as she said " social influences " I should have understood the whole business. The only person higher up on the social ladder with whom Edna had been 40 THE HUSBAND'S STORY able to scrape intimate acquaintance in Passaic was a dowdy, tawdry chatterbox of a woman I forget her name who talked incessantly of the fashionable people she knew in Brooklyn how she had gone there a stran ger, had joined St. Mary's Episcopal Church, and had at once become a social favorite, invited to " the very best houses, my dear; such lovely homes," and associ ated with " the most charming cultured people," and so on and on you know the rest of the humbug. Now, one of the discoveries about my wife which I but half understood and made light of, had been that she was mad, literally mad, on the subject of social climbing. That means she was possessed of the disease imported into this country from England, where it has raged for upward of half a century the disease of being bent upon associating by hook or by crook with people whose strongest desire seems to be not to associate with you. This plague does not spare the male population by no means. But it rages in and ravages the female population almost to a woman. Our women take inci dental interest or no interest in their homes, in their husbands, in their children. Their hearts are centered upon social position, and, of course, the money-squan dering necessary to attaining or to keeping it. The women who are " in " spend all their time, whatever they may seem to be about, in spitting upon and kick ing the faces of the women who are trying to get " in." The women who are trying to get "in" spend their whole time in smiling and cringing and imploring and plotting and, when it seems expedient, threatening and compelling. Probe to the bottom if you have acute- 41 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ness enough, which you probably haven't probe to the bottom any of the present-day activities of the Ameri can woman, I care not what it may be, and you will discover the bacillus of social position biting merrily away at her. If she goes to church or to a lecture or a concert if she goes calling or stays at home if she joins a suffrage movement or a tenement reform prop aganda, or refuses to join if she dresses noisily or plainly if she shuns society or seeks it, if she keeps house or leaves housekeeping to servants, roaches, and mice if she cares for or neglects her children if she pets her husband or displaces him with another no matter what she does, it is at the behest of the poison flowing through brain and vein from the social-position bacillus. She thinks by doing whatever she does she will somehow make her position more brilliant or less insecure, or, having no position at all, will gain one. And the men? They pay the bills. Sometimes re luctantly, again eagerly; sometimes ignorantly, again with full knowledge. The men they pay the bills. Now you know better far than I knew at the time why our happy little family went to Brooklyn, took the house in Bedford Avenue which we could ill afford if we were to save any money, and joined St. Mary's. A couple of years after we were married my wife stopped me when I was telling her what had happened at the office that day, as was my habit. " You ought to leave all those things outside when you come home," said she. She had read this in a book somewhere, I guess. It was a new idea to me. " Why should I ? " said I. 42 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 66 Home is a place for happiness, with all the sor- didness shut out," explained she. " Those sordid things ought not to touch our life together." This sounded all right. " It seemed to me," stam mered I, apologetically, " that my career, the way I was getting on, that our bread and butter Well, I thought we ought to kind of talk it over together." " Oh, I do sympathize with you," said, or rather quoted, she. " But my place is to soothe and smooth away the cares of business. You ought to try not to think of them at home." " But what would I think about ? " cried I, much perplexed. " Why, my business is all I've got. It's the most important thing in the world to us. It means our living. At least that's the way the thing looks to me." " You ought to think at home about the higher side of life the intellectual side." " But my business is my intellectual side," I said. " And I can't for the life of me see why thinking about things that don't advance us and don't pay the bills is better than thinking about things that do." It seemed to me that this looking on my business as something to be left on the mud-scraper at the entrance indicated a false idea of it got somewhere. So I added somewhat warmly : " There's nothing low or bad about my busi ness." And that was the truth at the time. " I don't know anything about it," replied she with the gentle patience of her superior refinement and edu cation. " And I don't want to know. Those things don't interest me. And I think, Godfrey " very sweetly, with her cheek against mine " the reason hus- 43 THE HUSBAND'S STORY bands and wives often grow apart is that the husband gives his whole mind to his business and doesn't develop the higher side of his nature the side that appeals to a woman and satisfies her." This touched my sense of humor mildly. " My father gives his mind to one of those high sides," said I, " and we nearly starved to death." " Your father ! " exclaimed she in derisive disgust. " My father," said I cheerfully, " he does nothing but read, talk, and think politics." " Politics ! That isn't on the higher side. Women don't care anything about that." " Well, what do they care about ? " I inquired. " About music and literature and those artistic things." " Oh, those things are all right," said I. " But I don't see that it takes any more brains or any better brains to paint a picture or sing a song or write a novel than it does to run a railroad or to plan one. If you'd try to understand business, dear," I urged, " you might find it as interesting and as intellectual as anything that doesn't help us make a living. Anyhow, I've simply got to give my brains to my work. You go ahead and attend to the higher side for the family. I'll stick to the job that butters the bread and keeps the rain off." She was patient with me, but I saw she didn't ap prove. However, as I knew she'd approve still less if I failed to provide for her and the two young ones there were two at that time I let the matter drop and held to the common-sense course. I hadn't the faintest 44 THE HUSBAND'S STORY notion of the seriousness of that little talk of ours. And it was well I hadn't, for to have made her realize her folly I'd have had to start in and educate her un- educate her and then reeducate her. I don't blame the women. I feel sorry for them. When I hear them talk about the lack of sympathy between themselves and American men, about the low ideals and the sordid talk the men indulge in, how dull it is, how different from the inspiring, cultured talk a woman hears among the aris tocrats abroad, said aristocrats being supported in helpless idleness throughout their useless lives, often by hard-earned American dollars when I hear this piti ful balderdash from fair lips, I grow sad. The Ameri can woman fancies she is growing away from the Ameri can man. The truth is that while she is sitting still, playing with a lapful of the artificial flowers of fake culture, like a poor doodle-wit, the American man is growing away from her. She knows nothing of value ; she can do nothing of value. She has nothing to offer the American man but her physical charms, for he has no time or taste for playing with artificial flowers when the world's important work is to be done. So the poor creature grows more isolated, more neglected, less respected, and less sought, except in a physical way. And all the while she hugs to her bosom the delusion that she is the great soul high sorrowful. The world moves ; many are the penalties for the nation or the race or the sex that does not move with it, or does not move quickly enough. I feel sorry for the American woman unless she has a father who will leave her rich or a husband who will give her riches. 4 45 THE HUSBAND'S STORY I feel some of my readers saying that I must have been most unfortunate in the women I have known. Perhaps. But may it not be that those commiserating readers have been rarely fortunate in their feminine acquaintances? or in lack of insight? Now you probably not only know why we went to Brooklyn, but also what we did after we got there. I have not forgotten my promise to gentle reader. I shall not linger many moments in Brooklyn. True, it is superior to Passaic, at least to the part of Passaic in which I constrained gentle reader to tarry a minute or two. But it is still far from the promised heights. My wife owes a vast deal to Brooklyn. As she haughtily ignores the debt, would deny it if publicly charged, I shall pay it for her. Brooklyn was her fin ishing school. It made her what she is. In the last year or so we spent in Passaic there had been, as I have hinted, a marked outward change in all three of us. The least, or rather the least abrupt, change had been in me. Associated in business with a more prosperous and better-dressed and better-educated class of men, I had gradually picked up the sort of knowledge a man needs to fit himself for the inevitably changing social conditions accompanying a steady ad vance in material prosperity. I was as quick to learn one kind of useful thing as another. And just as I learned how to fill larger and larger positions and how to make money out of the chances that come to a man situated where money is to be made, so I learned how to dress like a man of the better class, how to speak a less slangy and a less ungrammatical English, how to use THE HUSBAND'S STORY my mind in thinking and in discussing a thousand sub jects not directly related to my business. If my wife had been interested in any of the impor tant things of the world, I could have been of the greatest assistance to her and she to me. And we should have grown ever closer together in sympathetic companionship. But although she had a good mind a superior mind she cared about nothing but the things that interest foolish women and still more fool ish men for a man who cares about splurge and show and social position and such nonsense is less excusable, is more foolish, than a woman of the same sort. Women have the excuse of lack of serious occupation, but what excuse has a man? Still, she was not idle not for a minute. She was, on the contrary, in her way as busy as I. From time to time she would say to me enigmatically : " You don't appreciate it, but I am preparing myself to help you fill the station your business ability will win us a chance at." It seemed to me that I was doing that alone. For what was neces sary to fill that station but higher and higher skill as a man of affairs? When we had made our entry in Brooklyn and had seated ourselves in the state in Bedford Avenue which she had decided for, she showed that she felt immensely proud of herself. We took the house furnished throughout nicely furnished in a substantial way, for it had been the home of one of the old Brooklyn mercantile families. " It's good enough to start with," said she, cast ing a critical glance round the sober, homelike dining 47 THE HUSBAND'S STORY room. " I shan't make any changes till I look about me. 7 ' " We couldn't be better off," said I. " Everything is perfectly comfortable." And in fact neither she nor I had ever before known what comfort was. Looking at that house merely looking at it and puzzling out the uses of the various things to us theretofore unknown was about as important in the way of education as learning to read is to a child. " It's good enough for Brooklyn," said she. She regarded me with her patient, tender expression of the superior intelligence. " You haven't much imagination or ambition, Godfrey," she went on. " But fortunately I have. And do be careful not to betray us before the servants Fm engaging." The show part of the house continued to look about as it had when we took possession. But the living part went to pieces rapidly. We had many servants. We spent much money so much that, if I had not been speculating in various ways, we should have soon gone under. But the results were miserably poor. My wife left everything to her servants and devoted herself to her social career. The ex-Brooklyn society woman at Passaic had not deceived her. No sooner had she j oined St. Mary's than she began to have friends friends of a far higher social rank than she had ever even seen at close range before. They were elegant people in deed the wives of the heads of departments in big stores, the families of bank officers and lawyers and doctors. There were even a few rather rich people. My wife was in ecstasy for a year or two. And she 48 THE HUSBAND'S STORY improved rapidly in looks, in dress, in manners, in speech, in all ways except in disposition and character. Except in disposition and character. As we grow older and rise in the world, there is always a deteriora tion both in disposition and in character. A man's dis position grows sharper through dealing with, and hav ing to deal sharply with, incompetence. The character tends to harden as he is forced to make the unpleasant and often not too scrupulous moves necessary to get ting himself forward toward success. Also, the way everyone tries to use a successful man makes him more and more acute in penetrating to the real motives of his fellow beings, more and more inclined to take up men for what he can get out of them and drop them when he has squeezed out all the advantage in brief, to treat them precisely as they treat him. But the whole object in having a home, a wife, a family, is de feated if the man has not there a something that checks the tendencies to cynicism and coldness which active life not merely encourages but even compels. There was no occasion for Edna's becoming vixen ish and hard. It was altogether due to the idiotic and worthless social climbing. She had a swarm of friends, yet not a single friend. She cultivated people socially, and they cultivated her, not for the natural and kindly and elevating reasons, but altogether for the detest able purposes of that ghastly craze for social position. Edna was bitter against me for a long time, never again became fully reconciled, because I soon flatly refused to have anything to do with it. " They will think there's something wrong about 49 THE HUSBAND'S STORY you, and about me, if you don't come with me," pleaded she. " I need my strength for my business," said I. " And what do I care whether they think well or ill of me? They don't give us any money." " You are so sordid ! " cried she. " Sometimes I'm almost tempted to give up, and not try to be somebody and to make somebodies of Margot and you." 66 1 wish you would," said I. " Why shouldn't we live quietly and mind our own business and be happy ? " " How fortunate it is for Margot that she has a mother with ambition and pride ! " " Well no matter. But please do get another cook. This one is, if anything, worse than the last except when we have company." We were forever changing cooks. The food that came on our table was something atrocious. I heard the same complaint from all my married associates at the office, even from the higher officials who were rich men and lived in great state. They, too, had American wives. In the markets and shops I saw as I passed along all sorts of attractive things to eat, and of real quality. I wondered why we never had those things on our table. Heaven knows we spent money enough. The time came when I got a clew to the mystery. One day Edna said : " I've been doing my house keeping altogether by telephone. I think I'll stop it, except on rainy days and when I don't feel well." By telephone ! I laughed to myself. No wonder we had poor stuff and paid the highest prices for it. I thought a while, then to satisfy my curiosity began to 50 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ask questions, very cautiously, for Edna was extremely touchy, as we all are in matters where in our hearts we know we are in the wrong. " Do you remember what kind of range we have in our kitchen ? " I asked. " I ? " exclaimed she disgustedly. " Certainly not. I haven't been down to the kitchen since we first moved into this house. I've something better to do than to meddle with the servants." " Naturally," said I soothingly. And I didn't let her see how her confession amused me. What if a man tried to run his business in that fashion ! And ordering by telephone ! Why, it was an invitation to the trades people to swindle us in every way. But I said nothing. As usually either it was bad weather or Edna was not feeling well, or was in a rush to keep some social engagement, the ordering for the house continued to be done by telephone, when it was not left entirely to the discretion of the servants. One morning it so happened that she and I left the house at the same time. Said she: " I'm on my way to do the marketing. It's a terrible nuisance, and I know so little about those things. But it's coming to be regarded as fashionable for a woman to do her own marketing. Some of the best families people with their own carriages and servants in livery some of the swellest ladies in Brooklyn do it now. It's a fad from across the river." " You must be careful not to overtax yourself," said I. And I said it quite seriously, for in those days of my innocence I was worried about her, thought her a poor 51 THE HUSBAND'S STORY overworked angel, was glad I had the money to relieve her from the worst tasks and to leave her free to amuse herself and to take care of her health! I had not yet started in the direction of ridding myself of the mas culine delusion that woman is a delicate creature by nature if she happens to be a lady and of course I knew my Edna was a lady through and through. It was many a year before I learned the truth why ladies are always ailing and why they can do nothing but wear fine clothes and sit in parlors or in carriages when they are not sitting at indigestible food, and amuse them selves and pity themselves for being condemned to live with coarse, uninteresting American men. Yes, I was sincere in urging her to take care how she adopted so laborious a fad as doing her own mar keting. She went on : " If I had a carriage it wouldn't be so bad." She said this sweetly enough and with no suggestion of reproach. Just the sigh of a lady's soul at the hard ness of life's conditions. But I, loving her, felt as if I were somehow to blame. " You shall have a carriage before many years," said I. " That's one of the things I've been working for." She gave me a look that made me feel proud I had her to live for. " I hope I'll be here to enjoy it," sighed she. I walked sad and silent by her side, profoundly im pressed and depressed by that hint as to her feeble health. I know now it was sheer pretense with her, the more easily to manage me and to cover her shortcom ings. I ought to have realized it then. But what man 52 THE HUSBAND'S STOEY does? She certainly did not look ill, for she was not one of those who were always stuffing themselves at teas and lunches, and talked of a walk of five blocks as hard exercise! She had learned how to keep health and beauty. What intelligence it shows, that she was able to grasp so difficult a matter ; and what splendid persist ence that she was able to carry out a mode of life so disagreeable to self-indulgence. If her intelligence and her persistence could have been turned to use! Pres ently we were at the butcher shop. I paused in the doorway while she engaged in her arduous labor. Here is the conversation: " Good morning, Mr. Toomey." (Very gracious ; the lady speaking to the trades person.) " Good morning, ma'am." (Fat little butcher touch ing cracked and broken-nailed hand to hat respect fully.) " That lamb you sent yesterday was very tough." " Sorry, ma'am. But those kind of things will hap pen, you know." (Most flatteringly humble of man ner.) " Yes, I know. Do your best. I'm sure you try to please. Send me let me see say, two chickens for broiling. You'll pick out nice ones ? " " Yes, indeed, ma'am. I'll attend to it myself." " And something for the servants. You know what they like." " Yes, ma'am. I'll attend to it." " And you'll not overcharge, will you ? " 66 1, ma'am? I've been dealing with ladies for twenty years, right here, ma'am. I never have overcharged." 53 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " I know. All the ladies tell me you're honest. I feel safe with you. Let me see, there were some other things. But I'm in a hurry. The cook will tell your boy when he takes what I've ordered. You'll be sure to give me the best ? " " I'd not dare send anything else to you, ma'am." (Groveling.) A gracious smile, a gracious nod, and Edna re joined me. Innocent as I was, and under the spell that blinds the American man where the American woman is concerned, I could not but be upset by this example of how our house was run an example that all in an instant brought to my mind and enabled me to under stand a score, a hundred similar examples. There was I, toiling away to make money, earning every dollar by the hardest kind of mental labor, struggling to rise, to make our fortune, and each day my wife was tossing carelessly out of the windows into the street a large part of my earnings. I did not know what to do about it. Edna's next stop was at the grocer's. I had not the courage to halt and listen. I knew it would be a repetition of the grotesque interview with the butcher. And she undoubtedly a clever woman alert, improving. What a mystery ! I went on to my office. That day, without giving my acquaintances there an inkling of what was in my mind, I made inquiries into how their wives spent the money that went for food the most important item in the spending of incomes under ten or twelve thousand a year. In every case the wife or the mother did the marketing by telephone. All the men THE HUSBAND'S STORY except one took the ignorance and incompetence of the management of the household expenses as a matter of course. One man grumbled a little. I remember he said : " No wonder it's hard for the men to save any thing. The women waste most of it on the table, pay ing double prices for poor stuff. I tell you, Loring, the American woman is responsible for the dishonesty of American commercial life. They are always nagging at the man for more and more money to spend, and in spending it they tempt the merchants, the clerks, their own servants, everyone within range, to become swin dlers and thieves." " Oh, nonsense," said I. " You're a pessimist. The American woman is all right. Where'd you find her equal for intelligence and charm ? " " She may be intelligent," said he. " She doesn't use it on anything worth while, except roping in some poor sucker to put up for her and to put up with her. And she may have charm, but not for a man who has cut his matrimonial eye teeth." I laughed at Van Dyck that was my grumbling friend's name. And I soon dropped the subject from my mind. It has never been my habit to waste time in thinking about things when the thinking could not pos sibly lead anywhere. You may say I ought to have interfered, forced my wife to come to her senses, com pelled her to learn her business. Which shows that you know little about the nature of the American woman. If I had taken that course, she would have hated me, she would have done no better, and she would have scorned me as a sordid haggler over small sums 55 THE HUSBAND'S STORY of money who was trying to spoil with the vulgarities of commercial life the beauties of the home. No, I instinctively knew enough not to interfere. But let us take a long leap forward to the day when I became president of the railroad, having made myself a rich man by judicious gambling with eight thousand dollars loaned me by father Wheatlands. He was a rich man, and in the way to become very rich, and he had no heir but Edna after the drowning of her two brothers under a sailboat in Newark Bay. Margot was in a fashionable school over in New York. My wife and I, still a young couple and she beautiful my wife and I were as happy as any married couple can be where they let each other alone and the husband gives the wife all the money she wishes and leaves her free to spend it as she pleases. When I told her of my good fortune, and the sud den and large betterment of our finances, she said with a curious lighting of the eyes, a curious strengthening of the chin : "Now for New York!" " New York? " said I. " What does that mean? " " We are going to live in New York," replied she. " But we do live in New York. Brooklyn is part of New York." " Legally I suppose it is," replied she. " But mor ally and aesthetically, socially, and in every other civi lized way, my dear Godfrey, it is part of the backwoods. I can hardly wait to get away." 56 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Why, I thought you were happy here ! " exclaimed I, marveling, used though I was to her keeping her own counsel strictly about the matters that most interested her. " You've certainly acted as if you loved it." " I didn't mind it at first," conceded she. " But for two or three years I have loathed it, and everybody that lives in it." I was amazed at this last sally. " Oh, come now, Edna," cried I, " you've got lots of friends here lots and lots of them." I was thinking of the dozen or so women whom she called and who called her by the first name, women she was with early and late. Women she was daily playing bridge with Bridge! I have a friend who declares that bridge is ruining the American home, and I see his point, but I think he doesn't look deep enough. If it weren't bridge it would be something else. Bridge is a striking example, but only a single example, of the results of feminine folly and idleness that all flow from the same cause. However, let us go back to my talk with Edna. She met my protest in behalf of her friends with a contemptuous : " I don't know a soul who isn't frightfully common." " They're the same sort of people we are." " Not the same sort that / am," declared she proudly. " And not the sort Margot and you are going to be. You'll see. You don't know about these things. But fortunately I do." " You don't seriously mean that you want to leave this splendid old house " " Splendid ? It's hardly fit to live in. Of course, we 57 THE HUSBAND'S STORY had to endure it while we were poor and obscure. But now it won't do at all." " And go away from all these people you've worked so hard to get in with all these friends go away among strangers. / don't mind. But what would you do? How'd you pass the days? " " These vulgar people bore me to death," declared she. " I've been advancing, if you have stood still. Thank God, I've got ambition." " Heaven knows they've never been my friends," said I. " But I must say they seem nice enough people, as people go. What's the matter with 'em? " " They're common," said she with the languor of one explaining when he feels he will not be understood. " They're tiresome." " I'll admit they're tiresome," said I. " That's why I've kept away from them. But I doubt if they're more tiresome than people generally. The fact is, my dear, people are all tiresome. That's why they can't amuse themselves or each other, but have to be amused have to hire the clever people of all sorts to entertain them. Instead of asking people here to bore us and to be bored, why not send them seats at a theater or orders for a first-class meal at a first-class restaurant ? " " I suppose you think that's funny," said my wife. She had no sense of humor, and the suggestion of a jest irritated her. " Yes, it does strike me as funny," I admitted. " But there's sense in it, too. . . . I'm sure you don't want to abandon your friends here. Why make our selves uncomfortable all over again ? " I took a serious 58 THE HUSBAND'S STORY persuasive tone. " Edna, we're beginning to get used to the more stylish way of living we took up when we left Passaic and came here to live. Is it sensible to branch out again into the untried and the unknown? Will we be any wiser or any happier? You can shine as the big star now in this circle of friends. You like to run things socially. Here's your chance." " How could I get any pleasure out of running things socially in St. Mary's ? " demanded she. " I've outgrown it. It seems vulgar and common to me. It is vulgar and common." " What does that mean? " I asked innocently. " If you don't understand, I can't tell you," replied she tartly.* " Surely you must see that your wife and your daughter are superior to these people round here." " I don't compare my wife and daughter with other people," said I. " To me they're superior to anybody and everybody else in the world. I often wish we lived Vay off in the country somewhere. I'm sure we'd be happier with only each other. We're putting on too much style to suit me, even now." " I see you living in the country," laughed she, " You'd come down about once a week or month." I couldn't deny the truth in her accusation. I felt it ought to have been that my wife and I were so sym pathetic, so interested in the same things, that we were absorbed in each other. But the facts were against it. We really had almost nothing in common. I admired her beauty and also her intelligence and energy, though I thought them misdirected. She, I think, liked me in the primitive way of a woman with a man. And she 59 THE HUSBAND'S STORY admired my ability to make money, though she thought it rather a low form of intellectual excellence. How ever, as she found it extremely useful, she admired me for it in a way. I have seen much of the aristocratic temperament that despises money, but I have yet to see an aristocrat who wasn't greedier than the greediest money-grubber and I must say it is hard to conceive anything lower than the spirit that grabs the gift and despises the giver. But then, some day, when thinking is done more clearly, we shall all see that aristocracy and its spirit is the lowest level of human nature, is I simply a deep-seated survival of barbarism. However, Edna and I appealed to and satisfied each other in one way; beyond that our congeniality abruptly ended. Looking back, I see now that talking with her was never a pleasure, nor was it a pleasure to her to talk with me. I irritated her ; she bored me. How rarely in our country do you find a woman who is an interesting companion for a man, except as female and male pair or survey the prospect of pair ing? And it matters not what line of activity the man is taking business, politics, literature, art, philan thropy even. The women are eternally talking about their superiority to the business man ; but do they get along any better with an artist unless he is cultivating the woman for the sake of an order for a picture? Is there any line of serious endeavor in which an American woman is interesting and helpful and companionable to a man? I can get along very well with an artist. I have one friend who is a writer of novels, another who is a writer of plays, a third who is a sculptor. They 60 THE HUSBAND'S STORY are interested in my work, and I in theirs. We talk together on a basis of equal interest, and we give each. other ideas. Can any American woman say the same? I don't inquire anticipating a negative answer. I sim ply put the question. But I suspect the answer would put a pin in the bubble of the American woman's pre tense of superior culture. She is fooled by her vanity, I fear, and by her sex attraction, and by the influence of the money her despised father or husband gives her. There's a reason why America is notoriously the land of bachelor husbands and that reason is not the one the women and foreign fortune hunters assert. The American man lets the case go by default against him, not because he couldn't answer, nor yet because he is polite, but because he is indifferent. But my wife was talking about her pro j ected assault upon New York. " I really must be an extraordinary woman," said she. " How I have fought all these years to raise myself, with you dragging at me to keep me down." " I ? " protested her unhappy husband. " Why, dear, I've never opposed you in any way. And I've tried to do what I could to help you. You must admit the money's been useful." " Oh, you've never been mean about money," con ceded she. " But you don't sympathize with a single one of my ideals." " I want you to have whatever you want," said I. " And anything I can do to get it for you, or to help you get it, I stand ready to do." " Yes, I know, Godfrey, dear," said she, giving me 61 THE HUSBAND'S STORY a long hug and a kiss. " No woman ever had a more generous husband than I have." I naturally attached more importance to this burst of enthusiasm then than I do now. And it is as well that I was thus simple-minded. How little pleasure we would get, to be sure, if, when we are praised or loved by anybody because we do that person 'a kindness, we paused to analyze and saw the shallow selfishness of such praise or such love. After all, it's only human nature to like those who do as we ask them and to dis like those who don't ; and I am not quarreling with hu man nature or with any other of the unchangeable con ditions of the universe. My own love for Edna what was it but the natural result of my getting what I wanted from her, all I wanted? I really troubled my self little about her incompetence and extravagance and craze for social position. No doubt to this day I should be But I am again anticipating. " Generous ? Nonsense," said I. " It isn't gener ous to try to make you happy. That's my one chance of being happy myself. A busy man's got to have peace at home. If he hasn't he's like a soldier attacked rear and front at the same time." " I know you don't care where we live," she went on. " And for Margot's sake we've simply got to move to New York." " Oh, you want her to stay at home of nights, in stead of living at the school. Why didn't you speak of that first?" " Not at all," cried she. " How slow you are ! No ; for the present, even if we do live in New York, I think 62 THE HUSBAND'S STORY it best for Margot to keep on living at the school. She's barely started there. I want her training to be thor ough. And while I'm learning as fast as I can, I am not competent to teach her. I know, of course. But I haven't had the chance to practice. So I can't teach her." " Teach her what? " I inquired. " To be a lady a practical, expert lady," replied Edna. " That's what she's going to Miss Ryper's school for. And when she comes out she'll be the equal of girls who have generations of culture and breeding behind them." " God bless me ! " cried I, laughing. " This Ryper woman must be a wonder." " She is," declared Edna. " It was a great favor, her letting Margot into the school." " Oh, I remember," said I. " She couldn't do it until I got two of the directors of the road to insist on it. But I guess that was merely a bluff of hers to squeeze us for a few hundreds extra." " Not at all," Edna assured me. " You are so igno rant, Godfrey. Please do be careful not to say those coarse things before people." " As you please," said I, cheerfully, for I was used to this kind of calling down. " All the same, the Ryper lady is hot for the dough." Edna shivered. She detested slang continued to detest and avoid it even after she learned that it was fashionable. " Miss Ryper guards her list of pupils as their mothers guard their visiting lists," said she. " But mow she likes Margot. The dear child has been elected 68 THE HUSBAND'S STORY to the most exclusive fraternity. Every girl in it ha* to wear hand-made underclothes and has to have had at least a father, a grandfather, and a great grand father." Edna laughed with pride at her own clever ness before she went on. " Margot came to me when she was proposed, and cried as if her little heart would break. She said she didn't know anything about her grandfather and great grandfather. But I hadn't for gotten to arrange that. I think of everything." " Oh, that was easy enough," said I. " Your grand father was a tailor and mine was in the grocery business like father." Edna looked round in terror. " Sh ! " she exclaimed. u Servants always listen." She went to the door w were in the small upstairs sitting room opened it sud denly, looked into the hall, closed the door, and returned to a chair nearer the lounge on which I was stretched comfortably smoking. " What's the matter? said I. " No one was there," said she. " Haven't I told yom never to speak of of those horrible things ? " " But Margot " " Margot doesn't know. She must never know ! Poor child, she is so sensitive, it would make her ill." I lapsed into gloomy silence. I had not liked the way Edna had been acting about her parents and min ever since we came to Brooklyn. But I had been busy, and was averse to meddling. " I gave Margot for the benefit of the girls a gene alogy I've gotten up," she went on. " You know all genealogies are more or less faked, and I're no doubt 64 THE HUSBAND'S STORY kers is every bit as genuine as those of half the girls over there. I fixed ours so that it would take a lot of inquiry to expose it. And Margot got into the fra ternity." " Are the hand-made underclothes fake too ? " said I. " Oh, no. They had to be genuine. I've never let Margot wear any other kind since I learned about those things. There's nothing that gives a child such a sense ef ladylikeness and superiority as to feel she's dressed right from the skin out." " Well, school's a different sort of a place from what it was in our day," said I. The picture my wife had drawn amused me, but I somehow did not exactly like it. My mind was too little interested in the direction of the things that absorbed Edna for me to be able to put into any sort of shape the thoughts vaguely moving about in the shadows. " I'll bet," I went on, " poor Margot doesn't have as good a time as we had." " She'd hate that kind of a time," said Edna. I laughed and laid my hand in her lap. Her hand tole into it. I watched her lovely face the sweet, dreamy expression. " What are you thinking ? " said I oftly, hopeful of romance what / call romance. " I was thinking how low and awful we used to be,'* replied she, " and how splendidly we are getting away from it." I laughed, for I was used to cold water on my ro mance. " All the same," insisted I, " Margot would envy us if she knew." " She'd hate it," Edna repeated. " She's going to be an improvement on us." 65 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Not on you," I protested. She looked at me with tender sparkling eyes, the same lovely light-brown eyes that had fascinated me as a boy. Brown eyes for a woman, always ! But they must not be of the heavy commonplace shades of brown like a deer's or a cow's. They must have light shades in them, tints verging toward blue or green. Said Edna : " I'm doing my best to fit myself. And before I get through, Godfrey, I think I'll go far." " Sure you will, 7 ' said I, with no disposition to turn the cold douche on her kind of romance. What an idiot I was about her, to be sure ! I went on : " And I'll see that you have the money to grease the toboggan slide and make the going easy." She talked on happily and confidingly : " Yes, it's best to leave Margot another year as a boarder at Miss Hyper's. By that time we'll be established over in New York, and we'll have a proper place for her to receive her friends. And perhaps we'll have a few friends of our own." " Swell friends, eh? " " Please don't say swell, dear," corrected she. " It's such a common word." " I've heard you say it," I protested. " But I don't any more. I've learned better. And now I've taught you better." " Anything you like. Anybody you like," said I. When Edna and I were together, with our hands clasped, I was always completely under her spell. She could do what she pleased with me, so long, of course, as she didn't interfere in my end of the firm. And I may add 66 THE HUSBAND'S STORY that she never did ; she hadn't the faintest notion what I was about. They say there are thousands of Ameri can women in the cities who know their husbands' places of business only as street and telephone numbers. My wife was one of that kind. Oh, yes, from the standpoint of those who insist that business and home should be separate, we were a model couple. " There's another matter I want to talk over with you, Godfrey," she went on. " That's a lovely dress you're wearing," said I. " It goes so well with your skin and your hair." She was delighted, and was moved to rise and look at herself in the long mirror. She gave herself an ap proving glance, but not more approving than what she saw merited. A long, slim beautiful figure ; a dress that set it off. A lovely young tip-tilted face, the face of a girl with fresh, clear eyes and skin, the whitest, evenest sharp teeth and such hair ! such quantities of hair attractively arranged. From herself she glanced at me. " No one'd ever think what we came from, would they? " said she fondly and proudly. " Oh, Godfrey, it makes me so happy that we look the part. We belong where we're going. The good blood away back in the family is coming out. And Margot I've always called her the little duchess and she looks it and feels it." Dreamily, " Maybe she will be some day." " Why, she's a baby," cried I. For I didn't like to see that my baby was growing up. " She's nearly fourteen," said Edna. She was look ing at herself again. " Would you ever think 7 had a 67 THE HUSBAND'S STORY daughter fourteen years old? " said she, making a laughing, saucy face at me. I got up and kissed her. " You don't look as old as you did when I married you," said I, and it was onlj * slight exaggeration. When we sat again, she was snuggled into my lap with her head against my shoulder. She was immenselj fond of being petted. They say this is no sign of a loving nature, that cats, the least loving of all pets, are fondest of petting. I have no opinion on the subject. " What was it you wanted to talk about? " said I. "Money?" " No, indeed," laughed she. " I supposed so, as that's the only matter in whidi I have any influence in this family." " Come to think of it," said she, " it t* money in a way. It's about our parents." She gave a deep sigh. " Godfrey, they hang over me like a nightmare! " Her tragic seriousness amused me. " Oh, cheer up, w said I, kissing her. " They certainly don't fit in with our stylishness. But they're away off there in Passaic, and bother us as little as we bother them. The truth is, Edna, we've not acted right. We've been selfish spending all our prosperity on ourselves. Of course, they've got everything they really want, but well " " That's exactly it," said she eagerly. " My con science has been hurting me. We ought to to It wouldn't cost much to make them perfectly comfortable so they'd not have to work and could get away from the grocery and the and the " she hesitated before saying " father's business," as if nerying he*- 68 THE HUSBAND'S STORY self to pronounce words of shame. And when she did finally force out the evading " father's business," it was with such an accent that I couldn't help laughing outright. " Undertaking's a good-paying business," said I. " We certainly ought to be grateful to it. It supplied the eight thousand dollars that gave me the chance to buy half the rolling mill. And you know the rolling mill was the start of our fortune." " Do you think father could be induced to retire? '* the asked. " Never," said I. " Your father's a rich man, for Passaic. He's got two hundred thousand at least hived away in tenements that pay from twenty to thirty-five per cent. And his business now brings in ten to fifteen thousand a year straight along." " You can make your father retire ? " I laughed. " Poor dad ! I've been keeping him from? being retired by the sheriff. He's squeezing out a bare living. He'd be delighted to stop and have all his time for talking politics and religion." " You could buy them a nice place a little way out in the country, on some quiet road. I'm sure your mother and your old maid sister would love it." " Perhaps," said I. " If it wasn't too quiet." 44 But it must be quiet. And we'll induce my father and mother to buy a place near by." " Your father'll not give up the business." " I've thought it all out," said Edna, whose mind was equal to whatever task she gave it. " You must get some one to offer him a price he simply can't refuse,, 69 THE HUSBAND'S STORY and make a condition that he shall not go into business again. Aren't those things done? " I was somewhat surprised, but not much, at the knowledge of business this displayed. " Why ! Why ! " laughed I. " And you pretend to know nothing about business ! " She was in a sensible, loving mood that day. So she said with a quiet little laugh : " I make it a point to know anything that's useful to me. I don't know much about business. Why should I bother with it? I've got confidence in you." It was not the first time I had got a peep into her mind and had seen how she looked on everyone, includ ing me, as a wheel in her machine, and never interfered unless the wheel didn't work to suit her. I laughed delightedly. There was something charmingly feminine, thought I, about this point of view so upside down. " Yes, I guess your father'll jump for the bait you suggest," said I. " But why disturb him? He loves his undertaking." She shivered. " And he'll be miserable idling about." " Oh, I guess he'll get along all right," said she, with sarcasm and with truth. " He'll devote himself to suing his tenants and counting his money. . . . God- frey, you simply must get those people in Passaic out of our way. I've been a little nervous over here, though I knew that none of these dreadful people we associate with has anything better in the way of family than us, and some have a lot worse. Oh, it's frightful to have parents one's ashamed of ! " 70 THE HUSBAND'S STORY I think I blushed. I'm sure I looked away to avoid seeing her expression. " It's frightful to be ashamed of one's parents," said I. " Now don't be hypocritical," cried she. " You know perfectly well you are ashamed of your parents, as I am of mine." " I'll admit," said I, " that if they showed up at the office, I'd be a bit upset and would feel apologetic. But I'm ashamed of myself for feeling that way." " If you only realized about things," said she, which was her phrase for hitting at me as lacking in refined instincts, " you'd not be ashamed of yourself, but would frankly suffer. They are a disgrace to us." " They're honest people, well meaning, and as good as the best in every essential way," said I. " Believe me, Edna, the fault isn't in them. It's in us. Suppose you found some day that Margot was ashamed of you and me." " But she'll not be," retorted Edna, " I for one will see to it that she has no cause to be anything but proud." I couldn't but admit that there were two sides to the problem of our parents. It was shameful to be ashamed of them. But it was also human. I couldn't and can't utterly damn in Edna a fault, a vulgar weakness, I myself had, and almost everyone I knew. No doubt, gentle reader, you are scandalized and dis gusted. But one of my objects in relating this whole story is to scandalize and to disgust you. You have had too much consideration at the hands of writers you and your hypocritical virtues and your hysterical 71 THE HUSBAND'S STORY nerves. If you are an American, you are probably far in advance of your parents in worldly knowledge, in education, in every way except perhaps manly and womanly self-respect. For along with your progress has come an infection of snobbishness and toadyism that seems in some mysterious way inseparable from higher civilization. So be shocked and disgusted with Edna and me, and don't turn your hypocritical eyes inward on your own secret thoughts and actions about your own humble parents. Above all, don't learn from this horrifying episode a decenter mode of thinking and feeling and acting. " We must get them out of the way before we move to New York," said Edna. " Ever since Margot began at Mrs. Hyper's I've been on pins and needles. You f don't know how malicious fashionable people are. Why, some of them who have nothing to do might at any time run out to Passaic and see for themselves." Edna was sitting up in my lap, gazing at me with wide harassed-looking eyes. I burst out laughing. " They might take a camera along, and get some snap shots," I suggested. Edna's face contracted with horror and her form grew limp and weak. " My God ! " she cried. " S they might. Godfrey, we must attend to it at once." m I HAVE never been able to come to a satisfactory rerdict as to the intelligence of the human race. Is it tupid, or is it, rather, sluggish? Is it unable to think, or does it refuse to think? Does it believe the follies it pretends to believe and usually acts upon, or is it the victim of its own willful prejudices and hypocrisies? Never have I decided that a certain man or woman was practically witless, but that he or she has confounded me by saying or doing something indicating shrewdness or even wisdom. The women are especially difficult to judge. Take Edna, for example. It was impossible to interest her in anything worth while. But as to the things in which she was inter ested, none could have thought more clearly or keenly, or could have acted with more vigor and effect. I have often made serious blunders inexcusable blunders in managing my own affairs. To go no further, my management of my family would have convicted me of imbecility before any court not made up of good-na tured, indifferent, woman-worshiping, woman-despising American husbands. Yes, I have made the stupidest blunders in all creation. But I cannot recall a single notable blunder made by Edna in the matters which 73 THE HUSBAND'S STORY alone she deemed worthy of her attention. She decided what she wanted. She moved upon it by the best route, whether devious or direct or a combination of the two. And she always got it. You may say her success was due to the fact that her objects were trivial. But if you will think a mo ment, you will appreciate that a thing's triviality does not necessarily make it easy to attain. As much energy and skill may be shown in winning a sham battle as in winning a real. Still, I suppose minds are cast in molds of various sizes, and one cast in a small mold can deal only with the small. And I guess that, from whatever cause, the minds of women are of diverse kinds of smaller molds. Perhaps this is the result of bad education. Perhaps better education will correct it. I do not know. I can speak only of what is of Edna as she is and always has been. Having made up her mind to fell the genealogical tree, that an artificial one might be stood up in its place, she lost no time in getting into action. It was on the Sunday following our talk the ear liest possible day that she took me for the first visit we had made our parents in nearly three years. We had sent them presents. We had written them letters. We had received painfully composed and ungrammatical re plies these received both for Edna and myself at my office, because she feared the servants would pry into periodically arriving exhibits of illiteracy. We had written them of coming and bringing Margot with us. We had received suggestions of their coming to see us, which Edna had evaded by such excuses as that we were 74 THE HUSBAND'S STORY moving or that she or Margot was not well or that the cook had abruptly deserted. The world outside Passaic was a vague place to our old fathers and mothers. Their own immediate affairs kept them busy. So with no sense of deliberate alienation on their side and small and mildly intermittent sense of it on our side, the months and the years passed without our seeing one another. Edna announced to me the intended visit only an hour before we started. It was a habit of hers a clever habit, too never to take anyone into her con fidence about her plans until the right moment that is, the moment when execution was so near at hand that discussion would seem futile. At a quarter before nine on that Sunday morning she said : " Don't dress for church. This is a good day to make that trip to Passaic." "We'll go by Miss Ryper's for Margot," said I. " How the old people will stare when they see her ! " Edna looked at me as if I had suddenly uncovered unmistakable evidence of my insanity. Then I who had clean forgot her foolish notions remembered. " But why not ? " I urged. " It will give them so much pleasure." " Trash! " ejaculated she. " They don't care a rap about her. They can't, as they've not seen her since she was a baby. And Margot would suffer horribly. I think it would be wicked to give a sweet, happy young girl a horrible shock." This grotesque view of the effect of the sight of grandparents upon a grandchild struck me as amusing. But there was no echo of my laughter in the disgusted 75 THE HUSBAND'S STORY face of my wife. I sobered and said : " Yes, it would give her a shock. We've made a mistake, bringing her up in that way." " Too late to discuss it now," said Edna. " I suppose so," I could not but agree. " I guess the mischiefs done beyond repair." Said Edna : " Have you any sense of of them being your father and mother? " " Rather," said I. " My childhood is very vivid to me, and not at all disagreeable." " It seems to me like a bad dream unreal, and to be forgotten as quickly as I can." She said this with a fine, spiritual look in her eyes, and I must say that Edna, refined, delicately beautiful, fashionably dressed, speaking her English with an ele gant accent, did not suggest fusty-dusty, queer-looking Weeping Willie with his hearse and funeral coaches, his embalming apparatus and general appearance of ani mated casket, nor yet fat, sloppy Ma Wheatlands, al ways in faded wrappers and with holes cut in her shoes for her bunions. " Wear your oldest business suit," said Edna, com ing back to earth from the contemplation of her own elevation and grandeur. " I shall dress as quietly as I dare. We mustn't arouse t*he suspicions of the serv ants." Edna's fooleries amused me. I didn't then appre ciate the dangers of tolerating and laughing at the bad habits of a fascinating child. If I had, little good I'd have accomplished, I suspect. However, I got myself up as Edna directed, and when I saw how it irritated 76 THE HUSBAND'S STORY her I stopped making such remarks as : " Shall I wear a collar? Hadn't I better sneak out the back way and join you at the ferry? " I should have liked to get some fun out of our doings ; that would have taken at least the saw edge off my feelings of self-contempt. I am not fond of hypocrisy, yet for that one occasion I should have welcomed the familiar human shamming and faking in such matters. But Edna would put the thing through like one of her father's funerals. As we, in what was practically disguise, issued forth, she said loudly enough for the cocking ear of a maid who chanced to be in the front hall: " Anyhow, the country dust won't spoil these clothes. I'm so glad it's clear. How charming the woods will look." Just enough to deceive. Edna expanded upon her cleverness in never saying too much, because saying too much always started people, especially servants, to thinking. But she abruptly checked her flow of self- praise as we seated ourselves in the ferry and she looked about. There, not a dozen seats away, loomed our cook ! Yes, no mistake, it was our Mary, " gotten up regardless " for a Sunday outing. " Do you see Mary? " said my wife. " She's the most conspicuous female in sight," said I. " She's a credit to us." " I must have been mad," groaned Edna, " to giy her a holiday ! Always the way. I never do a generous, kind-hearted thing that I don't have to pay for it." " I don't follow you," said I. " She hates us," explained Edna. " Cooks Irish 6 77 THE HUSBAND'S STORY cooks invariably hate the families they draw wages from. She's dogging us." " Nonsense," said I. " She probably hasn't even seen us." But Edna was not listening; she was contriving. " We must let her leave the boat ahead of us. Pretend not to see her." I obeyed orders. In the Jersey City train shed we, lagging behind, saw her take a train bound for a dif ferent destination from ours. Much relieved, Edna led the way to the Passaic train. Hardly were we seated when in at the door of the coach hurried our Mary, excited and blown. She came beaming down the aisle. Edna saluted her graciously and calmly. " I got in the wrong train," said Mary. " It'd never have took me nowheres near my cousin in Passaic." Edna's composure was admirable. Said I, when Mary had passed on, " Now what, my dear? " " You see she is dogging us," replied Edna. " I've not a doubt she knows all about us." " I don't thwk she's got a camera," said I. " Still, they make them very small nowadays." " We shall have to go on in the train, and return home from the station beyond," said Edna. " Do as you like," said I. " But as for me, I get off at Passaic and go to see the old folks." " Please stop your joking," said Edna. " If you had any pride you couldn't joke." " I am serious," said I. " I shall go to see mother and father." 78 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " No doubt her cousin lives in the same part of the slums," said Edna. " Oh, it is hideous! " I don't know what possessed me whether a fit of indigestion and obstinacy or a sudden access of sense of decency as I approached my old home. Whatever it was, it moved me to say: "My dear, this nonsense has gone far enough. We will do what we set out to do." " Not I," said Edna. " Then I'll drop off at Passaic alone, and hire a trap, and give Mary a seat in it as far as her cousin's. I'm not proud of my parents, the more shame to me. But there's a limit to my ability to degrade myself." Edna and I had not lived together all those years without her learning the tone I use when I will not be trifled with. She did not argue. She sat silent and pale beside me. When the train stopped at Passaic she fol lowed me from the car. Mary descended ahead of us and moved off at as brisk a pace as tight corsets and stiff new shoes would permit, in a direction exactly op posite that we were to take. " Aren't you glad we didn't go on? " said I, eager to make it up. She made no reply. She maintained haughty and injured silence until we were within sight of the houses. Then she said curtly : " I'll do the talking about our plans for them." " That'll be best," said I, most conciliatory. I had not intended to say this. There had been a half-formed resolution in my mind to oppose those plans. But her anger roused in me such a desire to pacify her 79 THE HUSBAND'S STORY that I promptly yielded, where, I must in honesty con fess, I was little short of indifferent. American hus bands have the reputation of being the most docile and the worst henpecked men in the world. All foreigners say so, and our women believe it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The docility of Ameri can husbands is the good nature of indifference. A friend of mine has the habit of saying that his most valued and most valuable possession is his long list of things he cares not a rap about. It is a typically American and luminous remark. The men of other j nations agitate over trifles, love to have the sense of being master at home usually their one and only * chance for a free swing at the joyous feeling of being | boss. The American man, absorbed in his important work at office or factory, and not caring especially about anything else, lets thieving politicians rule in public affairs, lets foolish, incompetent women rule in domestic affairs. He has a half-conscious philos ophy that he is shrewd enough, if he attends to his business, to make money faster than they can take it away from him, and that, if he does not attend to his business only, he will have nothing either for thieving politician and spendthrift wife or for himself. If you wish to discover how little there is in the notion of his docility, meddle with something he really cares about. Many a political rascal, many a shiftless wife, has done it and has gotten a highly disagreeable surprise. Perhaps what I saw had as much to do with my tame acquiescence in my wife's projects as my desire to have peace between her and me, when peace meant 80 THE HUSBAND'S STORY yielding what only a vague and feeble filial impulse moved me to contest. I had what I thought was a clear and vivid memory of my natal place and Edna's how the two houses looked, how small and shabby they were, how mean their surroundings, how plain their interiors. But as we drove up I discovered that memory had been pleasantly deceiving me. Could these squalid hovels, these tiny, hideous boxes set in two dismal weedy oblongs of unkempt yards could these be our old homes ? And the bent old laboring man and his wife we had drawn up in front of my home could they be my father and my mother? A feeling of sickness, of nausea came over me. Not from repulsion for my parents thank God, I had not sunk that low. But from abhorrence of myself, so de graded by the " higher world " into which prosperity and Edna's ambitions had dragged me that I could look down upon the gentle old man and the patient, lov ing old woman to whom I owed life and a fair start in the world. My blood burned and my eyes sank as they greeted me, their homely old hands trembling, their mouths distorted by emotion and age and missing teeth. I turned away while they were kissing Edna, for I felt I should hate her and loathe myself if I saw the ex pression that must be in her face. " There are my father and mother ! " she cried in a suffocating voice. And we three Lorings were watching her hurry across the yard and through the gap in the fence between the two places. My sister came forward. We kissed each other as awkwardly as two strangers. I looked at her dazedly. Mary, our cook, was an impos- 81 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ing looking lady beside this thin-haired, coarse-featured old maid. In embarrassed silence we four entered the house. I am not tall nor in the least fat, yet I had an uncontrollable impulse to stoop and to squeeze as I entered the squat and narrow doorway. That miser able little " parlor ! " As we sat silent my roving glance at last sought my mother's face. Oh, the faces, the masks, with which freakish and so often savagely ironic fate covers and hides our souls, making fair seem foul and foul seem fair, making beauty repellent and ugliness seem beau tiful. Suddenly through that plain, time- and toil- scarred mask, through those dim, sunken eyes, I saw her soul her mother's heart looking at me. And the tears poured into my eyes. " Mother ! " I sobbed in a choking voice, and I put my arms round her and nestled against her heart, a boy again a bad boy with a streak of good in him. I felt how proud she they all were of me, the son and brother, who had gone forth and ful filled the universal American dream of getting up in the world. I hoped, I prayed that they would not re alize what a poor creature I was, with my snobbish shame. There was an awkward, rambling attempt at talk. But we had nothing to talk about nothing in common. I happened to think of our not having brought Margot ; how shameful it was, yet how glad I felt, and how self- contemptuous for being glad. To break that awful silence I enlarged upon Margot her beauty, her clever ness. " She must be like Polly " my sister's name was 83 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Polly " like Polly was at her age," observed my mother. I looked at Polly Ann, in whose faded face and withered form faded and withered though she was not yet forty, was in fact but seven or eight years older than I. Like Polly ! I could speak no more of Margot, the delicate loveliness of a rare, carefully reared hot-house exotic. Yes, exotic ; for the girls and the women brought up in the super-refinements of prosperous class silliness seem foreign to this world and are. A few minutes that seemed hours, and Edna came in, her father and mother limping and hobbling in her train. Edna was sickly pale and her eyelids refused to rise. I shook hands with old Willie Wheatlands, hesi tated, then kissed the fat, sallow, swinging cheek of my mother-in-law. Said Edna in a hard, forced voice : " I've explained that Margot isn't well and that we've got to get back " " Mercy me ! " cried my mother. " Ain't you going to stay to supper ? " Supper! It was only half-past twelve. Supper could not be until five or half past. We had been there half an hour and already conversation was exhausted and time had become motionless. " We intended to," said Edna. " But Margot wasn't at all well when we left. We simply can't stay away long. We'd not have come, but we felt we'd never get here if we kept on letting things interfere." " You didn't leave Margy alone? " demanded Edna's mother. " Almost," said Edna. " Only a a servant." 83 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Oh, you keep a nurse girl, too," said Polly. " I thought Edna didn't look as if she did any of her own work." " Yes, I have a a girl, in addition to the cook," replied Edna, flushing as she thus denied three of her five servants flushing not because of the denial, but because in her confession she had almost forgotten about the numerous excuses based on the cook. " God frey has been doing very well, and we felt we could afford it." " Better get rid of her," advised old Willie sourly. " And of the cook, too. Servant girls is mighty waste ful." " And she'll teach Margy badness," said my mother. " Them servants is full of poison. Even if yer pa'd had money I'd never have allowed no servant round my chil dren, no more'n a snake in the cradle. I hope she's a good Christian, and not a Catholic? " " She's all right," declared Edna nervously. " But we'll have to be going soon." " Yes ; that there girl might git drunk," said Mrs. Wheatlands. " And set fire to the house maybe," said my mother. " I heard of a case just last week." " I wish you hadn't said that," cried Edna, her tones of protest more like jubilation. " I'll be wretched until I'm home again." Mother told in detail and with rising excitement the story of the drunken nurse girl who had burned up her self and her charges, a pair of lovely twins. From that moment our families were anxious for us to go. The 84 THE HUSBAND'S STORY three women could see the girl drunk and the house burning. The two grandfathers, while less imaginative, were almost as uneasy. Besides, no doubt our families found us full as tiring as we found them. " But before we go," said Edna, in a business-like tone, " there's one thing we wanted to talk about. God frey has had that is, he has done very well in business. And of course our first thought one of our first thoughts was what could we do for you all down here. We hate to think of your living in this unhealthful part of the town. We want to see you settled in some health ful place, up in the hills." We were watching the faces of our five kinsfolk. We could make nothing of their expression. It was heavy, dull mere listening, without a hint of even com prehension behind. " We thought you, father, and Mr. father Loring might look round and find a nice farm with a big comfortable house plenty big enough for you all and Godfrey will buy it, and will pay for a man and a woman to look after you. He has done well, as I said, and he can afford it. In fact, they've made him president of the railroad." My father, my mother, and my sister exchanged glances. A long, awed silence. Old Willie spoke in his squeaky, stingy voice : " I can't leave my business. I ain't footless like Loring there. My business pays." " You can sell it," said Edna. " You know you ought to retire. You were telling me how bad your health had been." " Nobody else couldn't make nothing like what I 85 THE HUSBAND'S STORY make out of it. The men growing up nowadays ain't no account. The no-account women with heads full of fool ishness leads 'em off." Edna agreed with him, pointed out that he'd have to give up soon anyhow, appealed to his cupidity for real estate by expanding upon the size and value of the farm I was willing to give him. She made a strong im pression. The women were converted by the prospect of having help with the work. My father had long dreamed of a home in the country. He had not the imagination to picture how he would be bored, away from the loafers with whom he talked politics and re ligion. " And," said Edna, " you'll have horses and things to ride in, so you can go where you please when ever you please." We had roused them. We had dazzled them. It was plain that if a purchaser could be found for the Wheatlands undertaking business, Edna would carry her point. " Godfrey will look for somebody to take the business," said she to her father. " I want you and Father Loring to start out to-morrow morning, and not stop till you've found a farm." I understood an uncertain gleam in old Willie's eyes. " About the price," said I, speaking for the first time, " I'm willing to pay twenty-five thousand down for the place alone, and as I'll pay cash, you ought to be able on mortgage to get a farm or two or three adjoining farms that would cost twice that." The two families were dumbfounded. " I know I can trust you, Mr. Wheatlands, to get the money's worth." 86 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Buy a big place," said Edna, of the unexpected timely shrewdnesses. " Go back from the main roads where land's so dear." Wheatlands nodded. " That's a good idea," said he. " There'll be plenty of roads after a while." Edna was ready to depart. "Then it's settled?" said she. Her father nodded. " I'm willing to see what cam be done. But I'd rather not have Ben Loring along. He'd interfere with a good bargain." " Yes, you go alone, Willie," said my father. " Anyhow, I've got to 'tend store. I can't afford a boy any more." The mention of the, to them, enormous sum of money had put them in a state of awe as to Edna and me. It saddened me to observe how quickly the weed of snob bishness, whose seeds are in all human nature, sprang up and dominated the whole garden. They lost the sense of our blood kinship with them. They felt that we, able to dispense such splendid largess, were of a superior order of being. And I saw that my and Edna's feel ing of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the 5 feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. fin my dealings with my fellow beings I have often noted | this sort of thing that the snobbishness of those who {look down is a weak and hesitating impulse which would 'Soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the i snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, " Caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down." That is a great truth, and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked. 87 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Looking back I see that my own first decisive impulse toward the caste feeling came that day, came when mj people and Edna's, discovering that we were rich, began to treat us as lower class treats upper class. My mother had been scrutinizing me for signs of the rnaj esty of wealth. " Why don't you wear a beard, or leastways a mustache, Godfrey ? " she finally inquired. " Then you wouldn't seem so boyish like." " I used to wear a mustache," said I, " but I cut it off because I don't recall why." In fact I did recall. I noted one day that I had a good mouth and better teeth than most men have. And it came to me how absurd it was to hang a bunch of hair from my upper lip to trail in the soup and to embalm the odors of past cigars for the discomfort of my nose. Edna kept after me for a time to let it grow again. But reading in some novel she regarded as authoritative that mustaches were " common," she de sisted. And I found my boyish appearance highly use ful. It led men to underestimate me a signal advan tage in the contests of wit against wit in which I daily engaged with a view to wrenching a fortune for myself away from my fellow men. My mother went on to urge me to make my face look older and more formidable. Now that she had learned what a grand person I was she feared others would not realize it. Edna, who, as I have said, was shrewdness personified where her own interests were in volved, immediately saw the dangerous bearings of this newly aroused vanity of our kin. " I forgot to caution you," said she, " not to mention our prosperity. If we 88 THE HUSBAND'S STORY were talked about now, it might be lost entirely. The only reason Godfrey and I came to you so soon with the news of it was because we wanted to do something for you right away. And we knew we could trust you not to get us into trouble. Don't talk about us. If you hear people talking, if they ask you questions, pre tend you don't understand and don't know. You see, it may be spies from our enemies." One glance round that circle of eager faces was enough to convince that Edna had made precisely the impression she desired. I could see that my mother and old Weeping Willie, the shrewd of the five the two to whom Edna and I owed most by inheritance were prepared to deny knowing us if that would aid in safe guarding the precious prosperity. My father and sister were obviously disappointed that they could not go about boasting of our magnificence and getting from the neighbors the envy and respect due the near rela tions of a plutocrat. But there was no danger of their being indiscreet ; Edna could breathe freely. And when the two families were tucked away in the midst of a large and secluded farm, she could tell what genealogical tories she pleased without fear of being confounded by the truth. By three o'clock we were back in Brooklyn. Edna felt and looked triumphant. The crowning of the day's work had been small but significant. A heavy rain atorm that came up while we were on the way back must have made the servants think we had cut short our woodland outing. As we were going to bed that night Edna roused herself from deep study and broke 89 THE HUSBAND'S STORY a long silence with, " I hesitated whether to tell them you had become president of the road." I had noted that seeming slip of hers, so unlike her cautious reticence. " Then I remembered they'd be sure to see it in the papers," continued she. " And I decided it was best te tell and quiet them." While the old folks were industriously settling them selves in the New Jersey woods Here let me relieve my mind by saying a few words in mitigation of the unfilial and snobbish conduct of Edna and me. I admit we deserve nothing but condemnation. I admit I am more to blame than she because I could have compelled her to act better toward our families, though of course I could not have changed her feelings or my own, for that matter. But, as often happens in this world, the thing that was in motive shameful turned out well. We and our families had grown hopelessly apart. Inter course with them could not but have been embarrassing and uncomfortable for both sides. When we got them the farm, got them away from the malarial and squalid part of Passaic into a healthful region where they lived in much better health and in a comfort they could ap preciate, we did the best possible thing for them, as well as for ourselves. Do not think for a moment that be cause I am ashamed of my snobbish motives I am there fore advocating the keeping up of irksome and ab surd ties merely out of wormy sentimentality. It has always seemed to me, when we have but the one chance at life, the one chance to make the best of osr 90 THE HUSBAND'S STORY talents and opportunities, that only moral or mental weakness, or both, would waste the one chance in the bondage of outworn ties. When one has outgrown any association, lop it off relentlessly, say I. If the living lets the dying cling to it, the dying does not live but the living dies. If you are associated with anyone in any way business, social, ties of affection, whatever you please and if you do not wish to lose that one, then keep yourself alive and abreast of him or her. And if you let yourself begin to decay and find yourself cut away, whose is the fault, if fault there be? We Edna and I perhaps did not do all we might to make our outgrown families happy ; I say perhaps, though I am by no means sure that we did not do all that was in our power, for they certainly would have got no pleasure out of seeing more of two people so uncon genial to them in every respect. At any rate, we did not leave our families to starve or to suffer. Hard though my charming, lovely wife was, I cannot conceive her sinking to that depth. On the whole, I feel that we could honestly say we took the right course with them. That is, we helped them without hindering our selves. We did the right thing, though not in the right way. While our families were choosing a farm, were fixing up the buildings to suit their needs and tastes, were moving themselves from their ancient haunts, Edna was as industriously busy making far deeper inroads on the new prosperity. She was planning the conquest of New York. Every day in the year many a suddenly enriched 91 THE HUSBAND'S STORY family is busy about the same enterprise. Families from the less fashionable parts of the city moving to the fashionable parts. Families from other cities and towns east, west, north, and south advancing to social con quest under the leadership of mamas and daughters tired of shining in obscure, monotonous, and unappre- ciative places. There are I forget how many thousands of millionaires on Manhattan Island; enough, I know, with the near millionaires and those living like million aires, to make a city of three or four hundred thousand, not including servants and parasites. Not all of these have the fashionable craze; at least, they haven't it in its worst form the form in which it possessed my wife. All the acute sufferers must find suitable lodgments near Fifth Avenue if not in it. Now New York is ever ready to receive and to " trim " the arriving millionaire. It has all kinds of houses and apartments to meet the peculiarities of his or, rather, of his wife's and daughter's notions of grandeur. It has a multitude of purveyors of furnish ings and decorations likewise designed to catch crude and grandiose tastes. My wife was busy with these gentry. " Don't you think we'd better go a little slow? " said I. " Why not live in a hotel on Manhattan and look about us ? " I had respect for my wife's capacity at the woman side of the game ; she had thoroughly drilled me to more than generous appreciation of it. But at the same time I was not so blinded by her charm for me or so convinced bj her insistent and plausible egotism that I had not THE HUSBAND'S STORY noted certain minor failures of hers due to her ignorance of the art of spending money. She was clever at learn ing. But often her vanity lured her into fancying she knew, when in fact her education in that particular di rection was all miseducation. She dressed much more giddily in our first years in Brooklyn than she did after wards. And in the later years she made still further discoveries as to dress that resulted in another revolu tion, away from quietness, not toward the gaudy but toward smartness that curious quality which makes a woman's toilet conspicuous without the least suggestion of the loud. However, Edna scorned my suggestion that she make haste slowly. She had long been engaged in a thorough study of the mode of life in millionairedom. Newspapers, Sunday supplements, magazines, and so ciety novels had helped her. She had examined the exteriors of the famous palaces. She had got into the drawing-rooms and ballrooms of two or three palaces by way of high-priced charity tickets. She had in one instance roamed into sitting rooms, bedrooms, bath rooms until caught and led back by some vigilant and unbribable servant. I wonder if she ever recalls that adventure now ! Probably not. I think I have recorded her ability absolutely to forget whatever it pleases her not to remember. She had been educating herself, so when I suggested caution, she replied: " Don't you fret, Godfrey. I know what I'm about. I'll get what we've got to have." And I'll concede that she did also, that I thought it overwhelmingly grand at the time. It was a house 7 93 THE HUSBAND'S STORY in a fashionable side street, between Madison avenue and Fifth a magnificent house built for exactly such a family as mine. That is, it was built entirely for show and not at all for comfort ; it fairly bristled with the luxuries and " modern conveniences," but most of them were of the sort that looks comfortable but is not. The rent was some preposterous sum thirty-five or forty thousand a year. We had room enough for the housing of nearly a hundred people, counting servants as people, which I believe is not the custom. It was fitted through out in the fashion which those clever leeches who think out and sell luxuries have in all ages imposed upon the rich man because it means money in their pockets. Once in a while you find a rich man who has the cour age to live as he pleases, but most of them live as the fashion commands. And many of them have no idea that there is any less comfortless and less foolish way to live. You imagine, gentle reader, that people with money live in beauty and comfort. You imagine that you could do it also if you had but the wealth. Believe me, you deceive yourself. Beyond question a certain amount of money is necessary to the getting of attract ive and comfortable surroundings. But there is an other, an equally indispensable and a far rarer factor. That factor, gentle reader, is intelligence knowledge of the resources of civilization, knowledge of the reali ties as to comfort, luxury, and taste. I am tempted to linger upon the details of the ex travagance of that first big establishment of Edna's. It was so astounding and so ridiculous. I saw that she had delivered us and our fortune over to hordes of 94 THE HUSBAND'S STORY crafty, thirsty bloodsuckers merchants, tradesmen, servants. But her heart was set upon it, and all other rich people were living in that same way. " You want to do the right thing by Margot, don't you ? " said she. " By you and Margot," said I. " Go ahead. I guess I can find the money." I shan't here go into the ways I discovered or in vented for finding that money. They were not too scrupulous, but neither were they commercially dishon orable. I must smile there. Being of an inquiring and jocose mind I have often tried to find an action that, in the opinion of the most eminent commercial authori ties, was absolutely dishonorable. Never yet have I found a single action, however wrong and even criminal in general, that they would not declare in certain cir cumstances perfectly honorable. And those " certain circumstances " could always be boiled down to the one circumstance needing the money. I can't recall exactly how many servants we had to wait on us two, but it was about thirty-five. I remem ber hearing my wife say one month that our meat bill alone was about a thousand dollars. For a time I fan cied we were living more grandly than anyone else in town. But it soon revealed itself to me that, as things went with " our class," we were leading rather a simple life. Certainly nothing we did marked us out from the others in that region. The sum totals suggested that servants stood at the front windows all day long tossing money into the street. But nothing of the kind occurred. You would have said we ate the finest food in wholesale quantities. Yet never did I get a notably good meal at 95 THE HUSBAND'S STORY my own house. The coffee was always poor. The fruit was below the average of sidewalk stands. We often had cold-storage fowls and fish on the table. We paid for the best ; I'm sure we paid for it many times over. We got what one always gets when the wife is too intellectual and too busy to attend to her business. But I assure you it was grandly served. The linen and the dishes were royal, the servants were in liveries of im pressive color and form though I could have wished that my wife had been as sensitive to odors as I was, and had compelled some of those magnificent gentry to do a little bathing. Throughout the establishment the same superb scale was maintained. We lived like the rest of the millionaires, neither better nor worse. We lived in grandeur and discomfort. But my wife was ecstatic, and I was therefore content. Yes, we were very grand. And, as in Brooklyn, the glasses came to the table with a certain sour odor not alluring as you lifted them to drink the odor that causes an observant man or woman to say, " Aha dirty rags in this perfect lady's kitchen dirty rags and all that goes with them." But only a snarling 'cynic would complain of these vul gar trifles. There's always at least a fly leg in the ointment. " Didn't I tell you I knew what I was about ? " said Edna triumphantly. " You did," said I. " Haven't we got what we wanted ? " " We have," said I, perhaps somewhat abruptly, for I was just then wondering how the devil we were going to keep it. 96 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " And if it hadn't been for me," proceeded she, " we'd still be living in Brooklyn! " " Or in Passaic," said I. " Don't speak of Passaic," she cried. " I'm trying to forget it." " We were very happy then," said I. " / was miserable," retorted she. " I could find it in my heart to wish we weren't al ways attended by servants/' said I. " I almost never see you alone." " What a bourgeois you are," laughed she. Then after a thorough glance round to make sure house keeper or maid or lackey wasn't on watch she patted my cheek and kissed me, and added : " But you do make me happy. I'm so proud of you! No matter what I want I'm never afraid to buy it, for I know you can get all the money you want to." I winced. Said I : " I'm afraid you'd not be proud of some of the ways I get the money." She frowned. " Don't talk business, please," she said. " \ ou know we never have in all our married life. You've always respected my position as your wife. All business is low is mere sordidness." " Yes, it's all low," said I. " Sometimes I think all living is low as well. Edna " I put my arm round her " don't you ever feel that we'd be really happy, that we'd get something genuine out of life if you and Margot and I " She stopped my mouth with a kiss. " You never will grow up to your station, darling." I said no more. Indeed, it was on hastiest impulse 97 THE HUSBAND'S STORY that I had said so much, an impulse sprung from a mood of depression. The cause of that mood was a nasty reverse in Wall Street. It had rudely halted me in my triumphant way toward the security of the man of many millions. It had set me to wavering uncertainly, with the chances about even for resuming the march and for tumbling into the abyss of a discreditable bankruptcy. There are in New York two well-defined classes of the rich the permanently rich and the precariously rich. The permanently rich are those who by the vast- ness of their wealth or by the strength of their business and social connections cannot possibly be dislodged from the plutocracy. The precariously rich are those who have much money and are making more, but are not strong enough to survive a series of typhoons, and are without the support of indissoluble business ,and social connections. My friend G , for exam ple, head of the famous banking house, associated in business and by marriage with half the permanent plu tocracy, was practically bankrupt in the late panic. Had he been a man of ordinary position he would have gone into bankruptcy, and, I more than suspect, into jail. But his fellow plutocrats dared not let him drop, much as they would have liked to see his arrogance brought low, much as they longed to divide among them selves his holdings of gilt-edged securities; if he had gone down it would have made the whole financial world tremble. He was saved. On the other hand, my friend J , richer actually, was ruined, was plucked by his .associates, was finally jailed for doing precisely the 98 THE HUSBAND'S STORY things every man of finance did over and over again in that same period of stress for, what invariably hap pens to moral codes in periods of stress? I was at that time but not now, gentle reader, so cheer up and read on I was at that time in the class not of the permanently but of the precariously rich. And through a miscalculation I had laid myself open to the dangers that lie in wait for the man short of ready cash. The miscalculation was as to the extravagance of my wife's undertakings. She, against my express re quest, had contracted without consulting or telling me several enormous bills. It is idle to say she ought not have done this. I knew her well ; I should have been on guard. I had begun my married life wrong, as the young man very much in love is apt to do ; so, to hold her love and liking, I had to keep on giving her taste for spending money free rein. If I had not, she would have thought me small and mean, would have made life at home exceedingly uncomfortable for me, for I am not of those men who can take from a woman what they wish whether she wishes to give or not. So the whole fault was mine. When the storm broke, in the light of its first terrific flash that illuminated for me every part of my affairs, I discovered that I was not prepared as I had been imagining. The big bills of my wife were presented, for the merchants knew I was heavily interested in the stocks that were tobogganing. Those bills had to be paid, and paid at once, or it would run like wildfire uptown and down that I was in difficulties ; and when a man is known to be in financial difficulties, how the birds and beasts of prey from eagles 99 THE HUSBAND'S STORY and lions to buzzards and jackals do come flapping and loping ! There followed several anxious days and nights. On one of those nights I rose from beside my wife we still slept together and went into the adjoining room. I turned on an electric light and began for the thousandth time, I dare say, to look at the critical papers and to grope for the desperate " way out." I was startled by my wife's voice sleepy, peevish: " Do turn out that light and come to bed, God frey. You know how it disturbs me for you to get up in the night. And I've such a hard day before me to morrow with the upholsterers and curtain people." I obediently turned off the light. As I was about to throw myself into bed and draw the covers over me, a broad beam from the moon flooded the face of a por trait on the opposite wall the face of my daughter Margot. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at that face pure, sweet, with the same elevated expres sion her mother had in these days of refinement and climbing. Said I to Edna : " Are you asleep, dear? " " No," she answered crossly. 6f I'm waiting for you to quiet down." " Then let me talk to you a few minutes." 66 Oh, please ! " she cried, flinging herself to the far edge of the bed. " You have no consideration for me none at all." " Listen," I said. " I'm face to face with ruin." She did not move or speak, but I could feel her intense attention. 100 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " If I let matters take their course I can save my reputation and my official position. But for many years we'll have to live quietly about as we did in Brooklyn." " I can't do that," cried she. " The fall would kill me. You know how proud I am. . . . Just as I had everything ready for us to get into society! Godfrey, how could you! And I thought you were clever at business." I could not see her, nor she me, except in dimmest outline. I said : " But we'd have each other and Mar- got. And my salary isn't so small, as salaries go." " Isn't there any way to avoid it? " She was sitting up in bed, her nervous fingers upon my arm. " You must think, Godfrey. You mustn't play Margot and me this horrible trick. You mustn't give up so easily. You must think think think! " " I have," said I. " I've not slept for three days and nights. There's no way no honest way." " Then there is a way ! " she cried. " But not an honest one." She laughed scornfully. " And you pretend to love me ! When my life and Margot's happiness are at stake you talk like a Sunday-school boy." " Yes," said I. " And I've been thinking more or less that way lately for the first time in years. It wasn't long after I started when I cut my business eye teeth. I found out that as the game lay I'd not get far if I stuck to the old maxims of the copy book and the Sun day school. Except by accident nobody ever got rich who followed them. To get rich you've got to make 101 THE HUSBAND'S STORY a lot of people work for you and work cheap, and you've got to sell what they make as dear as you can. ('Success in business means taking advantage of the ig- Jnorance or the necessities of your fellow men, or both." " Don't waste time talking that kind of nonsense," said she impatiently. " It doesn't mean anything to me or to anybody, I guess. The thing for you to do is to put your mind on the real thing how to save your family and yourself." " That's what I'm talking about," said I. " I'm talking about saving myself and my family. As I told you, my troubles the first business troubles I've ever had have set me to thinking. I've not been doing right all these years. It's true, everybody does as I've been doing. It's true I've been more generous and more considerate .than most men with opportunities and the sense to see them. But I've been doing wrong." I paused, hoping for some sign of sympathy. None came. I went on : " And I've been wondering these last few days if by doing it I haven't been ruining myself and my family not financially, but in more important ways. Edna, what's the sense in this life we're leading? What will be the end of it all? Is there any decency or happiness in it? Haven't we been going backward instead of forward ? " All the time I was talking I could feel she was not listening. When I finished she said : " Godfrey, what is this way you can escape by ? " " I can sell out my partners in the deals that have gone bad." 102 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Perhaps they're selling you out," she instantly suggested. " Why, of course they are doing that very thing ! while you are driveling about honesty like a backwoods hypocrite of a church deacon." " No, they're not selling me out," said I. " How do you know ? " cried she. " I caught them at that trick in a former deal and in the early stages of this one. And I fixed things so that, while they have to trust me, I don't trust them." She laughed mockingly. " Godfrey, I think your mind must be going. You talking about sacrificing your fortune and your wife and your child for men who've tried to ruin you men who are even now think ing out some scheme for doing it. ... Suppose you saved yourself and let them go what then ? Wouldn't you be rich? And when you were secure again couldn't you pay them back what they lost if you were still foolish enough to think it necessary ? " It was not the first time she had astonished me with the depth of her practical insight and her skill at logic when she cared to use her mind. " I had thought of saving myself and paying back afterwards," said I. " But I'm not sure I'd save myself. It's simply my one chance." " Then you've got to take that chance," said she. " I didn't expect you to talk like this," said I, " The only reason I haven't spoken of my troubles be fore was that I feared you'd forbid me to do what I was being tempted to do." And that was the truth about my feeling. I had always heard and had firmly believed that woman 103 THE HUSBAND'S STORY was somehow the exemplar of ideal morality, that it was she who kept men from being worse than they were, that the evil being done by men pursuing success was done without the knowledge of their pure, idealist wives and mothers and daughters. I can't account for my stupidity in this respect. Had I not on every side the spectacle that gave the lie to the shallow pretense of feminine moral superiority? Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and simply spends ; was it not the women, the ladies, who were edging on the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses, the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy cloth ing, the costly jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift squandering upon the degrad ing vanities of social position? I laughed somewhat cynically. " No wonder you've always refused to learn anything about business," said I. " It's a habit among big business men to refuse to know anything as to the details of a large transaction that can be carried through only by dirty work. If we don't know, we can pretend that the dirty work isn't being done by or for us isn't being done at all." " Now you are getting coarse," said my wife. " Do you know what I think of you? " I could not see her expression, but the voice always betrays if there is in sincerity, because we do not deal enough with the blind to learn to deceive perfectly with the voice. Her tones 104 THE HUSBAND'S STORY were absolutely sincere as she answered her own ques tion : " I think it is cowardly of you to come to me with your business troubles. If you were brave you'd simply have quietly done whatever was necessary to save your family. Yes, it is cowardly ! " " I didn't mean it as cowardice," said I, admiring but irritated by this characteristic adroitness. " In the stories and the plays that give such thrills, the husband, in the crisis and tempted to do wrong, appeals to his wife. And they are brought closer together, and she helps him to do right, and everything ends happily." Again I laughed good-humoredly. " It doesn't seem to be turning out that way, does it, dear? My heavenly picture of you and Margot and me living modestly and making up in love what we lack in luxury it doesn't attract you? " She said in her patient, superior tone: " I suppose you never will understand me or my ideals. What you've been doing in annoying me with your business, it's as if when I was giving a dinner I assembled my guests and compelled them to watch all the prepara tions for the dinner the killing of the lambs and the fish and the birds, the cleaning, all those ugly and low things. Bringing business into the home and the social life, it's like bringing the kitchen into the drawing- room." The obvious answer to this shallow but plausible and attractive cleverness of hers did not come to me then. If it had I'd not have spoken it. For of what use to argue with the human animal, female or male, about its dearest selfishnesses and vanities ? Of what use to point 105 THE HUSBAND'S STORY out to human self-complacence, greediness and hypoc risy that a " refined " and " cultured " existence of ease and luxury can be obtained only by the theft and mur der of dishonest business that for one man to be vastly rich thousands of men must somehow be robbed and oppressed, even though the rich man himself directly does no robbing and oppressing? If I have sucking pig for dinner, I kill sucking pig as surely as if my hand wielded the knife of the butcher. But the human race finds it convenient and comfortable not to think so. Therefore, let us not bother our heads about it. At that period of my career I had not thought things out so thoroughly as I have since in these days when events have compelled me to open my eyes and to see. In my hypocrisy, in my eagerness to save myself, I was not loth to take refuge behind the advice given by my wife partly in genuine ignorance of business, partly in pretended ignorance of it. Said I: " I suppose you're right. I ought to think only of my family. Heaven knows, my rascal friends aren't thinking in my interest. If I don't do it, no one will. There's no disputing that eh ? " No reply. She was asleep or, rather, was pretend ing to be asleep. The matter had been settled, why dis cuss it further? Why expose herself longer than un avoidable to the danger of being unable to be, or to pretend to be, ignorant of business, of the foundation upon which her splendid, cultured structure of ambition proudly reared? Often in her sleep her hand would seek mine, and when it was comfortably nestled she would give a little 106 THE HUSBAND'S STORY sigh of content that thrilled me through and through. Her hand now stole into mine and the sigh of content came softly from her lips. " My love," I murmured, kissing her cheek before I lay down. How could I for a minute have considered any course that would have made her unhappy, that might have lessened, perhaps destroyed, her love for me ? IV IT is hardly necessary to say that I threw overboard my partners and saved myself. Indeed, I emerged from the crisis liberally bespattered with mud, it is true but richer than when I entered it. Since I was doing the act that was the supreme proof of my possessing the courage and the skill for leadership in business since I was definitely breaking with the old-fashioned morality I felt it was the part of wisdom to do the thing so thoroughly, so profitably, that instead of being exe crated I should be admired. There were attacks on me in the newspapers ; there were painful interviews with my partners not so painful to me as they would have been had I not been able to remind them of their own unsuccessful treacheries and to enforce the spoken re minder with the documentary proof. But on the whole I came off excellently well as who does not that " gets away with the goods ? " In these days of increased intelligence and consequent lessened hypocrisy, the big business man is the object of only perfunctory hypocrisies from outraged morality. It has been discovered that the farmer watering his milk or the grocer using solder-" mended " scales is as bad as the man who " reorganizes " a railway or manipulates 108 THE HUSBAND'S STORY a stock is worse actually because the massed mis chief of the million little business rascals is greater than the sensational misdeeds of the few great rascals. It been discovered that human nature is good or bad mly according to the opportunities and necessities, not according to abstract moral standards. And the cry I is no longer, " Kill the scoundrel," but, " That fellow i had the sense to outwit us. We must learn from him how to sharpen our wits so that we won't let ourselves be robbed." A healthful sign this, that masses of men are ceasing from twaddle about vague ideals and are educating themselves in practical horse sense. It may be that some day the honest husbandman will learn to guard his granary not only against the robber with the sack in the dark of the morn, but also against the rats and mice who pilfer ten bushels to every one that is stolen. Of one thing I am certain until men learn to take heed in the small, they will remain easy prey in the large. Far from doing me harm, my bold stroke was of the greatest benefit from the standpoint of material success, and that is the only point of view I am here considering. It did me as much good with the world as it has done me with you, gentle reader. For while you are exclaiming against my wickedness you are in your secret heart confessing that if I had chosen the ideally honest course, had retired to obscurity and poverty, you would have approved and would have lost interest in me. Why, if I had chosen that ideal course, I doubt not I should have lost my railway position. My direct ors would have waxed enthusiastic over my " old-fash- 8 109 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ioned honesty," and would have looked round for an other and shrewder and stronger man to whom to intrust the management of their railway which would not pay dividends were it run along the lines of old- fashioned honesty. The outburst of denunciation soon spent itself, like a summer storm beating the giant cliffs of a mountain. Of what use to rage futilely against my splendid immovable fortune? The attacks, the talk about my bold stroke, the exaggerations of the size of the fortune I had made, all served to attract at tention to me, to make me a formidable and an inter esting figure. I leaped from obscurity into fame and power and I had the money to maintain the position I had won. Long before, indeed as soon as we moved to Man hattan, my wife had joined fashionable and exclusive Holy Cross Church and had plunged straightway into its charity work. A highly important part of her Brooklyn education had been got in St. Mary's, in learning how to do charity work and how to make it count socially. Edna genuinely loved charity work. She loved to patronize, loved to receive those fawning blessings and handkissings which city poverty becomes adept at giving the rich it lives off of. The poor fam ily understands perfectly that the rich visit and help not through mere empty sentimental nonsense of brotherhood, but to have their vanities tickled in ex change for the graciousness of their condescending presence and for the money they lay out. As the poor want the money and have no objection to paying for it 110 THE HUSBAND'S STORY with that cheap and plentiful commodity, cringing scantily screening mockery and contempt rich and poor meet most comfortably in our cities. Not New York alone, but any center of population, for human nature is the same, city and country, San Francisco, Bangor Pekin or Paris, for that matter. There is a shallow fashion of describing this or that as peculiarly New York, usually snobbishness or domes tic unhappiness or wealth worship, dishonest business men or worthless wives. It is time to have done with such nonsense. New York is in no way peculiar, nor is any other place, beyond trifling surface differences. New York is nothing but the epitome of the whole coun try, just as Chicago is. If you wish to understand America, study New York or Chicago, our two universal cities. There you find in one place and in admirable perspective a complete museum of specimens of what is scattered over three and a half million square miles. For, don't forget, New York is not the few blocks of fashionable district alone. It is four million people of all conditions, tastes, and activities. And the domi nant force of struggle for money and fashion is no more dominant in New York than it is in the rest of America. New York is more truly representative of America than is Chicago, for in Chicago the Eastern and Southern ele ments are lacking and the Western element is strong out of proportion. I was telling of my wife's blossoming as Lady Boun tiful in search not of a heavenly crown, but of what human Lady Bountiful always seeks social position. Charity covers a multitude of sins ; the greatest of them 111 THE HUSBAND'S STORY is hypocrisy. I have yet to see a charitable man or woman or child whose chief and only noteworthy object ,was not self-glorification. The people who believe inj brotherhood do not go in for charity. They wish toj abolish poverty, whereas charity revels in poverty andr seeks to increase it, to change it from miserable poverty which might die into comfortable pauperism which can live on, and fester and breed on, and fawn on and give vanity ever more and more exquisite titillations. Holy Cross, my wife's new spiritual guide, was past master of the pauper-making and pauper-utilizing arts. Its rector and his staff of slimy sycophants had the small standing army of its worthy poor trained to perfection. When my wife went down among them, she returned home with face aglow and eyes heavenly. What a treat those wretches had given her ! And in the first blush of her enthusiasm she dispensed lavishly, where the older ^members of the church exacted the full measure of titil- lation for every dollar invested and awarded extra sums jonly to some novelty in lickspittling or toadeating. Were I not sure I should quite wear out the for bearance of gentle reader, I should linger to describe this marvelous charity plant for providing idle or social- position-hunting rich women with spiritual pleasures I had almost said debaucheries, but that would be in truding my private and perhaps prejudiced opinion. I have no desire to irritate, much less shake the faith of, those who believe in Holy Cross and its " uplift " work. And I don't suppose Holy Cross does any great amount of harm. The poor who prostitute themselves to its purposes are weak things, beyond redemption. THE HUSBAND'S STORY As for the rich who waste time and money there, would they not simply waste elsewhere were there no Holy Cross ? My wife was, at that time, a very ignorant woman, thinly covered with a veneer of what I now know was a rather low grade of culture. That veneer impressed me. It had impressed our Brooklyn friends of St. Mary's. But I fancy it must have looked cheap to expert eyes. Where her surpassing shrewdness showed itself was in that she herself recognized her own short comings. Rare and precious is the vanity that com forts and sustains without self-deception. She knew she wasn't the real thing, knew she had not yet got hold of the real thing. And when she began to move about, cautiously and quietly, in Holy Cross, she real ized that at last she was in the presence of the real thing. My big responsibilities, my associations in finance, had been giving me a superb training in worldly wis dom. I think I had almost as strong a natural apti tude for " catching on " to the better thing in speech and manner and in dress as had Edna. It is not self- flattery for me to say that up to the Holy Cross period I was further advanced than she. Certainly I ought to have been, for a man has a much better opportunity than a woman, and one of the essentials of equipment for great affairs is ability to observe accurately the lit tle no less than the large. Looking back, I recall things which lead me to suspect that Edna saw my superiority in certain matters most important to her, and was irri tated by it. However that may be, a few months in. Holy Cross and she had grasped the essentials of the 113 THE HUSBAND'S STORY social art as I, or any other masculine man, never could grasp it. And her veneer of " middle-class " culture disappeared under a thick and enduring coating of the best New York manner. " What has become of you? " I said to her. " I haven't seen you in weeks." " I don't understand," said she, ruffling as she al ways did when she suspected me of indulging in my coarse and detestable sense of humor. " Why, you don't act like yourself at all," said I. " Even when we're alone you give the uncomfortable sense of dressed-up not as if you were * dressed-up,' but as if / were. I feel like a plowboy before a princess." She was delighted ! " You," I went on, " are now exactly like the rest of those women in Holy Cross. I suppose it's all right to look and talk and act that way before people. At least, I've no objection if it pleases you. But for heaven's sake, Edna, don't spoil our privacy with it. The queen doesn't wear her coronation robes all the time." " I'm sure I don't know what you mean," said she. " Don't you? " cried I, laughing. " What a charm ing fraud you are ! " And I seized her in my arms and kissed her. And she seemed to yield and to return my caresses. But I was uncomfortable. She would not drop that new manner. The incident seems trifling enough; perhaps it was trifling. But it stands out in my memory. It marks the change in our relationship. I recall it all distinctly how she looked, how young and charming and cold, what she was wearing, the delicate THE HUSBAND'S STOEY simple dress that ought to have made her most alluring to me, yet made me feel as if she were indeed alluring, but not for me. A subtle difference there, but abysmal ; the difference between the woman who tries to make her self attractive for the sake of her husband and the wom an who makes toilets in the conscious or half-conscious longing successfully to prostitute herself to the eyes of the public. I recall every detail of that incident ; yet I have only the vaguest recollection of our beginning to occupy separate bedrooms. By that time the feeling of alienation must have grown so strong that I took the radical change in our habits as the matter of course. Many are the women, in all parts of the earth, who have sought to climb into the world of fashion by the broad and apparently easy stairway of charity. But most of them have failed because they were unaware of the secret of that stairway, an unsuspected secret which I shall proceed to point out. It seems, as I have said, a particularly easy stairway broad, roomy, with invalid steps. It is, in fact, a moving stairway so cun ningly contrived that she it is usually she who as cends keeps in the same place. She goes up, but at exactly her ascending rate the stairway goes down. She sees other women making apparently no more effort than she ascending rapidly, and presently entering the earthly heaven at the top. Yet there she stands, mark ing time, moving not one inch upward, and there she will stand until she wearies, relaxes her efforts, and finds herself rapidly descending. But how do the women who ascend accomplish it ? I do not know. You must ask them. I only know the cause of the failure 115 THE HUSBAND'S STORY of the women who do not ascend. If I knew why the others succeeded I should not tell it. I would not de prive fashionable women of the joy of occupying a dif ficult height from which they can indulge themselves in the happiness of sneering and spitting down at their lowlier sisters. And I have no sympathy with the aspirations or the humiliations of those lowlier sisters. My energetic and aspiring wife presently found herself on this stairway, with no hint as to its secret, much less as to the way of overcoming its peculiarity. She toiled daily in Holy Cross. She subscribed to everything, she helped in everything. She was the proud recipient of the rector's loud praises as his " most devoted, least worldly, most spiritual helper." But not an invitation of the kind she wanted. Everyone was " just lovely " to her. Whenever any charitable or spiritual matter was to be discussed, no matter how grand and exclusive the house in which the discussion was to be held, there was my wife in a place of honor, eagerly consulted and urged to subscribe. But noth ing unworldly. They understood how spiritual she was, did those sweet, good people. They knew Saint Edna wished no social frivolities no dinners or theater par ties, no bridge or dancing. She was a wise lady. She hid her burning impa tience. She smiled and purred when she yearned to scowl and scratch. She waited, and prayed for some lucky accident that would swing her across the invisible, apparently nonexistent but actually impassable dead line. She had expected snubs and cold shoulders. 116 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Never a snub, never a cold shoulder. Always smiles and gracious handshakings and amiable familiarities, but those always of the kind that serve to accentuate caste distinction instead of removing it. For the first time in her life, I think, she was completely stumped. She could combat obstacles. She might even have found a way to fight fog. But how ridiculous to make struggles and thrust out fists when there is nothing but empty, sunny air ! She held church lunches and dinners at our house of course, had me on duty at the dinners. All in vain. The distinction between the spiritual and the temporal remained in force. The grand people came, acted as if they were delighted, complimented her on her house, on her hospitality, went away, to invite her to similar dreary functions at their houses. And my, how it did cost her! No wonder Holy Cross made a pet of her and elected me to the board of vestrymen. Once in a while she would find something in her net, so slyly cast, so softly drawn. She would have a wild spasm of joy; then the something would turn out to be another climber like herself. Those climbers avoided each other as devils dodge the font of holy water. The climber she would have caught would be one who, igno rant of the intricacies of New York society, was under the impression that the Mrs. Godfrey Loring so con spicuous in Holy Cross must be a social personage. They would examine each other at a series of joyous entertainments each would provide for the other, would discover their mutual mistake and You know the contemptuous toss with which the fisherman rids him- 117 THE HUSBAND'S STORY self of a bloater; you know the hysterical leap of the released bloater back into the water. But how it was funny ! My wife did not take me into her confidence as to her social struggles. She main tained with me the same sweet, elegant exterior of spiritual placidity with which she faced the rest of the world. Nevertheless, in a dim sort of way I had some notion of what she was about though, as I was pres ently to discover, I was wholly mistaken in my idea of her progress. "What has happened to Mrs. Lestrange?" I said to her one evening at dinner. " Is she ill ? " She cast a quick, nervous glance in the direction of the butler. I, looking at him by way of a mirror, thought I saw upon his aristocratic countenance a faint trace of that insolent secret glee which fills servants when their betters are humiliated before them. " Mrs. Lestrange?" she said carelessly. "Oh, I see her now and then." " But you've been inseparable until lately," said I. " A quarrel, I suppose ? " " Not at all," said my wife tartly. And she shifted abruptly to another subject. When I went to the little study adjoining my sitting room to smoke she came with me. There she said: " Please don't mention Mrs. Lestrange before the servants again." " Why, what's up? " said I. " Did she turn out to be a crook? " " Heavens, no ! How coarse you are, Godfrey. Simply that I was terribly mistaken in her." 118 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " She looked like a confidence woman or a madam," said I. " Didn't you tell me she was a howling swell? " " I thought she was," said my wife, and I knew something important was coming; only that theory would account for her admitting she had made a mis take. " And in a way she was. But they caught her several years ago taking money to get some dreadful low Western people into society. Since then she's asked she herself because she's well connected and amusing. But she can't help anyone else." " Oh, I see," said I. " And you don't feel strong enough socially as yet to be able to afford the luxury of her friendship." " Strong enough ! " said Edna with intense bitter ness. " I have no position at all none whatever." I was surprised, for until that moment I had been assuming she was on or near the top of the wave, moving swiftly toward triumphant success. " You want too much," said I. " You've really got all there is to get. At that last reception of yours you had all the heavy swells. My valet told me so." " Reception to raise funds for the orphanage," said Edna with a vicious sneer the unloveliest expression I had ever seen on her lovely face and I had seen not a few unlovely expressions there in our many married years, some of them extremely trying years. " I tell you I am nobody socially. They take my money for their rotten old charities. They use me for their tire some church work and they do nothing for me noth ing ! How I hate them ! " I sat smoking my cigar and watching her face. It 119 THE HUSBAND'S STORY was a wonderfully young face. Not that she was so old; on the contrary, she was still young in years. I call her face wonderfully young because it had that look of inexhaustible, eternal youth which is rare even in the faces of boys and girls. But that evening I was not thinking so much of her youth and her beauty as of a certain expression of hardness, of evil passions rampant envy and hatred and jealousy, savage disap pointment over defeats in sordid battles. " Edna," said I, hesitatingly, " why don't you drop all that? Can't you see there's nothing in it? You're tempting the worst things in your nature to grow and destroy all that's good and sweet all that makes you and me happy. People aren't necessary to us. And if you must have friends, surely all the attractive people in New York aren't in that little fashionable set. Judg ing from what I've seen of them, they're a lot of bores." " They look bored here," retorted she. " And no wonder! They come as a Christian duty." I laughed. " Now, honestly, are those fashionable people the best educated, the best in any way any real way? I've talked with the men, and the younger ones the ones that go in for society are unspeakable rot ters. I wouldn't have them about." Edna's eyes flashed, and her form quivered in a gust of hysterical fury the breaking of long-pent passion, of anger and despair, taking me as an excuse for vent. " Oh, it's terrible to be married to a man who always misunderstands ! one who can't sympathize ! " cried she. It was a remark she often made, but never before had she put so much energy, so much bitterness into it. THE HUSBAND'S STORY " What do I misunderstand ? " I asked, more hurt than I cared to show. " Where don't I sympathize ? " " Let's not talk about it ! " exclaimed she. " If I weren't a remarkable woman I'd have given up long ago I'd give up now." Before you smile at her egotism, gentle reader, please remember that husband and wife were talking alone ; also that with a few pitiful exceptions all human beings think surpassingly well of themselves, and do not hesitate to express that good opinion privately. I guess there's more lying done about lack of egotism and of vanity generally than about all other matters put together. Said I : " You are indeed a wonder, dear. In this country one sees many astonishing transformations. But I doubt if there have been many equal to the trans formation of the girl I married into the girl who's sit ting before me." " And what good has it done me ? " demanded she. " How I've worked away at myself inside and out and all for nothing ! " " You've still got me" said I jovially, yet in earnest too. " Lots of women lose their husbands. I've never had a single impulse to wander." In the candor of that intimacy she gave me a most unflattering look a look a woman does well not to cast at a man unless she is more absolutely sure of him than anyone can be of anything in this uncertain world. I laughed as if I thought she meant that look as a jest; I put the look away in my memory with a mark on it that meant " to be taken out and examined at leisure." THE HUSBAND'S STORY But she was absorbed in her chagrin over her social fail ure; she probably hardly realized I was there. " Well, what's the next move ? " inquired I presently. " You've got to help," replied she and I knew this was what she had been revolving in her mind all evening. " Anything that doesn't take me away from business, or keep me up too late to fit myself for the next day." " Business always business," said she, in deepest disgust. " Do you never think of anything else? " " My business and my family that's my life," said I. " Not your family," replied she. " You care noth ing about them." " Edna," I said sharply, " that is unjust and un true." " Oh, you give them money, if that's what you mean," said she disdainfully. " And I give them love," said I. " The trouble is I give so freely that you don't value it." " Oh, you are a good husband," said she carelessly. " But I want you to take an interest." " In your social climbing? " " How insulting you are ! " she cried, with flashing eyes. " I am trying to claim the position we are en titled to, and you speak of me as if I were one of those vulgar pushers." " I beg your pardon," said I humbly. " I was mere ly joking." " I've often told you that your idea of humor wa revolting." THE HUSBAND'S STORY I felt distressed for her in her chagrin and despair. I was ready to bear almost anything she might see fit to inflict. " What do you want me to do ? " I asked. " Whatever it is, I'll do it. Do you need more money? " " I need help real help," said she. " Money's god over the realm of fashion, the same as it is over that of of religion of politics or any thing you please. And luckily I've got that little god in my employ, my dear." " If you are so powerful," said she, " put me into fashionable society make these people receive me and come to my house." " But they do," I reminded her. " I mean socially" cried she. " Can't I make you understand? Why are business men so dumb at any thing else? Compel these people to take me as one of them." " Now, Edna, my dear," protested I, " be reason able. How can I do that? " "Easily, if you've got real power," rejoined she. " It's been done often, I've found out lately. At least half the leaders in society got in originally by compel ling it. But you, going round among men intimately you must know it must have known all along. If you'd been the right sort of man I'd not have to humil iate myself by asking you by saying these dreadful things." Her eyes were flashing and her bosom was heaving. " Women have hated men for less. But I must bear my cross. You insist on degrading me. Very well. I'll let myself be degraded. I'll say the things a decent man would not ask a woman to say " 123 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Edna, darling," I pleaded. " Honestly, I don't understand. You'll have to tell me. And it's not de grading. We have no secrets from each other. We who love each other can say anything to each other anything. What do you wish me to do ? " " Use your power over the men. Frighten them into ordering their wives to invite us and to accept our invitations. You do business with a lot of the men, don't you?" " Yes," said I. " You can benefit or injure them, as you please, can't you? can take money away from them can put them in the way of making it? " " Yes," said I ; " to a certain extent." " And how do you use this power ? " " In building up great enterprises. I am founding a city just now, for instance, where there was nothing but a swamp beside a lake, and " " In making more and more money for yourself," she cut in, " you think only of yourself." " And you what do you think of? " said I. " Not of myself," cried she indignantly. " Never of myself. Of Margot. Of you. Of the family. I am working to build us up to make us somebody and not mere low money grubbers." I did not see it from her point of view. But I was not inclined to aggravate her excitement and anger. " Why shouldn't you use your powers for some un selfish purpose ? " she went on. " Why not try to have higher ambition ? " I observed her narrowly. She was sincere* THE HUSBAND'S STORY " I want you to help me for Margot's sake, for your own sake," she went on in a kind of exaltation. " Margot is coming on. She'll be out in less than three years. We've got to make a position for her." " I thought, up there at Miss Ryper's she was " " That shows how little interest you take ! " cried Edna. "Don't you know what is happening? Why, already the fashionable girls at her school are begin ning to shy off from her " "Don't be absurd!" laughed I. "That simply could not be. She's lovely, sweet, attractive in every way. Any girls anywhere would be proud to have her as a friend." " How can you be so ignorant of the world ! " cried Edna in a frenzy of exasperation. " Oh, you'll drive me mad with your stupidity! Can't you realize how low\ fashionable people are. The girls who were her friends I so long as they were all mere children are now taking a positive delight in snubbing her, because she's so pretty and will be an heiress. It gives them a sense of power to treat her as an inferior, to make her suffer." I flung away the cigar and sat up in the chair. " How long has this be?n going on ? " I demanded. " Nearly a year 3 ' ? replied my wife. " It began as soon as she lost her childishness and developed toward a woman. I'm glad I've roused you at last. So long as she was a mere baby they liked her invited her to their children's parties came to hers. But now they're dropping her. Oh, it's maddening ! They are so sweet and smooth, the vile little daughters of vile mothers ! " " Incredible ! " said I. " Surely not those sweet,, 9 125 THE HUSBAND'S STORY well-mannered girls I've seen here at her parties ? They couldn't do that sort of thing. Why, what do those babies know about social position and such nonsense? " "What do they know? What don't they know?" cried Edna, trembling with rage at her humiliation and at my incredulity. " You are an innocent ! There ought to be a new proverb innocent as a married man. Why, nowadays the children begin their social training in the cradle. They soon learn to know a nurse or a butler from a lady or a gentleman before they learn to walk. They hear the servants talk. They hear their parents talk. Except innocent you everyone nowadays thinks and talks about these things." " But Margot our Margot she doesn't know ! " I said with conviction. Edna laughed harshly. " Know ? W T hat kind of mother do you think I am? Of course she knows. Haven't I been teaching her ever since she began to talk? Why do you suppose I've always called her the little duchess?" " She suggests a superior little person," said I, groping vaguely. " She suggests a superior person because I gave her that name and brought her up to look and act and feel the part. She expects to be a real duchess some day ' Edna reared proudly, and her voice rang out confidently as she added " and she shall be ! " I stared at her. It seemed to me she must be out of her mind. Oh, I was indeed innocent, gentle reader. 6C I've always treated her as a duchess, and have made the servants do it, and have trained her to treat 126 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ^iim~mHKmmmm*mmm\ ^^^^^^i them as if she were a duchess." A proud smile came into her face, transforming it suddenly back to its love liness. " 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 ! drop ping 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 yester day 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 " 127 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " 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 in famous 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 communi cation. " The question is, what are you going to do," pro ceeded 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. ' 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 128 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 alter nations 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 them selves 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 no tions 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 j probably been the principal cause of my business sue- , cess, of my ability to outwit even abler men than myself. -' THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 impa tiently, 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, asjj 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 com mercial 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 130 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 see ing 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 my self 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 sweet ly, 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 direc tion, I took particular pleasure in my wife's small per sonal 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 131 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 sev eral 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 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 mem orable 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 ig norance of the realities, and their mothers, often with hy pocritical 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 re- 133 THE HUSBAND'S STORY garding 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 com mentary 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. 3?or, 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 in telligence 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 rou tine of inane and worthless time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable women and apers THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 con tempt. I amused myself from time to time by inquir ing 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, his tory, 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 atten tion 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 aster oids 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 educa tion? 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 135 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 af ford. 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 j jneed in this world is not more sentiment, but more in- ftelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and jcrazily 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 136 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 atten tively, 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 eager ness 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? " 137 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Yes. Miss Parnell " her companion " has a headache, poor creature ! " Margot had caught to perfection the refined, ele gant, 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 alac rity. 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." j " 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? " 138 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " 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.. 139 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " 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 your self ? " 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 recog nize as my own. She threw her arms round my neck with a gesture and an expression that made me realize how close a copy 140 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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. 10 V IN refusing Edna her heart's desire thus promptly and tersely I had an object. I assumed she would pro test 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 some thing 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 emer gency minds, on knowing just what to do in any situa tion the instant it arises ; and fine spectacles they are, lying buried and broken amid the ruins they have aggra vated 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 dis cussion, I did not know which way to turn. Why had I refused to help her in the way she sug- THE HUSBAND'S STORY gested? Not on moral grounds, gentle reader. There I should have been as free from scruple as you yourself would have been, as you perhaps have been in your so cial climbing or maneuvering in your native town, where- ever it is. Nor yet through fear of failure. I did not know the social game, but I did know something of human nature. And I had found out that the trium phant class, far from being the gentlest and most civil ized, as its dominant position in civilization would in dicate, was in fact the most barbarous, was saturated with the raw savage spirit of the right of might. I am speaking of actualities, not of pretenses of deeds, not of words. To find a class approaching it in frank savagery of will and action you would have to descend through the social strata until you came to the class that wields the blackjack and picks pockets and dyna mites safes. The triumphant class became triumphant not by refinement and courtesy and consideration, but by defiance of those fundamentals of civilization by successful defiance of them. It remained the triumphant : 'class by keeping that primal savagery of nature. As jsoon as any member of it began to grow tame gentle, considerate, except where consideration for others would increase his own wealth and power, became really a dis- | ciple of the sweet gospel he professed and urged upon others just so soon did he begin to lose his wealth into \ ;;the strong unscrupulous hands ever reaching for it :and with waning wealth naturally power and prestige ; waned. No, I did not refuse because I thought the trium phant class would contemptuously repel any attempt to 143 THE HUSBAND'S STORY carry its social doors by assault. I saw plainly enough that I could compel enough of these society leaders to receive my wife and daughters to insure their position. You have seen swine gathered about a trough, comfort ably swilling; you have seen a huge porker come run ning with angry squeal to join the banquet. You have observed how rudely, how fiercely he is resented and fought off by the others. This, until he by biting and thrusting has made a place for himself; then the fact Jiat he is an intruder and the method of his getting a Dlace are forgotten, and the swilling goes peacefully ? orward. So it is, gentle reader, though it horrifies your lypocrisy to be told it, so do human beings conduct ;hemselves round a financial or political or social swill irough. I should have had small difficulty in biting and kicking a satisfactory place for Edna and Margot at the social swill trough; I should have had no difficulty at all in keeping it for them. But You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable society in the me tropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too, like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great democracy and many of the not so comfortable classes as well because you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are " common," and for straightway making it your heart's dearest desire to compel that person to associate with you. You will be incredulous when I tell you my sole reason was my hatred and horror of 144 THE HUSBAND'S STORY what seemed to me the degrading, vulgar, and rotten longings that filled my wife and that had infected my daughter. That hatred and horror had thrown me into a state of mind I did not dare confess to myself. You are incredulous ; but perhaps you will admit I may be truthful when I explain that the reason for my moral and sentimental revolt was perhaps in large part my dense ignorance of the whole society side of life. No doubt in the Passaic public school of my boy hood there had been as much snobbishness as there is in Fifth Avenue. But I had somehow never happened to notice it. It must have been there; it must be ele mental in human nature ; how else account for my wife ? We hear more about the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue than we do about the snobbishness of the tenements. But that is solely because Fifth Avenue is more con spicuous. Also, Fifth Avenue, supposedly educated, supposedly broadened by knowledge and taste, has no excuse for petty vanities that belong only to the igno rant. And if Fifth Avenue were really educated, really had knowledge and taste, it could not be snobbish. However, my busy life had never been touched by social snobbishness. I preferred to know and to associate with men better educated and richer than I, but for excellent practical reasons because from such men I could get the knowledge and the wealth I needed. But I would not have wasted a moment of my precious time upon the men most exalted in fashionable life the ig norant incompetents who had inherited their wealth. They seemed ridiculous and worthless to me, a man of thought and action. 145 THE HUSBAND'S STORY So, the sudden exposure of my wife's and my little girl's disease gave me a shock hardly to be measured by the man or woman used all his life to the social craze. It was much as if I had suddenly seen upon their bared bosoms the disgusting ravages of cancer. As I could not devise any line of action that, how ever faintly, promised results, I kept away from home. I absorbed myself in some new enterprises that filled my evenings, which I spent at iny club with the men I drew into them. At the mention of club, gentle reader, I see your ears pricking. You are wondering what sort of club 7 belonged to. I shall explain. It was the Amsterdam Club. You may have seen and gawked at its vast and imposing red sandstone front in middle Fif^h Avenue. As you drove by in the " rubber-neck " wagon, the man with the megaphone may have shouted : " The Amsterdam Clab, otherwise known as the Palace of Plutocracy. The total wealth of its members is one tenth of the total wealth of the United States. Every great millionaire in New York City belongs to it. The reason you see no one in the magnificent windows is because the plutocrats are afraid of cranks with pistol or bomb." And you stared and < envied and craned your neck backward as the sight seeing car rolled on. A fairly accurate description of my club. But you will calm as I go on to tell you the inside truth about it. It was built to provide a club for those rich men of New York who had no social position, and so could not be admitted to the fashionable clubs. It was not built by those outcasts 146 THE HUSBAND'S STORY for whom it was intended, but by the rich men of the fashionable world. They did not build it out of pity nor yet out of generosity, but for freedom and con venience. You must know that the rich, both the fashionables and the excludeds, are intimately associated in business. Now, in the days before the Amsterdam Club, if a rich fashionable wished to talk business out of office hours with a rich unfashionable, he had to take him to his home or to his club, one or the other. You will readily appreciate that either course involved disagreeable com plications. The rich unfashionable would say : " Why am I not invited to this snob's house socially? Why does not this hound see that I am elected to his elegant club? I'll teach this wrinkle-snout how to spit at me. I'll slip a stiletto into his back, damn him." As the number of rich unfashionables increased, as the number of stealthy financial stilettoings for social insult grew and swelled, the demand for a " way out " became more clamorous and panicky. The final result was the Am sterdam Club perhaps by inspiration, perhaps by acci dent. And so it has come to pass that now, when a rich fashionable wishes to talk finance with a rich pariah, he does not have to run the risk of defiling his home or his exclusive club. With the gracious cordiality where- for aristocracy is famed in song and story, he says: " Let us go to our club " for, the rich fashionables see to it that every rich pariah is elected to the Amsterdam immediately he becomes a person of financial conse quence. And I fancy that not one in ten of the rich pariah members dreams how he is being insulted and 147 THE HUSBAND'S STORY tricked. All, or nearly all, imagine they are elected by favor of the great fashionable plutocrats to about the most exclusive club in New York. Also, not one in a dozen of the fashionable members appreciates how he is degrading himself for, to my quaint mind, the snob degrades only himself. Well! Not many months after we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan I was elected to the Amster dam I, in serene ignorance of the trick that was being played upon me by my sponsors, associates in large financial deals and members of several exclusive really fashionable clubs. They pulled regretful faces as they talked of the " long waiting lists at most of the clubs." They brightened as they spoke of the Amsterdam - " the finest and, take it all round, the most satisfactory of the whole bunch, old man. And we believe we've got pull enough to put you in there pretty soon. We'll work it, somehow." If I had known the shrivel-hearted trick behind their genial friendliness, I should not have minded, should probably have laughed. For, human lit tlenesses do not irritate me; and I have a vanity I prefer to call it a pride that lifts me out of their reach. I am of the one aristocracy that is truly ex clusive, the only one that needs no artificial barriers to keep it so. But I shall not bore you, gentle reader, by explaining about it. You are interested only in the aristocracies of rank and title and wealth that are noth ing but the tawdry realization of the tawdry fancies of the yokel among his kine and the scullery maid among her pots. For, who but a tossed-up yokel or scullery maid would indulge in such vulgarities as sitting upon 148 THE HUSBAND'S STORY a gold throne or living in a draughty, cheerless palace or seeking to make himself more ridiculous by aggra vating his littleness with a title, like the ass in the lion's skin? Did it ever occur to you, gentle reader, that aristocracy is essentially common, essentially vulgar? To a large vision the distinction between king and carpenter, between the man with a million dollars and the million men with one dollar looks trivial and un important. Only a squat and squinting soul in a cellar and blinking through the twilight could discover agi tating differences of rank between Fifth Avenue and Grand Street, between first floor front and attic rear, between flesh ripening to rot in silk and flesh ripen ing to rot in cotton. To an infinitesimal insect an infinite gulf yawns between the molecules of a razor's edge. I often found my club a convenience, for in those busiest days of my financial career I had much private conferring or conspiring, if you choose. Never had I found it so convenient as when for the first time there was pain and shrinking at the thought of going home, of seeing my wife and Margot. My Margot! When she was a baby how proudly I had wheeled her along the sidewalks of Passaic in the showy perambulator we bought for her and the twenty-five dollars it cost loomed mighty big even to Edna. And in Brooklyn, what happy Sundays Edna and I had had with her, when I would hire a buggy at the livery stable round the corner and we would go out for the day to some Long Island woods ; or when we would take her down to the respectable end of Coney Island to dig in the 149 THE HUSBAND'S STORY sand and to wade after the receding tide. My MargotJ No longer mine; never again to be mine. One evening I had an appointment at the Amster dam with a Western millionaire, Charles Murdock, whom I had interested in a Canada railway to tap a Hudson Bay spruce forest. He was having trouble with his wife and something of it had come out in the afternoon newspapers. At the last moment his secretary who, by the way, afterwards married the divorced Mrs. Mur dock telephoned that Murdock could not keep his en gagement to dine. I looked about for some one to help me eat the dinner I had ordered. There are never many disengaged men in the Amsterdam. The fashion able rich come only when they have business with the pariahs. The pariahs prefer their own houses or the barrooms and cafes of the big hotels. I therefore thought myself lucky when I found Bob Armitage sulking in a huge leather chair and got him to share my dinner. Armitage was one of my railway directors. He had helped me carry through the big stroke that made me, had joined in half a dozen of my enterprises in all of which I had been successful. There was no man of my acquaintance I knew and liked so well as Armitage. Yet it had so happened that we had never talked much with each other, except about business. It promised to be a silent dinner. IJe was as deep in his thoughts as I was in mine and our faces showed that neither of us was cogitating anything cheerful. On impulse I suddenly said: " Bob, do you know about fashionable New York society?" 150 THE HUSBAND'S STORY I knew that he did; that is to say, I had often heard he was one of the heavy swells, having all three titles to fashion wealth, birth, and marriage. But I now pretended ignorance of the fact; when you wish to inform yourself thoroughly on a subject you should always select an expert, tell him you know nothing and bid him enlighten you from the alphabet up. "Why do you ask?" said Armitage. "Do you want to get in? I had a notion you didn't care for society you and your wife." Armitage didn't go to Holy Cross, but to St. Bar tholomew's. So he had never known of my wife's activ ities, knew only the sort of man I was. " Oh, I forgot," he went on. " You've a daughter almost grown. I suppose you want her looked after. All right. I'll attend to it for you. Your wife won't mind my wife's calling? I'd have sent her long ago in fact, I apologize for not having done it. But I hate the fashionable crowd. They bore me. However, your wife may like them. Women usually do." It was at my lips to thank him and decline his offer. Then it flashed into my mind that perhaps my one hope of getting back my wife and daughter, of restoring them to sanity, lay in letting them have what they wanted. Another sort of man might have deluded himself with the notion that he could set his foot down, stamp out revolt, compel his family to do as he willed. But I happen not to be of that instinctively tyrannical and therefore inherently stupid temperament. Armitage ate in silence for a few moments, then said: 151 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " I'll have you elected to the Federal Club." " This club is all I need," said I. He smiled sardonically. I didn't understand that smile then, because I didn't know anything about caste in New York. " You let me look after you," said he. " You're a child in the social game." " I've no objection to remaining so," said I. " Quite right. There's nothing in it," said he. " But you must remember you're living in a world of rather cheap fools, and they are impressed by that nothing. On the other side of the Atlantic the social prizes have a large substantial value. Over here the value's small. Still it's something. You wouldn't re fuse even a trading stamp, would you ? " I laughed. " I refuse nothing," said I. " I take whatever's offered me. If I find I don't want it, why, what's easier than to throw it away? " " Then I'll put you in the Federal Club. You could have made me do it, if you had happened to want it. So, why shouldn't I do it anyhow, in appreciation of your forbearance? You don't realize, but I'm doing for you what about two thirds of the members of this club would lick my boots to get me to do for them." " I had no idea the taste for shoe polish was so gen eral here," said I. " It's a human taste, my dear Loring," replied he. " It's as common as the taste for bread. All the men have it. As for the women they like nothing so well. Having one's boots licked is the highest human joy. Next comes licking boots." 152 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Yon don't believe that? " said I, for his tone was almost too bitter for jest. " You aren't acquainted with your kind, old man," retorted he. " I don't know the kind you know," said I. And then I remembered my wife and my daughter. There must be truth in what Armitage had said; for, my beautiful wife and my sweet daughter, both looking so proud surely they could not be rare exceptions in their insensibility to what seemed to me elemental self-respect. " You don't know your kind," he went on, " because you don't indulge in cringing and don't encourage it. You're like the cold, pure-minded woman who goes through the world imagining it a chaste and austere place because her very face silences and awes sensuality. You are part of the small advance guard of a race that is to come." He grinned satirically. " Perhaps you'll drop out in the next few months. We'll see." When the silence was again broken, it was broken by me. " Do you know a school kept by a woman named Ryper ? " I inquired. " Sure I do," replied he. He gave me a shrewd laughing glance. " The daughter isn't learning any thing? " " Nothing but mischief," said I. " That's what Ryper's for. But what does it mat ter? Why should a woman learn anything? They're of no consequence. The less a man has to do with them the better off he will be." " They're of the highest consequence," said I bit- 153 THE HUSBAND'S STORY terly. " They have the control of the coming genera tion." " And a hell of a generation it's to be," cried he, suddenly rousing from the state of bored apathy in which he seemed to pass most of his time. " You've got me started on the subject that's a craze with me. I have only one strong feeling and that is my contempt for woman the American woman. I'm not speaking about the masses. They don't count. They never did. They never will. No one counts until he gets some edu cation and some property. I suppose the women of the masses do as well as could be expected. But how about the women of the classes with education and prop erty? Do you know why the world advances so slowly? why the upper classes are always tumbling back and everything has to be begun all over again ? " " I've a suspicion," said I. " Because the men are fools about the women." " The sex question ! " cried Armitage. " That's the only question worth agitating about. Until it's settled or begins to be settled and settled right, it's useless to attempt anything else. The men climb up. The women they take on their backs become a heavier and heavier burden and down they both drop and the children with them. Selfish, vain, extravagant moth ers, crazy about snobbishness, bringing up their chil dren in extravagance, ignorance and snobbishness that's America to-day ! " " The men are fools about the women, and they let the women make fools of themselves." " The men are fools but not about the women," 154 THE HUSBAND'S STORY said Armitage. " How much time and thought for your family have you averaged daily in the last ten years ? " " I've been busy," said I. " I've had to look out for the bread and butter, you know." " Exactly ! " exclaimed he, in triumph. " You think you're fond of your family. No doubt you are. But the bottom truth is you're indifferent to your fam ily. I can prove it in a sentence: You attend to any thing you care about; and you haven't attended to them." I stared at him like a man dazzled by a sudden light which, in fact, I was. " Guilty or not guilty ? " said he, laughing. " Guilty," said I. " The American man, too busy to be bothered, turns the American woman loose gives her absolute freedom. And what is she? A child in education, a child in experience, a child in taste. He turns her loose, bids her do as she likes and, up to the limit of his ability gives her all the money she wants. He pre fers her a child. Her childishness rests his tired brain. And he doesn't mind if she's a little mischievous that makes her more amusing." " You are married have children," said I, too serious to bother about tact. " How is it with you? " He laughed cynically. " Don't speak of my fam ily," said he. " I tried the other way. But I've given up several years ago. What can one do in a crazy crowd? " " Not much," confessed I, deeply depressed. 155 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " The women stampede each other," he went on. " Besides, no American woman none that I know has been brought up with education enough to enable her to make a life for herself, even when the man tries to help her. To like an occupation, to do anything at it, you've got to understand it. Being a husband and father is an occupation, the most important one in the world for a man. Being a wife and mother is an occupation the most important one in the world for a woman. Are American men and women brought up to those occupations trained in them prepared for them? The most they know is a smatter at the pastime of lover and mistress and they're none too adept at that." " I believe," said I, " that in my whole life I've never learned so much in so short a time." " It'll do you no good to have learned," rejoined Armitage. " It will only make you sad or bitter, ac cording to your mood. Or, perhaps some day you may reach my plane of indifference and be amused." " Nothing is hopeless," said I. " The American woman is hopeless," said he. " Her vanity is triple-plated, copper-riveted. She's hopeless so long as the American man will give her the money to buy flattery at home and abroad ; for, so long as you can buy flattery, you never find out the truth about yourself. And the American man will give her the money as long as he can, because it bm T s him peace and freedom. He doesn't want to be bothered with the American woman except when he's in a certain mood that doesn't last long." 156 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " There are exceptions," said I not clear as to what I meant. " Yes there are exceptions," said he. " There are American men who spend time with the American woman. And what does she do to them? Look at the poor asses ! neglecting their business, letting their minds go to seed. They don't make her wise. She makes them foolish as foolish as herself and her children." You may perhaps imagine into what a state this talk of Armitage's threw me. He was talking generali ties. But every word he spoke went straight home to me. He had torn the coverings from my inmost family life, had exposed its soul, naked and ugly, to my fas cinated gaze. He finished dinner, lighted a cigarette sat back watching me with a mysterious smile, half amused, wholly sympathetic, upon his handsome face, younger than his forty-five years for he was considerably older than I. I was hardly more than barely conscious of that look of his, or of his presence. Suddenly I struck my fist with violence upon the arm of my chair. And I said: " I will do something ! It is not hopeless ! " He shook his head slowly, at the same time exhal ing a cloud of smoke. " I tried, Godfrey," said he, " and I had a better chance of success than you could possibly have. For my wife had been brought up by a sensible father and mother in a sensible way, and she had been used to fashionable society all her life and, when I married her, seemed to have proved herself im- 11 157 THE HUSBAND'S STORY mime. A few years and ' His cynical smile may not have been genuine. " She leads the simpletons. But you'll see for yourself." " When you know what to do, and feel as you do," said I, " why did you suggest our going into your society? " " It isn't mine," laughed he. " It's my wife's. It doe % sn't belong to the men. It belongs to the women." " Into your wif e's society ? " persisted I. "Why did I suggest it? Because I wished to please you, and I know you like to please your wife. And she's an American woman therefore, society mad. She has her daughter at the Ryper joint, hasn't she? " I sat morosely silent. " Oh, come now ! Cheer up ! " cried he, with laugh ing 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 dec orator and housekeeper and staff supply the grand back ground. Father or husband supplies the cash. A dip into a novel or book of culture essays supplies the gib- ble-gabble. A nice easy profession, is lady and uni versally 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 automo- 158 THE HUSBAND'S STORY biles, 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 for get 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 gor geous 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. " Arid don't forget charity." " Ah charity ! " cried he gayly. " Thank you. I see we understand each other." He linked his arm af fectionately 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 patron- izer. She has ,no usefulness to contribute to the world., 159 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 / 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 cor ner 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 impress ive 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 160 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 im possible it was to undo the practically completed train ing 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 flat tering 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 catas trophe 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 pos sessing universal human weakness must be unfair. At the same time I believed he had excuse for being un- 161 THE HUSBAND'S STORY !^3g fair 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 ma chinery had suddenly forced upon the human race. The men living in the inundated region where floods were unknown, where appliances, even ideas for com bating them did not exist the men, hastily, hyster ically, incompetently, but with resolution and persist ence, 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 rela tions 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 in* capacity 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 pre- 162 THE HUSBAND'S STORY occupation with the new order, partly through indif ference 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 con ditions 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 or der 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 unprepared- ness, how could the poor women be condemned? I could not but admit to myself that in his account of the doings of the wcrmen 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 ex ample 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? 163 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 be fore 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 reconcilia tion 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 en gagement 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 164 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 Armi- tage. 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 165 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 friend ly 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 to gether," 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 heart aches 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." 166 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Well, it's all right now," said I, probably as in differently 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 ex amine 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 al ways 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." 167 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " 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 ideal ism in my nature," said Edna. " I wouldn't have as sordid an opinion of human nature as you have for any thing 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 neces sary money to keep us going, you are free to indulge your lovely delusions. Have your beautiful, unmer- cenary 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. 168 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 deli- ciously 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 for gotten in a moment, hastily covered deep with the gilt and the tinsel of hypocritical virtues. What an amus ing ass the human animal is ! How stupidly uncon scious 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 de spised and had scarcely troubled themselves to conceal their contempt. The cook sent up more attractive 169 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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 inso- jlently erect posture to all fours, and she attended to 1 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 debut in fashionable society topped them as the peak tops the foothills. Having seen her quiv ering 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 dis covered 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 look- 170 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ing. 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 ac quainted with them. But, as Edna knew at a glance, she and I were in the midst of the innermost and small est 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 ordi nary 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 171 THE HUSBAND'S STORY bring' to your narrow and shallow mind, you have ac quired 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, j being by training a hypocrite and a believer in hypoc risies, 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 intro duced 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 snobbish ness as well, as any of the others in that company whose whole lives were made up of calculation and snob bishness. She and they looked so refined and ele vated. 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. 172 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " 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 ex claimed, 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. Y"ou are of about the same figure, and the contrast of color ing 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 U3 173 THE HUSBAND'S STORY 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. 9 ' 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." We were at home, so she could escape from me. And I, for my part, was as glad to be quit of her so ciety as she could possibly have been to get rid of me. I was beginning to realize that her conversation bored me, that it had always bored me, that it was her sex and only her sex that interested me. And latterly even this had lost its charm. Why? I have observed and perhaps you have observed it, too that people of wealth and position, unless they have very striking individuality indeed, are usually ut terly devoid of charm. It is difficult to become interested in them, to establish any sort of sympathetic current. And you will notice that fashionable functions are dull, essentially dull; that the animation is artificial, is sup plied from without by an orchestra or entertainers, and fails to infect the company. It was long before I dis- f covered the explanation for this. I at first thought it was the stupidity that comes from a surfeit of the luxuries and pleasures. But I am now convinced that this familiar explanation is not the true one ; that the true one is the excessive, the really preposterous self- centeredness of people of rank and wealth. From wak ing until sleeping they are surrounded by hirelings and 174 THE HUSBAND'S STORY sycophants who think and talk only of them. Thus the rich man or woman gets into the habit of concen trating upon self. Now the essence of charm is giving! giving oneself out in sympathetic interest in one's fel-J lows. Plow can people, all whose faculties are trained! to work in upon themselves how can they have charm? An egotist, one who talks only of himself, may have charm because he gives you the impression that he is trying to please you, that he thinks you so important that he wishes you to be sensible of his importance. But the egotist who, whatever he talks, thinks only of himself he is not only dull and bored but also a dif- fuser of dullness and boredom. And that is how their servants and their sycophants make the rich and the fashionable so dreary. I imagine some such effect as this was being pro duced upon my wife by her surroundings of luxury. I think that may account for her long decreasing charm for me. At any rate, soon after she was well launched on her Elysian sea of fashion that is to say, soon after she ceased to have any check of social seeking to restrain her from centering all her thoughts and actions upon herself, she lost the last bit of her charm for me. She became radiantly beautiful. Her face took on a serene and refinedly assured expression that made her extravagantly admired on every hand. She became gracious to me and almost as sweet as she had been before we moved to New York. She even let me see that, if I so desired, she would condescend to be on terms of wifely affection with me again. But I did not so desire. I liked her. I admired her energy, her 175 THE HUSBAND'S STORY toilets, and, quite impersonally, her aristocratic beauty. But I was content to be a bachelor, and I was grateful when she began to relieve me of the tediousness of going about in her train. My substitute was an architect, Leon Macllvane by name a handsome young fellow of about my wife's age, though he thought her much younger, despite Margot's age and appearance. With his poetic dark eyes and classic features, and rich, deep voice, Macllvane had long been a favorite with the young married women of the Armitage set. He was indeed a valuable asset. The rich unmarried men were not especially interesting; also, they were needed by the marriageable girls. Mac llvane, not a marrying man and never making any mother uneasy by so much as an interested glance at a daughter intended for a rich husband, devoted himself to married women. " I do not care for girls," he said to me. " They are too colorless." " Why bother with women at all? " said I. " Aren't they all colorless? What do they know about life? What experience have they had? " " An intelligent woman's mind is the complement of an intelligent man's mind," said he, as if this trite old fallacy were a brilliant discovery of his own making. " Women stimulate me, give me ideas." " Oh, I see," said I practically. " Business. Yes, an architect does deal chiefly with the women." " I didn't mean that," said he, showing as much anger as he dared show the husband of the woman to whom he had attached himself. 176 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " Where's the harm in it ? " said I encourag ingly. " You've got to make a living haven't you? It's good sense for a business man to cultivate his customers." He, the poseur and the small man, hated this plain truthful way of dealing with his profession. Like all chaps of that kidney he thought only of himself and of appearances, and sought to degrade a noble profession to the base uses of his vanity. In fact, he had begun with my wife because of the orders he hoped to get for, he suspected that once she looked about her in the fashionable world from the new viewpoint of a fashion able person, she would want changes in her house to make it less vividly grand. He believed she would let Hilda Armitage educate her ; and Hilda, unlike most of her friends, liked the quiet kinds of ostentation and cost liness. And he guessed correctly. He was well paid for undertaking to replace me as escort so far as I could be replaced without causing scandal and, thank heaven, that was very far in the New York of busy and bored husbands, detesting the gaudy gaddings their wives loved. Soon he was serving my wife for other reasons than pay. I saw something of him from time to time, and I presently began to note a change in his manner toward me a formal politeness, an exaggeration of courtesy. I spoke to Armitage about it. Armitage and I had be come the most intimate of friends knocked about to gether in the evenings, were more closely associated than ever in business. " Bob," said I to Armitage, " what ails that ass, 177 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Macllvane? He treats me as if he were in love with my wife." Armitage laughed. "That's it," said he. "My wife's spaniel, Courtleigh, who writes poetry, treats me the same way. Get any anonymous letters yet ? " " Two," said I. " Servants," said he. " I suppose you burnt them? You didn't show them to your wife ? " "Heavens, no," replied I. "Why unsettle her? Why upset a pleasant arrangement? My wife finds Macllvane useful. I find him invaluable. He saves me hours of time. He spares me hours of boredom." " My feeling about Courtleigh," said Armitage. " And both those chaps are comfortably trustworthy." " I hadn't thought of Macllvane in that way," said I. " I know my wife and that's enough." Armitage reflected with an amused smile on his face. Finally, he said : " I don't suppose there ever were since the world began so thoroughly trustworthy women as these American women of the fashionable crowd those that have very rich husbands and only those, of course, are really fashionable. They may flirt a little, but never anything serious never anything that'd give their husbands an excuse for throwing them out and lose them their big houses and big incomes and social leadership." I had not thought of these aspects of the matter. I based my feeling of security solely on my knowledge of my wife's intense self-absorption. All the springs of sentiment except the shallow spring of highfaluting talk had dried up in her. She would listen to Mac- 178 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Ilvane's flatteries as long as he cared to pour them out. But if he ever tried to get her to think of him, she would feel outraged. " I suppose," pursued Armitage, " we'd be tremen dously amused if we could overhear those chaps talk- j ing to our wives about us. They don't dare pre sume to the extent of mentioning our names. But they hand out generalities of roasting how stupid most American men are, how superior the women are, what a tragic condescension for a wonderful Ameri can woman to have to live with a man who couldn't appreciate her." I nodded and laughed. " Nothing a woman loves so much an American woman with a little miseducation befogging her mind and fooling her as to its limited extent nothing she so dearly loves as to hear that she has a great intellect and a great soul, complex, mysterious, beyond the com prehension of the vulgar male clods about her. That's why they like foreigners. You ought to watch those foreign chaps flatter our women make perfect fools of them." But I had no desire to watch women in any circum stances. I had no active resentment against them as had Armitage. I simply wished to be let alone, to be free to pursue my ambitions and my ideas of self-devel opment. I had ceased to feel about Margot. I was merely glad she was not a boy; for I felt that if she were a boy, I should have to assert myself and do some drastic and disagreeable and almost certainly dis astrous disciplining in my family. 179 THE HUSBAND'S STORY About a year and a half after my wife achieved her ambition, I began to feel that she was spiritually bear ing down upon me in pursuance of some new secret plan. During the year and a half she had been playing the fashionable social game with the strenuous enthu siasm which only a woman I had almost said only an American woman seems able to inject into the pursuit of ob j ects that are of no consequences whatsoever. And, in spite of the useful Macllvane I had been compelled to assist her far more than was to my liking. I went about enough to get a thorough insight into fashion- ableness and a profound distaste for it. Of the many phases, ludicrous, repellent, despicable, pitiful, there was one that made a deep impression upon me. It amazed me to find that the " best " class of people was, if possible, more vulgarly snobbish than the class from which I had come even than the " Brooklyn bounders." I could not comprehend I cannot comprehend how those who have had the best opportunities are no more intelligent, no broader of mind than those who have had no opportunities at all. The ignorance, the narrowness of the men and women of the comfortable classes ! the laziness of their minds ! the shallow cant about lit erature, art and the like! Really, intelligence, activity of mind, seems confined to the few who are pushing upward ; and the masses of mankind in all classes seem contented each class with its own peculiar wallow of ignorance. But to Edna's secret plan. If you are a married man you will at once understand what I mean when I 180 THE HUSBAND'S STORY speak of having a vague sensation of being borne down upon. She said nothing ; she did nothing. But I knew she was making ready to ask something to which she believed she could get my consent only by the use of all her tact and skill and charm for she did not know her charms had ceased to charm, but thought them more potent than ever. I waited with patience and com posure ; and in due time she began cautious open ap proaches. " Margot is almost ready to come out," said she. " Money ? " said I, smiling. She rebuked this coarseness amiably. " Everybody isn't always thinking of money, dear," said she. " But why talk to me about anything else? That's my only department in the family." She deigned a smile for my pleasantry, then went on in her usual serious way : " I wish to consult you about her education." " Oh finish as you've begun," said I. " I suppose it's the best that can be done for a girl." " But I can't find what I want," said she, with an expression of sweet maternal solicitude. " I've always been determined Margot should have the best education any girl in the whole world could get." " Go ahead," said I. " See that she gets it." " She shall have the perfect equipment of a lady of a woman of the world," continued Edna, with growing enthusiasm. " She has the beauty to set it off and we can afford to give it to her. I am willing to make any sacrifices that may be nec essary." 181 THE HUSBAND'S STORY I pricked up my ears. I always do when anyone, male or female, uses that word sacrifice. I know a piece of selfishness is coming. " As I was saying," pursued Edna, with the serene look of the self-confident woman who is taking her husband in firm, strong hands, " I have been unable to find what I want for her. Mrs. Armitage tells me I'll not find it except in Paris." " Well why not go to Paris? " said I. Did you ever lift an empty box that you thought full and heavy? My wife looked as if she had just done that exceedingly uncomfortable thing. " But I don't see I I It would be a terrible sacrifice to have to go and live in Paris," stammered she. " Then don't do it," said I. " But I must think of Margot ! " exclaimed she hastily. " Oh, Margot seems to be stepping along all right. She'll never miss what she doesn't know about." " But you must realize, dear, what an education she'd get in Paris. And I suppose it would dp me good, too. It's a shame that I don't speak French. Everyone except me speaks it. They all had French governesses when they were children." " Some of them had and some hadn't," said I. " Armitage has told me things about your friends that make me suspect they're doing fully as much bluffing as we are." She winced, and sighed the sigh of the lady patient with a low husband. " Then you think I ought to go ? " said she. 182 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " I think you ought to do as you like," said I. " I always have thought so. I always shall." " And," continued she absently, " the society over there must be charming. Really, I need the education as much as Margot does. I do surprisingly well, con sidering what my early opportunities were." " I've never once heard you give yourself away," said I. " I'm not that stupid," replied she. " But a while in France on the Continent and in England per haps " " How long would you be gone ? " interrupted I, to show her that all this beating round Robin's barn was superfluous. She gave me a coquettish look : " How long could you spare me ? " " I can't tell till I've tried," said I, with a gallant smile but with no move toward her. You women who would be wise, distrust the gallantry that is con tent with speech and look. " You understand," pursued she, " if I started this thing I'd put it through no matter how much I missed you or how homesick I was over there." " You always do put things through," said I ad- ' miringly. "When have you planned to start?" " I haven't planned at all, as yet," replied she and I saw she thought I had set a trap for her, and was delighted with herself for having dodged it. Cer tainly never was there a husband with whom indirection was more unnecessary. Yet she would not realize this, partly because she had never bothered to discover what 183 THE HUSBAND'S STORY I manner of man I was, partly because she had one of those natures that move only by secrecy and indirection. "Do you expect me to go over with you?" in quired I. " I only wish you would ! " exclaimed she, but I distrusted her enthusiasm. " Couldn't Macllvane take you over and settle you? " Her face clouded. Her lip curled slightly. " I don't like him as I did," said she. " I've found out he's ridiculously vain and egotistical." I laughed outright. "What is it?" inquired she, elevating her eye brows. She had always disapproved my sense of humor. " So he's been making love to you eh? " said I. " No, indeed ! " cried she, bridling haughtily. " He'd not dare. But I saw he was beginning to pre sume in that direction, and I checked him." " Oh, he's harmless," said I. " Keep friendly with him. He'd be the very person to settle you in Paris. He lived there several years." " It would cause scandal," said she. " If you can't go, I can do well enough alone, I'm sure." " I'd only be in the way," said I. " Let me know when you wish to go, and I'll try to arrange it. But I can't get away for at least three months." "That would be too late," said she. " Margot must be started at once. She hasn't any too much time before her coming out. Also, Mrs. Armitage is sail ing in two weeks, and she would be a great help." " Then you have decided to sail in two weeks ? " 184 THE HUSBAND'S STORY said I, adding before she had time to get beyond a gathering frown of protest, " That suits me. I'll make my own plans accordingly." And in two weeks they sailed, I watching the big ship creep out of dock and drop slowly down the river. Armitage and I drove away from the pier together. We were in such high spirits that we had champagne with our lunch. VI ARMITAGE and I were together every day. He at tracted me for the usual reason of congeniality, and also because he was giving me a liberal education. I have never cared for books or, with two or three ex ceptions, for book men. About both there is for me an atmosphere of staleness, of tedium. I prefer to get what is in the few worth-while books through the medium of some clear and original mind such a mind as Armitage had. He ought to have been a great man. No, he was a great man ; what I mean to say is that his talents ought to have won his greatness recognition. He did not lack capacity or energy ; he showed a high degree of both in the management and increase of his fortune. He lacked that species of vanity, I guess it is, which spurs a man to make himself conspicuous. Also he had a kind of laziness, and chose to be active only in the way that was easiest and most agreeable for him the making of money. His father had been rich, and his grandfather ; his great-grandfather had been one of the richest men in Revolutionary times. His father was regarded as a crank because he had imagination, and therefore de spised the conventional ideas of his own generation.; to be regarded as thoroughly sane and sensible, you 186 THE HUSBAND'S STORY I must be careful to be neither, but to pattern yourself j painstakingly upon the particular form of feeble-mind- i edness and conventional silliness current in your time. Armitage's father resolved that his son should not have his individuality clipped and moulded and patterned by college and caste into the familiar type of upper- class man. So Armitage went to public school, grad uated from it into a factory, then into an office, him self earned the money to carry out the ambitions for study and travel with which his father had inspired him. I think there was nothing worth the knowing about which Armitage had not accurate essential information books, plays, pictures, music, literature, history, economics, science, medicine, law, finance. He was a good shot and a good horseman, could run an auto mobile, take it to pieces, put it together again. He was a practical mechanic and a practical railroad man. He had a successful model farm. " It doesn't take long to learn the essentials about anything," said he, " if you will only put your whole mind on it and not let up till you've got what you want. And the trouble / vwith most people why, they are narrow and ignorant III I land incompetent it isn't lack of mind, but lack of in- I J fterest. They have no curiosity." Nor was my friend J | J Armitage a smatterer. He didn't try to do everything ; he contented himself with knowledge, and did only one thing made money out of railroads. When he saw that I really wished to be educated, he amused himself by educating me. Not in a formal way, of course; but simply talking along, about what- 187 THE ever happened to come up. I have never known a man to get anywhere, who did not have an excellent memory. Lack of memory which means lack of the habit and power of giving attention is the cause of more fail ures than all other defects put together. If you don't believe it, test the failures you know ; perhaps you might even test your own not too successful self. I had an unusual memory ; and I don't think Armitage or anyone ever told me anything worth knowing that I did not stick to it and keep it where I could use it instantly. Several months after his wife and mine departed, we were walking in the park one afternoon the usual tramp round the upper reservoir to reduce or to keep in condition. He said in the most casual way: " My wife is coming next week, and will get her divorce at once." Taking my cue from his manner I showed even less surprise then I felt. " This is the first I've heard of it," said I. " Really? " said he carelessly. " Everyone knows." He laughed to himself. " She is to marry Lord Blan- kenship the Earl of Blankenship." "And the children?" said I. He shrugged his shoulders. " I don't know. Her people will look after them. She has spoiled them be yond repair. I have no interest in them nor they in me." After a little tramping in silence, he halted and rested his hands on the railing and looked away across the lakelike reservoir, its surface tossed up into white 188 THE HUSBAND'S STORY caps by the wind. u I loved her when we were mar ried," said he. " That caused all the mischief. I let ) her do as she pleased. She was a fine girl good f am- ] ily but poor. She pretended to be in sympathy with my ideas." His lip curled in good-humored contempt. ' " I believed in her enthusiasm. My father wonder fully sane old man warned me she was only after our money, but I wouldn't listen. Tried to quarrel with him. He wouldn't have it gave me my way. It's not strange I believed in her. She looked all that's high-minded and delicate and what they call aristo cratic. Well, it is aristocratic the reality of aristoc racy." " Perhaps she was sincere," said I, out of the depths of my own experience, " perhaps she honestly imagined she liked and wanted the sort of life you pictured. We are all hypocrites, but most of us are unconscious hypo crites." " No doubt she did deceive herself in part at least," he admitted. " For a year or so after our marriage she kept up the bluff. I didn't catch on didn't find her out until we began to differ about bringing up the children. Even then, I loved her so that I let her have her way until it was too late." " But," said I, " don't you owe it to them to " He interrupted with an impatient, " Didn't I try ? But it was hopeless. To succeed in this day, I'd have had to take the children away off into the woods, with the chances that even there the servants I'd be compelled to have would spoil them would keep them reminded of the rotten snobbishness they've been taught." He 13 189 THE HUSBAND'S STORY laughed at me with mocking irony. " You have a daughter," said he. "What about her?" " I was thinking of your boy," said I. He frowned and looked away. After a long pause " Hopeless hopeless," said he. " Believe me hopeless. The boy is like her. No, I'll have to begin all over again." I gave an inquiring look. " Marry again," explained he. " Another sort of ^oman, and keep her and her children away from this world of ours. I'd like to try the experiment. But " He laughed apologetically. " I'm afraid I love the city and its amusements too well. I'm not as determined nor as ardent as I once was. What does it matter, anyway? So long as we are comfortable and well amused, why should we bother? " After a silence, " Another mistake I made the initial mistake was in giving her a for tune. She is almost as well fixed as I am. Don't make that mistake, Godfrey." " I've already done it," said I. " And I shall never be sorry that I did. I gave my wife the first large sum I made, and I've added to it from time to time. I wanted her and Margot to be safe, no matter what happened to me." " A mistake," he said. " A sad mistake. I know how you felt. I felt the same way. But there's some thing worse than the more or less sentimental aversion to being loved and considered merely for the money they can get out of you and can't get without you." " Nothing worse," I declared. " Yes," he replied. " It's worse to give a foolish 190 THE HUSBAND'S STORY (woman the power to make a fool of herself, of her chil-; dren, and of you." " That is bad, I'll admit," said I. " But the other is worse at least to me." " You'd refuse to make a child behave itself, through: the selfish fear that it would hate you for doing so." I laughed. " You know my weakness, I see," said I. " There's the foolish American husband and father, j No wonder all the classes that ought to be leaders in development and civilization are leaders only in luxury and folly." " Oh, let them have a good time what they call a good time," said I. " As you said a moment ago, it doesn't matter." " If it only were a good time to be ignorant and snobbish and lazy, to drive instead of walking, to eat and drink instead of thinking, to be waited upon in stead of getting the education and the happiness that come from serving others. Don't laugh at me. After all, while you and I all our sort of men are greedy, selfish grabbers, making thousands work for us, still we do build up big enterprises, we do set things to moving, and we do teach men the discipline of regular work by forcing them to work for us at more or less useful things." No doubt you, gentle reader, have fallen asleep over this conversation. I understand perfectly that it is be yond you; for you have no conception of the deep un derlying principles of the relations of men and men or men and women. But there may be among my readers a few who will see interest and importance in this talk 191 THE HUSBAND'S STORY with Armitage. It is time the writers of stories con cerned themselves with the realities of life instead of with the showy and sensational things that obscure or hide the realities. What would you think of the physiolo gist who issued a treatise on physiology with no mention or account of the blood? Yet you read stories about what purports to be life with no mention or account of money this, when in any society money is the all-im portant factor. Put aside, if you can, the prejudices of your miseducation and aesthetics, of your false cul ture and your false refinement, open your mind, think, and you will see that I am right. When we were well down toward the end of the Park, Armitage said : " Pardon me a direct question. Have you and your wife separated? " " No," said I. " She has gone abroad to round out Margot's education and her own." " You know what that means ? " " In a general way," replied I. " I'm letting them amuse themselves. They don't need me, nor I them. Perhaps when they come back " I did not finish my sentence. He laughed. " That means you don't really care what happens when they come back." My smile was an admission of the correctness of his guess. We dropped our domestic affairs and took up the matters that were more interesting and more im portant to us. If you have good sight, unimpaired eyes, you go about assuming when you think of it at all that good sight is the rule in the world and impaired eyes the ex- 192 THE HUSBAND'S STORY ception. But let your sight begin to fail, let your eyes become darkened, and soon you discover that you are one of thousands that good sight is the exception, that almost everyone has something the matter with his eyes. | The reason human beings know so little about human nature, the reason the sentimental flapdoodle about hu man virtues, in the present not very far-advanced stage of human evolution, is so widely believed and doubt of it so indignantly denounced as cynicism, lies in the fact that the average human being is ignorant of the afflic tions of his own soul. This would be pleasant and harm less enough, and to destroy the delusion would be wick edly cruel, were it not that the only way to cure ail- < j , ments of whatever sort is to diagnose them. What hope 1 ] is there for the man devoured of a fever who fancies and insists that he is healthy? What hope is there for the man who eats pleasant-tasting slow poison under the I impression that it is food? What a quaint notion it is [ that the truth, the sole source of health and happiness, is bad for some people, chiefly for those sick unto death I through the falsehoods of ignorance and vanity ! We : humans are like the animal that claws and bites the sur- 3 geon who is trying to set its broken leg. But I am wandering a little. Discover that you have any ailment of body or of soul, and you soon discover jhow widespread that ailment is. You do not even appre- |ciate how widespread, incessant, and poignant are the \ ravages of death until your own family and friends be gin to die off. I had no notion of the extent of the so- jcial or domestic malady of abandoned husbands and fathers until I became one of that curious class. 193 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Among the masses there is the great and growing pestilence of abandoned wives husbands, worn out by the uncertainties of the laboring man's income, and dis gusted with the incompetence of their wives and with the exasperations of the badly brought up children such husbands flying by tens of thousands to escape what they cannot cure or endure. Among the classes, from the plutocracy down to and through the small merchants and professional men, I now discovered that there was a corresponding and reversed disease the abandoned husband. The husband and father, working hard and presently accumulating enough for ease in his particular station of life, suddenly finds himself supporting, with perhaps all the money he can scrape together, a distant and completely detached family. He mails his money regu larly, and with a fidelity that will appear grotesque, noble, or pitiful according to the point of view. In re turn he gets occasional letters from the loved ones per functory these letters somehow sound, or would sound to the critical, though they are liberally sprinkled with loving, even fawning phrases, such as " dear, sweet papa " and " darling husband." Where are " the loved ones ? " If the family home is in a small town or coun try, they are in New York or some other city of America usually. If the family home is in the city, they are abroad. What are they doing? Sacrificing themselves ! Especially poor wife and mother. She would infinitely prefer being at home with beloved husband. But she must not be selfish. She must carry her part of their common burden. While lie toils to provide for the chil- 194 THE HUSBAND'S STORY dren, she toils in the loneliness or unhappiness of New York or Paris or Rome or Dresden or Genoa. And what is she toiling at in those desert places ? Why, at educat ing the children ! Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's painting. Again it's " finishing," whatever that may mean, or plain, vague " education." There was a time when men of any sort could be instantly abashed, silenced and abased by the mere pronouncing of the word education. That happy day for mental fakers is nearing its close. Now, at the sound of the sacred word many a sensible, practical man has the courage to put on a grin. I have been credited with saying that a revival of the declining child-bearing among American women might be looked for, now that they have found the usefulness of children as an excuse for escape from home and husband. I admit having said this, but I meant it as a jest. However, there is truth in the jest. I don't especially blame the women. Why should they stay at home when they have no sympathy with the things that necessarily engross the husband? Why stay at home when it bores them even to see that the servants carry on the house de cently? Why stay at home when they simply show there from day to day how little they know about housekeeping? Why stay at home when there is an amiable fool willing to mail them his money, while they amuse themselves gadding about Europe or some big city of America? Abandoned wives at the one end of the social scale, abandoned husbands at the other end. Please note that in both cases the deep underlying cause is the same 195 THE HUSBAND'S STORY money. Too little money, and the husband flies; too much money, and it is the wife who breaks up the family. As soon as I discovered, by being elected to mem bership, the existence of the universal order of abandoned husbands I took the liveliest interest in it. I was eager to learn whether there was another fool quite so fool ish as myself, also whether the other fools were aware of their own folly. I found that most of them were rather proud of their membership, indulged in a ludicrous cock ing of the comb and waggling of the wattles when they spoke of " my family over on the other side for a few years," or of " my wife, poor woman, exiled in Paris to cultivate my daughter's voice," or of " my invalid wife she has to live in the south of France. It's a sad trial to us both." Then but this came much later I discovered that these credulous, money-mailing fools, including myself, were not quite so imbecile, as a class, as they seemed to be. I discovered that they were secretly, often uncon sciously, glad to be rid of their uncongenial families, and regarded any money they mailed as money well spent. They toiled cheerfully at distasteful tasks to get the wherewithal to keep their loved ones far, far away ! The absence of Edna and Margot was an enormous relief to me. Edna was constantly annoying me to ac companying her to places to which I did not care to go. I like the theatre and I rather like some operas, but when I go to either it is for the sake of the performance. Going with Edna and her friends meant a tedious social function. We arrived late; we did not hear the play or 196 THE HUSBAND'S STORY the opera. As for the purely social functions, they were intolerable. Perhaps I should not have been so unhappy had I been the kind of man who likes to talk for the sake of hearing his own voice. Women are attentive listeners when the man who is talking is worth flattering. But I talk only for purpose, and when I listen I wish it to be to some purpose also. So, Edna, always urging me to do something distasteful or giving me the sense that she was about to ask me, or was irritated against me for being " disobliging " Edna made me uncomfortable, in creasingly uncomfortable as I grew more intelligent, more critical, more discriminating. As for Margot, I could not talk with her ten minutes without seeing pro trude from her sweet loveliness some vulgarity of snob bishness. It irritated me to hear her speak to a servant. I had to rebuke her privately several times for the tone she used in addressing her governess or my secretary this when her mother and all her mother's friends used precisely the same repellant " gracious " tone in the same circumstances. I saw that she, sometimes instinctively, again deliberately tried to hide her real self from me, that I was making a hypocrite of her. Any sort of frankness or sympathy between her and me was im possible. A few weeks after their departure I closed the house. It came to me that I need endure its discomforts no longer, that I could get rid of those smelly, dull-witted, low-minded foreign animals, that I need not endure food sent up from a kitchen as to which I had from time to time disgusting proofs that it was not clean. I closed the house and left the mice and roaches and other insects 197 THE HUSBAND'S STORY to such short provender as would be provided by care taker and family. I took an apartment in a first-class hotel. When Armitage got clear of his wife he took the adjoining apartment. And how comfortable and how cheerful we were! The women with their incompetence and indifference have about destroyed the American home. To get good service, to have capable people assisting you, you must yourself be capable. The incapacity of the " ladies " has driven good servants out of the business of domestic service, has left in it only the worthless and unreliable creatures who now take care of the homes. If you find any part of the laboring class deteriorating, don't blame them. To do that is to get nowhere, is to be unjust and shallow to boot. Instead, look at the employers of that labor. Every time, you will find the fault is there, just as an ill-mannered or a bad child means unfaithful parents. The masses of mankind must have leadership, guidance, example. My experience has been that they respond when the dominating classes do their duty that is, pay proper wages, demand good service, and know what good service is. What a relief and a joy that hotel was ! Armitage and I had our own cook, and so could have the simple dishes we liked. We attended to the marketing and both knew what sort of meat and vegetables and fruit to buy, and were not long trifled with by our butcher, our grocer, and our dairyman, spoiled though they were by the ladies. And our apartments were clean really clean, and after the first few weeks our servants were 198 THE HUSBAND'S STORY contented, and abandoned the evil ways slip-shod mistresses had got them into. Pushing my inquiries, I found that not only our hotel, but every first-class hotel in the fashionable district was filled with the remnants of shattered homes husbands who had compelled their wives to give up the expensive and dirty attempts at housekeeping ; husbands who had abandoned their fami lies in country homes or in other cities and towns and had, surreptitiously or boldly, returned to bachelor bliss ; husbands who had been abandoned by their fami lies, none of these last cases being more heart-breaking than Armitage's or my own. The story ran that he was on the verge of melancholia because his beautiful wife had cast him off. There was no more truth in this than there would have been in a tale of my lonely grief. Had it not been for Armitage, pointing out to me the truth, I might have fancied myself a deserted unfor tunate. It would not have been an isolated instance of a human being not knowing when he is well off. I did not see my family again until the following spring. Business compelled me to go abroad, and they had come over to London for the season. When I descended from the train at Euston, a little confused by the strangeness, I saw my wife a few yards down the platform. Beside her stood a tall, beautiful young woman, whom I did not instantly recognize as my daughter. Both were dressed with the perfection of taste and of detail that has made the American woman famous throughout the world. I like well-dressed women and well-dressed men, too. I should certainly 199 THE HUSBAND'S STORY have been convicted of poor taste had I not been dazzled by those two charming examples of fashion and style. They looked like two lovely sisters, the elder not more than five or six years in advance of the younger. I was a youthful-looking man, myself except, perhaps, when I was in the midst of affairs and took on the air of re sponsibility that cannot appear in the face of youth. But no one would have believed there were so few years between Edna and me. Nor was she in the least made- up. The youth was genuinely there. That meeting must have impressed the by-standers, who were observing the two women with admiring inter est. I felt a glow of enthusiasm at sight of these elegant beauties. I was proud to be able to claim them. As for them, they became radiant the instant they saw me. " Godfrey ! " cried Edna loudly, rushing toward me. " Papa dear old papa ! " cried Margot, waving her arms in a pretty gesture of impatient adoration while her mother was detaining me from her embrace. "Well well!" cried I. "What a pair of girls! My, but you're tearing it off ! " They laughed gayly, and hugged and kissed me all over again. For a moment I felt that I had been missed and that I had missed them. A good-looking, short ish and shy young man, dressed and groomed in the attractive English upper-class way of exquisiteness with no sacrifice of manliness, was now brought forward. " Lord Crossley my husband," said Edna. " Pleased, I'm sure," murmured the young man, giv ing me his hand with an awkwardness that was somehow 200 THE HUSBAND'S STORY not awkward or, rather, that conveyed a subtle im pression of good breeding. " Now that you've got him or that he's got you," proceeded he, " I'll toddle along." My wife gave him her hand carelessly. " Until din ner," she said. Margot shook hands with him, and nodded and smiled. When he was gone I observed the carriage near which we were standing and I knew at once that it was my wife's carriage. It was a grand car of state, yet quiet and simple. I often looked at it afterwards, trying to puzzle out how it contrived to convey two exactly opposite impressions. I could never solve the mystery. On the lofty box sat the most perfect model of a coach man I had seen up to that time. Beside the open door in the shallow, loftily hung body of the carriage stood an equally perfect footman. I was soon to get used to that marvelous English ability at specializing men a system by which a man intended for a certain career is arrested in every other kind of growth, except only that which tends to make him more perfect for his purpose. Observing an English coachman, or valet or butler or what not, you say, " Here is a remarkably clever man." Yet you soon find out that he is practically imbecile in every other respect but his specialty. We entered the carriage, I sitting opposite the ladies and most uncomfortable I was ; for the carriage was designed to show off its occupants, and to look well in it they had to know precisely how to sit, which I did not. No one noticed me, however. There was too much pleasure to be got out of observing Edna and Margot, 201 THE HUSBAND'S STORY who were looking like duchesses out of a storybook. I knew they were delightfully conscious of the sensation they were making, yet they talked and laughed as if they were alone in their own sitting room a trick which is part of that " education " of which you have heard something, and will hear still more. The conversation seemed easy. In fact, it was only animated. It was a fair specimen of that whole mode of life. You have seen the wonderful peaches that come to New York from South Africa early in the winter have delighted in their exquisite perfection of color and form. But have you ever tasted them? I would as lief eat saw dust; I would rather eat it for, of sawdust I should expect nothing. " That young man is the Marquis of Crossley," said my wife. I liked to hear her pronounce a title in private. It gave you the sense of something that tasted fine made you envy her the sensation she was getting. " Who is he?" said I. Margot laughed naively an entrancing display of white teeth and rose-lined mouth. " Marquis of Cross- ley, papa," she said. " That's all and quite enough it is." " I don't know much about the big men in England," said I. " He looked rather young to amount to very much." " He's as old as you are," said Edna, a flash of ill- humor appearing and vanishing. I was astonished. " I thought him a boy," said I. " He's one of the greatest nobles in England one THE HUSBAND'S STORY of the greatest in Europe," said Edna and I saw Mar- got's eyes sparkling. " He seemed a nice fellow," said I amiably. " How you have grown, Margot ! " " Hasn't she, though ! " cried my wife. " Aren't you proud of her? " " I'm proud of you both," said I. " You make me feel old and dingy." " You've been working too hard, poor dear," said Edna tenderly. " If you only would stay over here and learn the art of leisure." " I'm afraid I'd be dismally bored," said I. I had heard much about the art of loafing as prac ticed by Europeans, and I had not been attracted by what I had heard. It was inconceivable to me that in telligent grown men could pass their time at things about equal to marbles and tops. But I suppose I am abnormal, as they allege. Many men seem to look on mental effort of any kind as toilsome, and seize the first opportunity to return to the mindless frolickings of the beasts of the field. To me mental effort is a keen pleas ure. And I must add I can't help thinking it is to everybody who has real brains. The conversation would have died in distressing agony had it not been for the indomitable pluck of my wife. She struggled desperately perhaps may even have deceived herself into thinking that she was glad to see me and that the carriage was the scene of a happy reunion. But I, who had a thorough training in quickly sizing up situations, saw the truth that I was a rank outsider, to both wife and daughter; that they were THE HUSBAND'S STORY strangers to me. I began to debate what was the short est time I could decently stop in London. " We are to be presented at Court next week," said Edna. Margot's eyes were again sparkling. It was the sort of look the novelists put on the sweet young girl's face when she sees her lover coming. " Yes next week next Thursday," said Edna. " And so another of the little duchess's dreams is com ing true." " Is it exciting ? " said I to Margot. Somehow ref erence to the " little duchess " irritated me. " Rather ! " exclaimed Margot, fairly glowing with ecstasy. " You put on the most wonderful dress, and you drive in a long, long line of wonderful carriages, with all the women in wonderful dresses. And you go into the palace through lines and lines of gorgeous liveries and uniforms and you wait in a huge grand room for an hour or so, frightened to death and then you walk into the next room and make the courtesy you have been practicing for weeks and you pass on." " Good ! " cried I. " What then ? " "Why you go home, half dead from the nervous shock. Oh, it's wonderful ! " It seemed to me for I was becoming somewhat critical, as is the habit in moods of irritation it seemed to me that Margot's elaborate and costly edu cation might have included the acquiring of a more extensive vocabulary. That word wonderful was be ginning to get on my nerves. Still, this was hyper- criticism. A lovely woman does not need a vocabulary, 204 THE HUSBAND'S STORY or anything else but a lovely dress and plenty of money to provide background. " Yes it must be wonder ful," said I. " We've been working at it for weeks, mamma and I," continued she. " I'm sure we shall do well. I can hardly wait. Just fancy! I'm to meet the king and the queen! " I saw that Edna was in the same ecstatic trance. I leaned back and tried to distract myself with the nov elty of London houses and crowds. It may be you un derstand the mingling of pity, contempt, anger, and amusement that filled my breast. If you do not under stand, explanation would merely weary you. I was no longer proud of my beautiful family ; I wished to get away from them, to forget them. Edna and Margot chatted on and on about the king and queen, about the various titled people they knew or hoped to know, about the thrills of aristocratic society. I tried not to listen. After a while I said, with I hope not unsucessful attempt at amiability: " I'm sorry I shan't be here to witness your tri umph." Across Edna's face swept a flash of vivid I had almost said vicious annoyance. " You're not going before the drawing-room at Buckingham Palace ! " cried she. " I'll have to," said I. " But you can't ! " protested Margot, tears of vexa tion in her eyes. " Everyone will think it's dreadfully queer." " Don't fret about that, my dear," replied I lightly. 14 205 THE HUSBAND'S STORY " I know how it is over here. So long as you've got the cash they'll never ask a question. We Americans mean money to them and that's all." " Oh, papa ! " cried Margot. " Don't put such ideas into the child's head, God frey," said my wife, restraining herself in a most lady like manner. " She knows," said I. " So do you. Money is every thing with aristocracies everywhere. They must live luxuriously without work. That can't be done without money lots of money. So aristocrats seriously think of nothing else, whatever they may talk." " You'll have a better opinion of them when you know them," said Edna, once more serene and sweetly friendly. " I don't think badly of them," I replied. " I ad mire their cleverness. But you mustn't ask me to re spect them. They hardly expect it. They don't respect themselves. If they did, they'd not be stealing, but working." Margot listened with lowered eyes. I saw that she was ashamed of and for me. Edna concealed her feel ings better. She forced an amiable smile. " I don't know much about these things," she said politely. " But, Godfrey, you mustn't desert us, at least not un til after the drawing-room. I've told our ambassador you're to be here, and he has gone to no end of trouble to arrange for you." "Howard?" said I. "That pup! I despise him. He's a rotten old snob. They tell me his toadyism turns the stomach of even the English. He's a disgrace to 206 THE HUSBAND'S STORY our country. But I suppose he's little if any worse than most of our ambassadors over here. They've all bought their jobs to gratify their own and their wives' taste for shoe polish." This speech so depressed the ladies that their last remnant of vivacity fled, not to return. You are sym pathizing with them, gentle reader, and they are wel come to your sympathy. We drove in silence the rest of the way to the hotel in Piccadilly, where they were installed in pompous luxury and had made equally lux urious provision for me. When I was alone with my valet I reasoned myself out of the grouchy mood into which the evidences of my family's fresh access of folly had thrown me. To quarrel with them, to be irritated against them, was about as unreasonable as attacking a black man for not being white. I had long since re alized, as the result of much experience and reflection, that character is no more to be changed than any other inborn quality. My wife had been born an aristocrat, and had brought into the world an aristocratic daugh ter. She was to be blamed neither for the one thing nor for the other. And it ill became my pretensions to superior intellect to gird at her and at Margot. The thing for me to do was to let them alone keep away. At dinner, which was served in our apartment, I took a different tone with them, and they met me more than half way. So cheered was my lovely daughter that after dinner she perched on the arm of my chair and ventured to bring up the dangerous subject. Said she: " You're not going to be mean to me and run away, are you, papa? " 207 THE HUSBAND'S STORY Looking at Edna, but addressing Margot, I replied : " Your mother will tell you that it's best. We three never can agree in our ideas of things. I'm an irrita tion. I spoil your pleasure." " No no, indeed ! " cried the girl. " I've been look ing forward to your coming. I've been telling every body how handsome and superior you are. And I want them to see for themselves." Most pleasant to hear from such rare prettiness, and most sincerely spoken. " So many of the American men in society over here are common," proceeded she, " and even those who aren't so very common somehow seem so. They are down on their knees before titles, and they act like servants. Even Mr. Howard He oughtn't to show his feelings so plainly. Of course we all feel impressed and honored by being taken up by real titled people of old families, but it's such bad form to show, and it inter feres with getting on. When I'm talking to Lord Cross- ley about that drawing-room, I act as if it were nothing." " I see you are being well educated," said I, laugh ing. " Oh, yes. Mamma and I have worked. We've not had an idle moment." " I believe you," said I. "You will stay, papa won't you?" I shook my head. But it was no longer the posi tive gesture. My besetting sin, my good nature, had possession of me. Remember, it was after dinner, and my beautiful daughter was caressing my cheek and was THE HUSBAND'S STORY pleading in a voice whose modulations had been cul tivated by the best masters in Paris. " But I don't want people to think I was deceiving them about my papa." " I'm willing to be exhibited to a select few in the next two or three days," I conceded. " They will tell the others." And with that they had to be content. In the faint hope of inducing me to change my mind, Edna the devoid of the sense of humor took me to a tailor's and had me shown pictures and models of the court costume I would wear. But I remained firm. A sense of humor would have warned her that a person of my sort would have an aversion to liveries of every kind, to any costume that stamps a man as one of a class. I am perhaps foolishly jealous of my own individuality. But I cannot help it. A king in his robes, a general in his uniform except in battle where it's as necessary and useful as night shirt or pajamas in bed any sort of livery seems pitiful and contemptible to me. I will wear the distinguishing dress of the human race and the male sex, but further than that classification I refuse to move. Also, what business had I, citizen of a democracy whose chief idea is the barbarism and silliness of aristocracy what business had I going to see a king and a queen? I should have felt that I was aiding them in the triumph of dragging democracy at their chariot wheels. No, I would not go to levees and drawing-rooms. You may say I showed myself an ab surd extremist. Well, perhaps so. But, as it seems to be necessary to go to one extreme or the other, I 209 THE HUSBAND'S STORY prefer the extreme of exaggerated and vainglorious self-respect. " The king and queen are no doubt nice people," said I to Margot. " But if I meet them, it must be on terms of equality and for some purpose less inane than exchanging a few set phrases." Edna and Margot seemed to feel that they had, on the whole, a presentable specimen of male relative to exhibit; for they made the most of the four days I gave them. Through Hilda Armitage, now Lady Blankenship, and much freshened up by the more con genial atmosphere, they had got in with the set that is the least easy of access to Americans though, of course, it is not actually difficult for any American with plenty of money and a willingness to spend and good guidance in how to spend. And I must admit I enjoyed myself in those four days. The women were, for the most part, rather slow, though I recall two who had real intelligence, and I don't think there was a single one quite so devoid of knowledge of important subjects as our boasted "bright" Amer ican women. The men were distinctly attractive. They had information, they had breadth the thing the upper-class men of America often lack. Also, they were entirely free from that ill-at-easeness about their own and their neighbor's position in society which makes the American upper classes tiresome and ridiculous. It amused me to observe the Americans in this en vironment. Both our women and our men seemed un easy, small, pinched. You could distinguish the Ameri- 210 THE HUSBAND'S STORY can man instantly by his pinched, tight expression of an upper servant out for a holiday. I could feel the same thing in our women, but I doubt not their looks and dress and vivacity concealed it from the English men. Anyhow, women are used to being nothing in themselves, to taking rank and form from their sur roundings. While with us it seems to be true that the women are wholly responsible for social position with all its nonsense, the deeper truth is that they owe every thing to the possessions of their fathers or husbands. Without that backing they would be nothing. Every thing must ultimately rest upon a substantiality. In themselves, unsupported, the women's swollen preten sions would vanish into thin air. Lord Crossley was to have dined with us my first evening in London, but was prevented by suddenly arising business in the country. Next day he came to lunch, and I at once saw that he was after Margot hammer and tongs. I discovered it not by the way he treated her, but by his attitude toward her mother and me. He seemed a thoroughly satisfactory young man in every way, and I especially liked his frankness and simplicity. Edna had devoted a large part of a long sight-seeing tour with me to an account of his grand eur in the British aristocracy. Having had experi ence at that time of the American brand of aristocracy only, I was ignorant of the European kinds that have the aristocratic instinct in the most acute form the ingrowing form. I know now that our own sort, un pleasant and unsightly though it is, cannot compare in malignance, in littleness and meanness of soul with THE HUSBAND'S STORY the European sort. Just as the noisy blowhard is a modest fellow and harmless, and on acquaintance lov able in comparison with the silent, brooding egotist, just so is the American aristocrat in comparison with the European. An American aristocrat has been known to forget himself and be human. I recall no instance of that sort in an European born and bred to the no tion that his flesh and blood are of a subtler material than the flesh and blood of most men. However, as I was saying, at the time of my first visit to Europe I knew nothing of these matters, and Lord Crossley seemed to me a simple, ingenuous young man, most attractively boyish for his years. " That chap wants to marry Margot," said I to Edna when we were alone later in the afternoon. " I think so," said she. " Several young men wish to marry her. But she is in no hurry. She's not nine teen yet, and she would like a duke." " To be sure," said I. " But she may not be able to love a duke." < "I never heard of a girl who wouldn't love a duke