They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject asit, forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant shock, out of temper with the general feeling.
"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive. That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom heard ofit there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I didn't know a single divorced person."
"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sortmustbe single."
At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the women not so much as the men.
"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host inquired.
"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little interval. "I don't just call one to mind."
"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."
"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of the fact."
The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said, over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you know some very nice people who have not been."
"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very good family, certainly."
"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.
A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really more of the thing than there used to be.
"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced," the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made difficult."
The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be persons of quality in the highest sense.
"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.
The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accusethemof a want of quality." She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she addressedit to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the life of the discussion.
"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it. I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."
The host believed it had influenced legislation.
"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
"Oh, against."
"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new relation themselves."
"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the hostess said.
The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.
In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a diversion in her favor bysaying that she had heard they had a very good law in Switzerland.
Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then they go home, and at the end of a certain time—weeks or months—the magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said, as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse their magnanimity, their condescension. Theythink that being there out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend" them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives, when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.
"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable evil?"
The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"
"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.
"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"
"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the hostess smiled gratefully atthe girl for drawing his fire. But it appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least able to contend with adverse opinions.
"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended, no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce couldn't exist without it."
The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan—he was of that date:
"'A paradox, a paradox;A most ingenious paradox!'"
"'A paradox, a paradox;A most ingenious paradox!'"
"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."
"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not mind him.
He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"
The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not knowing what might be coming.
"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is the mother of divorce?"
"Whichever you like."
"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else there's nothing in heredity."
"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we havesimply been suppressing the symptoms; and your Swiss method—"
"Oh, it isn'tmine," the man said who had stated it.
"—Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made difficult."
"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically, but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at all.
"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an inveterate enemy of divorce—"
An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.
"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostlyvulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I defy any one here to say that it is."
As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company remained silent. But this did not save them.
"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries, like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and preventing their escape through divorce."
Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on. "Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before marriage."
"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to suggest.
"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the engagement. I would have the betrothed—the mistress and the lover—come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them, and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should marry them, and let them take the consequences."
The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much frightened.He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that. It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."
"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."
"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbidthemall hope of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in), "wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all the marriages as we have them now?"
"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said, let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.
"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things—the nature of men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be very seriously considered as a cause."
"Yes?"
"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye, "difference of sex."
The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and conditional approval went up.
The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to their tobacco?" she said to the other women.
When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place without you."
"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live unhappily together?"
"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked, with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make sure of his identity, and then he said:
"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."
"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"
"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and touchesthe ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece. As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to answer one. Why do you think they do it?"
"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as he added, "Because the rest do."
"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange, very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on, the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day, had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've given her my seat."
"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"
"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I find I'd been missing."
"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look for when I come back in the fall."
The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim sunset over the westward trees.
"Yes," the elder assented. "I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before."
"The war seems to have stopped building because people can't afford it," the other suggested, "but it has only increased automobiling."
"Well, people can't afford that, either. Nine-tenthsof them are traveling the road to ruin, I'm told, and apparently they can't get over the ground too fast. Just look!" and the sages joined in the amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of motors innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while they choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances, and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.
"The mystery is," the elder continued, "why they should want to do it in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager? If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they must know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!"The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages, and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a policeman will pickmeup from under a second-hand motor. I wonder what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came to judgment."
"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and forgotten."
"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've known so little of either."
His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it's a vertiginous whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of their cars."
The younger sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'dbelieve them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving their lady-friends joy-rides."
"Few?" the elder retorted. "There are lots of them. I've counted twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful myself."
As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year."
The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: "Not at all. I've seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October."
"They didn't set their fruit, I suppose."
"Well—no."
"Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It's the soft weather that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till the first cold snap, and there won't be a single victoria or butterfly left."
"Yes," the elder assented, "we butterflies and victorias belong to the youth of the year and theworld. And the sad thing is that we won't have our palingenesis."
"Why not?" the younger sage demanded. "What is to prevent your coming back in two or three thousand years?"
"Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn't find room, for one reason. Haven't you noticed how full to bursting the place seems? Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city's shell hasn't been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough, swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I've an idea that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as thepeanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair. And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven't seen it, and I've decided it wasn't a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past."
"Four-horse dream," the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.
The elder did not seem quite pleased. "A joke?" he challenged.
"Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme."
"I didn't know you were a poet."
"I'm not, always. But didn't it occur to you that danger for danger your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing human creature?"
"It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But there was only one of it, and it wasn't going twenty miles an hour."
"That's true," the younger sage assented. "But there was always a fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were tamed, but, after all, they were onlytrainedanimals, like Hagenback's."
"And what is a chauffeur?"
"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously. "Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time. They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have another hero to win one."
"Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays, since I hada pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles."
The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter."
"Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting, once, but I don't any more; it would be no use."
"No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's "Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and sex ought to be killed."
"Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they oftendoget killed."
The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central blue to enforce them. After all—"
What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced upon the elder sage: "Now, see here, grandfather! This won't do at all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and here you are away down by the Falconer, and we've been looking everywhere for you. It's too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at all after this. Why, it's horrid of you, grandfather! You might have got killed crossing the drive."
The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severitywhich he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly yet fondly over her grandfather.
The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the path. The other finally gave an "Oh!" of recognition, and then said, for all explanation and excuse, "I didn't know what had become of you," and then they all laughed.
Miss Ramsey: "And they were really understood to be engaged?" Miss Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two lady's umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey's tea-table and looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey's absent face. Both are very young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional lapses into extreme girlhood.
Miss Garnett: "Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn't know, and I thought you ought to." She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and conviction-carrying voice. "If he has been coming here so much."
Miss Ramsey, with what seems temperamental abruptness: "Sit down. One can always think better sitting down." She catches a chair under her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks provisionally into her seat. "And I think it needs thought, don't you?"
Miss Garnett: "That is what I expected of you."
Miss Ramsey: "And have some more tea. There is nothing likefreshtea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for this." She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till the maid appears. "More tea, Nora." She is silent again while the maid reappears with the tea and disappears. "I don't know that he has been coming here soverymuch. But he has no right to be coming at all, if he is engaged. That is, in thatway."
Miss Garnett: "No. Not unless—he wishes he wasn't."
Miss Ramsey: "That would give himlessthan no right."
Miss Garnett: "That is true. I didn't think of it in that light."
Miss Ramsey: "I'm trying to decide what I ought to do if he does want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?"
Miss Garnett: "As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn't saywhomshe was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later, and she did not quite feel like asking, don't you know."
Miss Ramsey: "Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr. Ashley?"
Miss Garnett: "Simply by putting two and two together. They two were together the whole time last summer."
Miss Ramsey: "I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do."
Miss Garnett, admiringly: "I knew you would say that."
Miss Ramsey, dreamily: "The question is what the thing is."
Miss Garnett: "Yes!"
Miss Ramsey: "That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?" She offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her shoulder, without rising.
Miss Garnett: "Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?"
Miss Ramsey: "They go well with anything.But we mustn't allow our minds to be distracted. The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling on other girls—well, as if he wasn't—and he has been calling here a great deal. That is perfectly evident. He must be made to feel that girls are not to be trifled with—that they are not mere toys."
Miss Garnett: "How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to understand that Emily has a right—"
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I don't know that I care abouther—or notprimarily. Or do you say primarily?"
Miss Garnett: "I never know. I only use it in writing."
Miss Ramsey: "It's a clumsy word; I don't know that I shall. But what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn't matter whether the girl has thrown herself at him, or not—"
Miss Garnett: "She certainly did, from what Conny says."
Miss Ramsey: "He must be shown that other girls won't tolerate his behaving as if he werenotengaged. It is wrong."
Miss Garnett: "We must stand together."
Miss Ramsey: "Yes. Though I don't infer that he has been attentive to other girls generally."
Miss Garnett: "No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much, you want to prevent his trifling with others."
Miss Ramsey: "Something like that. But it ought to be more definite. He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one else."
Miss Garnett: "And cruel to the girl he is engaged to."
Miss Ramsey: "Yes." She speaks coldly, vaguely. "But that is the personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him purely in the abstract."
Miss Garnett: "Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he is so severe himself."
Miss Ramsey: "Severe?"
Miss Garnett: "Not tolerating anything that's the least out of the way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where you're wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I like that in him. It's so invigorating. It braces up all your good resolutions.It makes you ashamed; and shame is sanative."
Miss Garnett: "That's just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway." She takes another chocolate from the box. "Go on."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act. How do you suppose people do, generally?"
Miss Garnett: "Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them, after he's engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it doesn't matter whether they're in love with him themselves or not."
Miss Ramsey: "I'mnotin love with Mr. Ashley, please."
Miss Garnett: "No; I'm supposing an extreme case."
Miss Ramsey, after a moment of silent thought: "Did you ever hear of anybody doing it?"
Miss Garnett: "Not just in our set. But I know it's done continually."
Miss Ramsey: "It seems to me as if I had read something of the kind."
Miss Garnett: "Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows? They might carry off the effects of the chocolates." Miss Ramsey passesher the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table to look at.
Miss Ramsey: "And of course they couldn't get into the books if they hadn't really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point."
Miss Garnett: "Why, there was Peg Woffington—"
Miss Ramsey, with displeasure: "She was an actress of some sort, wasn't she?"
Miss Garnett, with meritorious candor: "Yes, she was. But she was a verygoodactress."
Miss Ramsey: "What didshedo?"
Miss Garnett: "Well, it's a long time since I read it; and it's rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her to give him back to her, and she does it. There's something about a portrait of Peg—I don't remember exactly; she puts her face through and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is beautiful. They become the greatest friends."
Miss Ramsey: "Rather silly, I should say."
Miss Garnett: "Yes, itisrather silly, but Isuppose the author thought she had to do something."
Miss Ramsey: "And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don't see any comparison with Mr. Ashley."
Miss Garnett: "No, there really isn't any. Emily has never asked you to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a little—loved him, in fact."
Miss Ramsey: "And Idon'tlike Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I respect him—and I admire his intellect; there's no question about his being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any other way; and now I can't even respect him."
Miss Garnett: "Nobody could. I'm sure Emily would be welcome to him as far asIwas concerned. But he has never been about with me so much as he has with you, and I don't wonder you feel indignant."
Miss Ramsey, coldly: "I don't feel indignant. I wish to be just."
Miss Garnett: "Yes, that is what I mean. And poor Emily is so uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers does, she is perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see why the poor girl's fiancé should be so taken with her. But I'm sure no one could say you had ever given Mr.Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure justice on your part. I think you are grand! I shall always be proud of knowing what you were going to do."
Miss Ramsey, after some moments of snubbing intention: "I don't know what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. Whatwasthat play? I never heard of it."
Miss Garnett: "I don't remember distinctly, but it was about a young man who falls in love with her, when he's engaged to another girl, and she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that he will go back to the other girl, don't you know."
Miss Ramsey: "That sounds rather more practical than the Peg Woffington plan. What does she do?"
Miss Garnett: "Nothing you'd like to do."
Miss Ramsey: "I'd like to do something in such a cause. What does she do?"
Miss Garnett: "Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don't know what all. The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away."
Miss Ramsey: "It's rather loathsome, isn't it?"
Miss Garnett: "Itisrather loathsome. But it was in a good cause, and I suppose it was what an actress would think of."
Miss Ramsey: "An actress?"
Miss Garnett: "I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I don't think a lady would like to cut up, much, in thebestcause."
Miss Ramsey: "Cut up?"
Miss Garnett: "She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?"
Miss Ramsey: "At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero isn't married. I don't like the notion of a married man."
Miss Garnett: "Oh, I'm quite sure he isn't married. He's merely engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington story. And there's no portrait, I'm confident, so that you wouldn't have to do that part."
Miss Ramsey, haughtily: "I don't propose to doanypart, if the affair can't be arranged without some such mountebank business!"
Miss Garnett: "You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance. I wouldn't be in his place!"
Miss Ramsey: "I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him when he comes. That will be simpler still." To Nora, at the door: "What is it, Nora?"
Nora: "Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey."
Miss Ramsey, with a severity not meant for Nora: "Ask him to sit down in the reception-room a moment."
Nora: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
Miss Garnett, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey's hands: "Oh, Isobel! But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!"
Miss Ramsey, with state: "Why are you going, Esther? Sit down."
Miss Garnett: "If I onlycouldstay! If I could hide under the sofa, or behind the screen! Isn't it wonderful—providential—his coming at the very instant? Oh, Isobel!" She clasps her friend convulsively, and after a moment's resistance Miss Ramsey yields to her emotion, and they hide theirfaces in each other's neck, and strangle their hysteric laughter. They try to regain their composure, and then abandon the effort with a shuddering delight in the perfection of the incident. "What shall you do? Shall you trust to inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand first, and then act? Or shall you tell him at once that you know all, and— Or no, of course you can't do that. He's not supposed to know that you know. Oh, I can imagine the freezing hauteur that you'll receive him with, and the icy indifference you'll let him understand that he isn't apersona gratawith! If I were only as tall as you! He isn't as tall himself, and you can tower over him. Don't sit down, or bend, or anything; just stand with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you know everything, and he'll simply go through the floor." They take some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman. She abruptly frees herself.
Miss Ramsey: "No. It can't be as tacit as all that. There must be something explicit. As you say, I mustdosomething to cure him of his fancy—his perfidy—and make him glad to go back to her."
Miss Garnett: "Yes! Do you think he deserves it?"
Miss Ramsey: "I've no wish to punish him."
Miss Garnett: "How noble you are! I don't wonder he adores you.Ishould. But you won't find it so easy. You must do something drastic. Itisdrastic, isn't it? or do I mean static? One of those things when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I must slip out— Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you'll do! But it will be perfect, whatever it is. You alwaysdiddo perfect things." They knit their fingers together in parting. "On second thoughts I won't kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength. Unman isn't the word, exactly, but you can't say ungirl, can you? It would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to duty. Good-by, dear!" She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings and the maid appears.
Miss Ramsey, starting: "Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!"
Nora: "Yes, Miss Ramsey."
Miss Ramsey: "Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?"
Nora: "Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn't like the smell here."
Miss Ramsey: "Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?"
Nora: "He's got the whole bottle full of them yet."
Miss Ramsey: "Full yet?"
Nora: "You wouldn't let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to lunch, last week, because you said—"
Miss Ramsey: "What did I say?"
Nora: "They were vulgar."
Miss Ramsey: "And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask Mr. Ashley to come." She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a little, as Walter Ashley enters. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you wait."
Mr. Ashley: "The timehasseemed long, but I could have waited all day. I couldn't have gonewithout seeing you, and telling you—" He pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey's resolute practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and waves before her face with innocent recklessness.
Miss Ramsey, chokingly: "Do sit down." She drops into an easy-chair beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. "Have a cigarette." She reaches the box to him.
Ashley: "Thank you. I won't smoke, I believe." He stands frowning, while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.
Miss Ramsey: "I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail."
Ashley: "A what?"
Miss Ramsey: "A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea, instead of rum, you know."
Ashley: "No, I didn't know." He regards her with amaze, rapidly hardening into condemnation.
Miss Ramsey: "I hope you don'tobjectto smoking. Englishwomen all smoke."
Ashley: "I think I've heard. I didn't know that American ladies did."
Miss Ramsey: "They don't,all. But they will when they find how nice it is."
Ashley: "And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?"
Miss Ramsey: "They will when they find how nice it is. But why do you keep standing? Sit down, if it's only for a moment. There is something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying when you came in? I didn't catch it quite."
Ashley: "Nothing—now—"
Miss Ramsey: "And I can't persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe I'll have another myself." She takes up the bottle, and tries several times to pour from it. "I do believe Nora's forgotten to open it! That is a good joke on me. But I mustn't let her know. Do you happen to have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?"
Ashley: "No—"
Miss Ramsey: "Well, never mind." She tosses her cigarette into the grate, and lights another. "I wonder why they always have cynical persons smoke, on the stage? I don't see that the two things necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen." She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings it away and starts to her feet. "Will you—wouldyou—open the window?" She collapses into her chair.
Ashley, springing toward her: "Miss Ramsey, are you—you are ill!"
Miss Ramsey: "No, no! The window! A little faint—it's so close— There, it's all right now. Or it will be—when—I've had—another cigarette." She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without smoking, throws it away. "Go on."
Ashley: "I wasn't saying anything!"
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, I forgot. And I don't know what we were talking about myself." She falls limply back into her chair and closes her eyes.
Ashley: "Sha'n't I ring for the maid? I'm afraid—"
Miss Ramsey, imperiously: "Not at all. Not on any account." Far less imperiously: "You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make me well. The full strength, please." She motions away the hot-water jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he offers her.
Ashley: "One lump or two?"
Miss Ramsey: "Only one, thank you." She takes the cup.
Ashley, offering the milk: "Cream?"
Miss Ramsey: "A drop." He stands anxiously beside her while she takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. "That was perfect."
Ashley: "Another?"
Miss Ramsey: "No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have been something poisonous in those cigarettes."
Ashley: "Yes, there was tobacco."
Miss Ramsey: "Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with tobacco in them after this. Won't you have one of the chocolates? Or a mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where was I?" She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.
Ashley: "You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I want you to let me keep them."
Miss Ramsey, with wide-flung eyes: "You? You said you wouldn't smoke."
Ashley, laughing: "May I change my mind? One talks better." He lights a cigarette. "And, Miss Ramsey, I believe Iwillhave a cocktail, after all."
Miss Ramsey: "Mr. Ashley!"
Ashley, without noting her protest: "I had forgotten that I had a corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don't trouble yourself to ring for one." He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: "Oh! I thought you liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes—very reviving. But if you won't—" He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the glass, smacking his lips. "Tell your brother I commend his taste—in cocktails and"—puffing his cigarette—"tobacco. Poison for poison, let me offer you one ofmycigarettes. They're milder than these." He puts his hand to his breast pocket.
Miss Ramsey, with nervous shrinking: "No—"
Ashley: "It's just as well. I find that I hadn't brought mine with me." After a moment: "You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I should like your notion of the problem in a book I've just been reading. Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman prevent hisbeing in love with another, or half a dozen others; orvice versa?"
Miss Ramsey: "Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?"
Ashley: "Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another choice?"
Miss Ramsey, indignantly: "Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or that I don't consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the most barefaced hypocrite, and—and—I don't know what—you are very much mistaken."
Ashley: "What in the world are you talking about?"
Miss Ramsey: "I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy."
Ashley: "My shameless perf— I don't understand! I came here to tell you that I love you—"
Miss Ramsey: "How dare you! To speak to me of that, when— Or perhaps youhavebroken with her, and think you are free to hoodwink some other poor creature. But you will find that youhave chosen the wrong person. And it's no excuse for you her being a little—a little—not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it's enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn't suppose you can come here red-handed—yes, it's the same as a murder, and any true girl would say so—and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I haven't fallen so low as that, though Ihavethe disgrace of your acquaintance. And I hope—I hope—if you don't like my smoking, and offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a lesson to you. And yes!—Iwillsay it! If it will add to your misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought everything—very highly—of you, and might have answered you very differently before, when you were free to tell methat—now I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence—and—disapproval of you. And—and— Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.
Miss Garnett, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not, and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere, and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have gone out and left it. I—" She starts with a little shriek, in encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and—" She discovers, or affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What—what is the matter, Mr. Ashley?"
Ashley: "I shall be glad to have you tell me—or any one."
Miss Garnett: "I don't understand. Has Isobel—"
Ashley: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"
Miss Garnett: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat—"
Ashley: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."
Miss Garnett: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"
Ashley: "Not the least in the world."
Miss Garnett, in despair: "Thenwhathave I done? Oh, what a fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told meherselfthat she was engaged! And you were together so much, last summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she engaged to?"
Ashley: "On general principles, I shouldn't know, but in this particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer."
Miss Garnett, with conviction: "So they were!" With returning doubt: "But why didn't she say so?"
Ashley: "I can't tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the factof her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems to have done with Miss Ramsey?"
Miss Garnett, with a burst of involuntary candor: "Why,Idid that. Or, no! What's she been doing?"
Ashley: "Really, Miss Garnett—"
Miss Garnett: "How can I tell you anything, if you don't tell me everything? You wouldn't wish me to betray confidence?"
Ashley: "No, certainly not. What was the confidence?"
Miss Garnett: "Well— But I shall have to know first what she's been doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley." He is silent. "Has she—has Isobel—been behaving—well, out of character?"
Ashley: "Very much indeed."
Miss Garnett: "I expected she would." She fetches a thoughtful sigh, and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair and leans forward. "Oh dear! It is a scrape." Suddenly and imperatively: "Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help whatever."
Ashley: "Why, she offered me a cocktail—"
Miss Garnett: "Oh, how good! I didn't suppose she would dare! Well?"
Ashley: "And she smoked cigarettes—"
Miss Garnett: "How perfectly divine! And what else?"
Ashley, coldly: "May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey's behaving out of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and—"
Miss Garnett: "She would have let itkillher! Never tell me that girls have no moral courage!"
Ashley: "But what—what was the meaning of it all?"
Miss Garnett, thoughtfully: "I suppose if I got her in for it, I ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence."
Ashley: "It depends upon the confidence. What is it?"
Miss Garnett: "Why— But you're sure it's my duty?"
Ashley: "If you care what I think of her—"
Miss Garnett: "Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn't think it strange of Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn't! Why, don't you see? She was just doing it to disgust you!"
Ashley: "Disgust me?"
Miss Garnett: "Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray."
Ashley: "Drive me ba—"
Miss Garnett: "If she thought you were engaged to Emily, when you were coming here allthe time, and she wasn't quite sure that she hated to have you, don't you see it would be her duty to sacrifice herself, and— Oh, I suppose she's heard everything up there, and—" She catches herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to await the retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs after the crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett's escape. He stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey as she enters the room.
Miss Ramsey, with the effect of cold surprise: "Mr. Ashley? I thought I heard— Wasn't Miss Garnett—"
Ashley: "She was. Did you think it was the street door closing onme?"