The
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

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 extenuating 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; my 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 inlets and islets of Australasia and the South Seas for several years.

To aggravate my situation, in the letter accompanying the manuscript, after several pages of the discriminating 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 editing of his curious production beyond such as a proofreader might have found necessary. As it is, I have done practically no editing at all. In form and in substance, 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

I am tempted to begin with our arrival in Fifth Avenue, New York City, in the pomp and circumstance befitting 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, because 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. Patience, gentle reader. While I shall begin humbly in the social scale, I shall not linger there long. I shall pass 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 magnificent as the architects and decorators and other purveyors 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 caramels 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 appointed 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, bartenders, 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 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 genealogical 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 illegitimacy, substitution, and other forms of genealogical flim-flam. But let that pass. Whoever is or is not aristocratic, 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 capitalist” 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 Passaic—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 remember. What an aid to conscience is such a quality! But I have not forgotten old Weeping Willy Wheatlands, 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 village. 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 cottages, 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 realities 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 subject. 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 unimportant; 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 give her an inventory of the furniture of those two cottages, and of the meager and patched draperies of the two Monday wash lines, as my mother and Edna’s mother—and Edna, too, when she grew big enough—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, because my mother was a woman of some neatness and energy 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 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 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 jeering 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 cared, because when we played kissing games she would never call me out, would call out every other boy, but 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 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 become 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 sewing. 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 something about music; we should all know something about everything, 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 fashion, 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, misinformation. 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 valuable to a citizen of this world as the Lap girl’s “education” 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 mediæval 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 perfect adaptation of the thing to be used to the purpose for which it is to be used. I am a business man, not a smug, shallow-pated failure teaching in an antiquated 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, elevated 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!

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 pomatumed 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 fluttering. They were all out, waiting. Down the street he 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, occasionally 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 joke is that Edna nearly married him. In this land where the social stairs are crowded like Jacob’s Ladder with throngs ascending and descending, 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 subject, because to understand any given thing we must have knowledge that enables us to connect it with the things we already know. A snowball would be an unfathomable mystery to a savage living in an equatorial plain. 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 knowledge of any subject and a woman’s or a man’s ignorance of that subject with however slender threads of connecting 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 possession 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 matching 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 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 fourteen 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, doddering 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 reading 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 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 neighborhood rather than with me—her pretense of having cast off Charley because she preferred me. We can do wonders in the way of concealing wounded 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 seventeen, 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 prettier 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 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 neighborhood.

“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.

And as I looked at her I for the first time felt a certain 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 material incident—disgusts your delicate soul. I am aware that you have a proper contempt for all the coarse details 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 bond at least halfway 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 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 commonplace personal characteristic—the notion that she had premonitions, was a sort of seeress or prophetess. Later she dropped it for one less tiresome and overworked. But I recall that even in that time of my deepest 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 anything 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 attempt 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 scorn in her cute face. “Oh, he!” 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 decided, 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 decide 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 surroundings, 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 admired, and I still admire, this significant move of hers. It was the gesture of progress, of ambition. It was splendidly American. I myself 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 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 character. 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 pernicious 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 something. 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 attractive 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. 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 working 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 beginning 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 reincarnations 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 friendly darkness of a row of sidewalk elms.

When we had indulged in an interlude of love-making, 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 ourselves 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 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, I’m 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 exalted as you fancy.

The upshot of our inspecting places to live and haggling 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 excitement 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 grindstone 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.”

“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 managers 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 marrying 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 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 business. 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 marriage. 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 picturing it. What vistas of rooms!—what high ceilings—what woodwork—and plumbing!—and what magnificent furniture! Edna’s father, in a moment of generosity, 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 everything 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, excited 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 audacious 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 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 understand 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 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 happiness. 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 letting everybody rob her, for getting so little for her money. She took high ground. Such things were beneath her attention. If I had wanted a wife of that dull, pinch-penny kind I’d certainly not have married 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 way of cooking. Mother was the old-fashioned fryer, and you know those fryers always served the vegetables 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 eating, to get breakfast or dinner or supper in a restaurant—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 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 mysterious 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 doctor’s and drug bills, were piling up. We were more than a thousand dollars in debt. But I said: “Very 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 general 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 apparently 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 despised 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 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 hundred, 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 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 superintendent. 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 teachers, 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 themselves 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, 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 suddenly 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 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 concede—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 radiance and fascination. As for little Margot, she transformed 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 shallowness 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 regards sickeningly rich cake as the finest food in the world—you, gentle reader, have already made up your mind why Edna thus suddenly awakened, or, rather, reawakened. “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 American 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 gratuitously 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 convenient 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 railroad, 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 myself to know that I knew. For example, I was perfectly 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 amusing. I had not then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to their husbands about big things and little, and that those women who profess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirections, such as omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising. Self-respect, real personal pride, I have discovered in spite of the reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern development, is still in embryo; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are either the most ignorant of ourselves or the most hypocritical.

But back to my acquaintance with my wife’s character. When I told her we should have to live nearer my 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 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 stranger, 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 associated 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 incidental 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-squandering 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 kicking 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 acuteness enough, which you probably haven’t—probe to the bottom any of the present-day activities of the American 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 propaganda, 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 reluctantly, 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.

“Home is a place for happiness, with all the sordidness shut out,” explained she. “Those sordid things ought not to touch our life together.”

This sounded all right. “It seemed to me,” stammered 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 business.” 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 education. “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 husbands 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 approve. 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 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—uneducate her and then reëducate 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 aristocrats abroad, said aristocrats being supported in helpless idleness throughout their useless lives, often by hard-earned American dollars—when I hear this pitiful balderdash from fair lips, I grow sad. The American woman fancies she is growing away from the American 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.

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 finishing 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 advance 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 my mind in thinking and in discussing a thousand subjects not directly related to my business.

If my wife had been interested in any of the important 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 foolish 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 necessary 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, casting a critical glance round the sober, homelike dining room. “I shan’t make any changes till I look about me.”

“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 I’m 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 joined 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 indeed—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 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 deterioration both in disposition and in character. A man’s disposition grows sharper through dealing with, and having 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 getting 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 defeated 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 vixenish 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 detestable 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 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.”

“I 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 housekeeping 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 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 tradespeople 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 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 masculine 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 themselves 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 marketing. 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 hardness 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 impressed 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 shortcomings. I ought to have realized it then. But what man 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 persistence 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! Presently 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 touching cracked and broken-nailed hand to hat respectfully.)

“That lamb you sent yesterday was very tough.”

“Sorry, ma’am. But those kind of things will happen, you know.” (Most flatteringly humble of manner.)

“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?”

“I, ma’am? I’ve been dealing with ladies for twenty years, right here, ma’am. I never have overcharged.”

“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 rejoined 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 understand 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 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 anything. The women waste most of it on the table, paying 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 swindlers 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 possibly lead anywhere. You may say I ought to have interfered, forced my wife to come to her senses, compelled 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 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 sudden 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 morally and æsthetically, socially, and in every other civilized way, my dear Godfrey, it is part of the backwoods. I can hardly wait to get away.”

“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 I 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 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. I 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 ourselves uncomfortable all over again?” I took a serious 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 ’way 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 sympathetic, 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 admired my ability to make money, though she thought it rather a low form of intellectual excellence. However, 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 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 pairing? And it matters not what line of activity the man is taking—business, politics, literature, art, philanthropy 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 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 simply put the question. But I suspect the answer would put a pin in the bubble of the American woman’s pretense 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 projected 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,” conceded 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 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 dislike those who don’t; and I am not quarreling with human nature—or with any other of the unchangeable conditions 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 myself 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 generous 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, instead 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 it best for Margot to keep on living at the school. She’s barely started there. I want her training to be thorough. 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 ignorant, 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 now she likes Margot. The dear child has been elected to the most exclusive fraternity. Every girl in it has to wear hand-made underclothes and has to have had at least a father, a grandfather, and a great grandfather.” Edna laughed with pride at her own cleverness 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 forgotten to arrange that. I think of everything.”

“Oh, that was easy enough,” said I. “Your grandfather was a tailor and mine was in the grocery business like father.”

Edna looked round in terror. “Sh!” she exclaimed. “Servants always listen.” She went to the door—we were in the small upstairs sitting room—opened it suddenly, 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 you 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 mine 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 genealogy I’ve gotten up,” she went on. “You know all genealogies are more or less faked, and I’ve no doubt hers 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 fraternity.”

“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 of 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 stole into it. I watched her lovely face—the sweet, dreamy expression. “What are you thinking?” said I softly, hopeful of romance—what I 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 romance. “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.”

“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,” 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 Ryper’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 that she never did; she hadn’t the faintest notion what I was about. They say there are thousands of American 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 approving 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 looking at herself again. “Would you ever think I had a 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 only a slight exaggeration.

When we sat again, she was snuggled into my lap with her head against my shoulder. She was immensely 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 which I have any influence in this family.”

“Come to think of it,” said she, “it is 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,” 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 conscience 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 nerving herself 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?” she 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.”