ROSE HUBBELL was spending the hottest of the hot weeks at Christmas Lake. Christmas Lake was a summer resort—a hotel and its satellites, plunged in a forest of pines and then made extremely accessible to motorists by assiduous care of the roads. It was beautiful and gay—entirely protected from any rough contacts with weather, and an excellent golf course and tennis courts gave those who wanted exercise opportunity, while no stigma fell upon those who preferred to dress for tennis or golf without running any risk of soiling their clothes. A great many unattached, wealthy people moved lazily about the lawns, eating, drinking, watching, talking and finding the place entirely to their liking. So did Rose Hubbell. Just enough of her story was known to make her interesting and her prettiness and clever clothes added to the interest in her. She was skillful enough to be docile before the elder women and wise enough not to attempt to compete with the very young ones. And by choosing her rôle carefully she drew around her both young and old, the old pitying her and the younger ones admiring romance, as she incarnated it for them.
She kept up, as always, her desultory correspondence with Langley. Her letters to him were idle, half-caressing, half-mocking, and with an occasional plaintive note. In late July she became rather unusually plaintive. Why didn’t Jim come and rest a week at the Lake? She was bored and alone. He must be tired. She had a motor at her disposal and he knew what lovely drives there were around Christmas Lake. She wrote on, saying that if he wanted to come and bring Horatia or if Horatia wanted to come alone, she would play duenna gladly. And urged Horatia’s coming further.
Jim usually pigeonholed Rose’s letters until she had written three or four demanding an answer. Then he wrote very briefly. But he re-read this letter and laid it down beside him, and several times in the day he referred to it and sat thinking. Late in the afternoon he began an answer.
“Dear Rose—It would be very pleasant to bring Horatia to Christmas Lake and you have a way of making the place sound very cool and alluring. She undoubtedly needs a rest and there are some shadows under those pines that induce rest.” He stopped and from his smile he must have been visioning Horatia in those blue shadows—with him, away from all her relatives and friends and the subtle hostilities to her lover—— He did no more work, but early in the evening went up the steps of the Williams house looking young and jubilant.
There were guests and it was half an hour before he could get Horatia by herself. They wentout through Maud’s tiny formal garden to a deep hammock and sat there. A million stars swung above them.
“I have a plan,” said Jim. “Will you let me kidnap you for a couple of weeks? Bob can run the office for a little while and we could vacation together.”
“You have only to throw me on your horse,” said Horatia. “I’ll be the most willing lady you ever kidnapped. But where shall we go?”
“Just to a very large, conventional resort—do you see? But one that all the money and nonsense and stupidity in the world hasn’t spoiled—where there are lovely places to tell you how much I love you. To Christmas Lake.”
“I’ve never been there. Everyone says that it’s heavenly. But, Jim, isn’t that where Rose Hubbell is?”
“That’s one of the advantages,” said Jim, eagerly, and yet there was a little damper on his eagerness even as he spoke. “She would be a sort of chaperon—only we wouldn’t have to bother about her too much.”
“I see—did she suggest it?”
Jim began to fumble a little.
“She sort of—gave me the idea.”
Horatia was silent for a minute. She felt on dangerous ground and full of a kind of protective pity for this lover of hers who seemed so oddly unable to see the ridiculousness of what he proposed.
“Jim, do you remember telling me once that Rose Hubbell was dangerous?”
“I remember that I did, but I don’t feel quite that way about it now. Rose likes you very much, you see—and she knows how I feel.”
This time there was real hurt in Horatia’s tone.
“You told her—that?”
He tried to recoup. “Only as much as your sister knows and your aunt.”
Horatia remained cruelly silent. When she spoke again her words reverted to the subject in hand, but her tone was far more distant than they justified.
“I don’t think Christmas Lake is quite practicable.”
Jim showed his hurt as his plans crashed to the ground.
“Just as you say, dear. I only suggested it because I was silly enough to think we might play around together there a lot and have a real rest.”
“But surely you don’t expect me to go under Rose Hubbell’s chaperonage, Jim. Why, think, Jim—dozens of people know her whole history and—— Think how impossible it would be for me.”
“I didn’t count on seeing much of her, you see,” said poor Jim, trying to defend not Rose Hubbell, but his own care and protection of Horatia. “And she would have been just a nominal chaperon. But I see that I was a fool. Just consider the suggestion cancelled, will you, darling? Put it out of your head absolutely.”
He drew her close to him and may have been simple enough to fancy his request had been granted. But thoughts were spinning madly around in Horatia’s head. This outrageously silly plan of Jim’s seemed to clinch the whole matter of Rose Hubbell. If Rose could make him believe that such an arrangement was all right—that it was all right to take the girl he was going to marry away under the chaperonage of a woman about whom he had been the co-respondent in a divorce suit, she could make him believe black was white. She felt older than Jim for once—responsible for him. With an instinctive feminine reaction she refused to blame the man. It was a matter between her and Mrs. Hubbell.
“Jim,” she said softly, “don’t you think the time has come for you to give up Rose Hubbell?”
Jim started. “How on earth could I give her up? She’s nothing to me, Horatia. Child, you surely don’t dream——”
The word “child” offended Horatia.
“No—of course I don’t think you are in love with her—or anything like that. But I think she thinks she has a hold on you and that she intends to play it for what it’s worth. She has a little proprietary air—and I think she has an influence over you which you don’t realize and that for your good you shouldn’t see her any more at all.”
The youth of Horatia, hurling such statements at any man and worst of all at the man who wished to be especially fine and strong in her eyes! She went on, a little flurried and feeling her way.
“Truly, I’m not jealous. I know you love me and I know that you’re not flirting. But I don’t like to see that woman hang around you because she has absolutely nothing to give you. From your own admission you see her because you feel you have a duty towards her and that is no reason at all. She is well able to look out for herself.”
“So am I, sweetheart.” That was the man in him.
Horatia did not agree.
“Let’s not quarrel about Rose Hubbell, please, darling,” he went on. “I don’t give a copper what becomes of her. But she is an old acquaintance and a perfectly harmless one. If you don’t like her you’ll never have to see her again.”
“And would you go on seeing her?”
“Why, no, darling—not unless I couldn’t help it. I can’t go around the block to avoid her—or cut her on the street.”
The slight impatience in his tone found immediate reflection in Horatia’s answer.
“Don’t be silly, Jim. I’m not unreasonable or going to be unreasonable. But I want to know where you stand with her and then we will drop it.” She was pressing the point now partly because her pride wouldn’t let her admit that she was being unreasonable or foolish and partly from sheer womanly desire to break down the resistance in her lover. And because she felt very near to tears her voice was hard and her figure tightened. Jim took it as a repulse, but he became more serious.
“What is it you want, Horatia?”
“I want you to drop Rose Hubbell. Not go to see her. Tell her if necessary that you are dropping her. It wouldn’t hurt her very much. Of course I don’t mean that you’re not to speak to her, but don’t ask her to dance when you are out places—don’t let her write to you. I want you to promise me.”
The tears showed in her voice now and who knows what Jim would not have been ready to promise if the word had not called out the memory of a promise given just a few weeks before to Rose. She had pleaded just not to be dropped. He had a clear memory of the whole conversation with her.
“Will you?” asked Horatia. “Truly it’s awfully hard to ask you. Won’t you promise just that?”
She felt like a child begging for a favor and like a woman to whom refusal would be outrage.
“Will it satisfy you, dear, if I promise to bear all this in mind and never to offend you again?”
The reservation puzzled Horatia and piqued her.
“Why won’t you promise outright?”
“Frankly, dear, I can’t. I can’t give a promise like that. It might be impossible to keep it without wounding Rose terribly.”
Horatia felt that she was wounded terribly. She turned her head away.
“Please,” begged Langley, “this is dreadful,Horatia. Can’t you trust my love for you and forget it?”
Horatia was weeping frankly now. He tried to take her in his arms but she drew away.
“Go away, Jim. Go home now. I want to think.”
“Let me sit here quietly while you think.”
“Please go—please.”
He took her hands and buried his face in them for a moment, his lips against the soft palms. Then he went down the path and through the garden gate.
TO Horatia the affair was immensely serious, but, Langley’s attitude inThe Journaloffice the next morning, though anxious, was not yet gravely troubled. According to reason he should have been right, what had jarred between him and Horatia was nothing after all, but in fact it was Horatia who gauged the dangers of the situation correctly. What she herself did not realize was that the episode about Mrs. Hubbell was one which only added another fear and another doubt to the fears and doubts which already had invaded her mind, unacknowledged. And these fears and doubts were in the air of her generation. Her discovery about Grace had perhaps begun the uncertainty. Tricked once into belief in a person and deceived, she herself had learned to feel suspicion and fear. She had learned that the men about her were not necessarily faithful to their wives and try as she would to put the thought out of her mind it crept back sometimes while she was talking to this man or that. Langley had reassured her—had made her smile again—events had driven the memory of Grace out of her mind—but the stain remained, corroding the faith and beauty of her feeling for Jim more than she guessed. There had been the doubts created by her fears about money matters and as towhether she and Jim would be able to keep themselves orderly and happy on their income. There had been the fear of the pain of marriage as she hovered at the door of the little sick child in her sister’s house. These things once accepted as the lot of woman became a problem now that they were a choice and not a lot. Subtly too, the temptations of the luxury of the life of the married women whom she met around Mrs. Clapp had dulled the edge of her own desire to work after she married. And Horatia had found no anchor philosophical or sociological. She was one of those who drifted with people rather than with causes and it was a hard age into which she had come to maturity. She could not like so many contemporary women fling herself into a cause and put the cause (or pretend to put it) before all personal life, and yet she could not, like her grandmother, fling herself into the institution of matrimony and expect the institution to solve her problems. Her faith in marriage with Jim was a structure subtly undermined by the conditions surrounding her and upheld only by one great and mighty prop—the prop of faith in Jim. Jim would adjust the problem of how they should live—Jim would keep them from stupidity and shabbiness—against the furtiveness of the married scoundrel who sought illicit relations, Jim stood, magnificent in his love for her. Everywhere he supported her, held her up, made her strong. And then this had come, this little thing which had curiously grown into a big thing. Itwas not that she feared Rose Hubbell as a rival. In that she was quite honest. But she feared Jim. She feared herself if Jim should seem weak, if he should appear to be the tool of a woman, if he could be the prey of a conscienceless woman. What sort of weakness was it to which she was looking for strength? The more she thought about it the more reasonable her position seemed to her. There that dangerous touch of feminine dogmatism absorbed at Maud’s came into play. She was asking him to give up a meaningless relationship, to trust in her judgment, to fulfill her desire. If he would not sacrifice a thing which was worthless, if he would not trust her judgment, if he would not fulfill her desire, either he had not been honest in telling of the whole relationship between him and Rose Hubbell or he was a lover whose love was only skin deep. To such a preposterous pitch of unconscious arrogance had her feelings brought her. Those were sad days for Horatia. She struggled for a week, while it grew steadily more hot in the city. Frantically her mind circled on itself, seeking rest and peace. There were times when it seemed that to turn to Jim and bury her head on his shoulder would solve everything. But when she did that, as she sometimes did, she found that it solved nothing—that she always began again on her endless round of argument.
There came a day when she and Jim, sitting opposite each other in his office after the rest had gone home, faced decision.
“You’ll wear out, Horatia. I can’t bear this. Won’t you please let the matter drop?”
“It doesn’t drop me,” said poor Horatia. “It goes on to mount up to the big question of whether you love me at all when you can let me suffer so.”
“It’s bigger than this affair,” said Jim, “you’re right. If it were a question of that promise only, perhaps I could find a way to make it even if it involved abandoning a trust. But the thing is bigger. You ask me to promise you something for which you’d despise me if I agreed.” She began to protest, but he shook his head. “Not now, but ultimately. You ask me to promise because you don’t trust me. If I gave that promise I’d be less a man and you less a woman for forcing it. You see, dear, I don’t quite satisfy you or make you confident. This promise would help things for a bit. Then you’d find another difficulty in my nature—another flaw to make you doubt and perhaps you’d want to bind that too with promises. Rose Hubbell is no more to me than that blotter. But I am something to myself in my relation to Rose Hubbell as well as to the newsboy on the corner. And I must decide those relationships myself because I am a man. If you want this promise it’s because you fear the strength of my manhood—and that’s basic.”
He was so much older, so much wiser than the Horatia who, tired and pale, hardly heeded his talk.
“Oh, I’m frightened,” she cried, “all this arguing! If this happened afterwards——”
“I’d become a brute or you a shrew,” said Langley.
But what she had wanted was his denial that it would ever happen again.
“I’m afraid of you. You are hard and unyielding. You don’t bring me——”
“I don’t bring you rest or comfort,” he said bitterly. “But, my God, how I long to, Horatia. Only I love you too much to bring you false rest or comfort or to drug you with words. I too have come to fear myself. What have I to give you——”
They sat drearily fatigued, the paper-strewn table between them.
Horatia made no protest; she was or thought she was full of questioning herself. Yet what came next brought about in three breaths a vast surprise; one moment what Langley was saying sounded like a natural sequence, and the next all the values of life shifted, and they faced each other in a new, strange, graceless world.
“I want you to go away for a rest,” said Jim. “Go away and forget all this. Then if you never want to come back to me, it’s all right. But if you should, Horatia, I’ll be here—I’ll always be here—always waiting, always thankful for what you’ve done for me—what you’ve given me, and always knowing that it was far, far more than I deserved.”
It was youth, inexperienced girlhood that disregarded the magnificence of that appeal. Horatia was primitive, green enough to want to be overcome—to want to be forced into surrender. That he did not force her but left her path open seemed weakness—and something like coldness. An older woman would have known that it was strength and rare devotion.
She was silent and in a turmoil within.
“Then you’ll give me up?” she asked at last, evenly enough.
“I’ll never give you up, but I’ll never imprison you.”
“It all is the same.” Horatia spoke out of a weary effort to keep dignity, not to break down before the indifference of her lover.
The languor that was all he could have heard in her voice was hard on him. Langley put his head on his hands and hid the agony in his face.
“I told you once that you loved the romance you found in me,” he said without resentment. “Well, I’ve destroyed the romance. I’m just ordinary, cheap, uninspiring. But I’m not going to make you ordinary or cheap. There’s so much romance left for you to find.”
She stood up and struck her hands together angrily.
“Don’t mock at me.”
“For God’s sake, Horatia, I wasn’t mocking.”
“Let me go—I will go now. I’ll go—on my vacation.”
“Your vacation?”
“We’ll call it that. I’ll go for a month—twomonths. And if I can come back, I’ll come. But I’m afraid.”
“My darling—my darling—if you can’t, you are to find happiness more worthily.”
He took her in his arms hungrily, sacrificially. That should have told her. But she was hungering for prohibitions, for demands upon her. There was no warmth in her, and he let her go.
At the door she lingered.
“Can you get someone to fill my place?”
“Yes—don’t worry about that. Just rest.”
“I’ve been happy here.”
“You’ve brought life with you.”
The door closed after her. She went down the staircase slowly, miserably.
Langley’s face was grey and old.
THE blue of the lake had faded into grey—a grey that looked thick and heavy and that lay impassive under the blasting sunlight. Its coolness was gone and its vigor. Above, inThe Journaloffice, where the shades were drawn down to keep out the heat, the vigor seemed gone too. The machinery went on smoothly enough. At Horatia’s desk a young woman, fresh from a New York school of journalism, was typing an excellent article on what suffrage had done in the recent campaign. At the surrounding desks the reporters struck off brief histories of automobile accidents, police raids, city happenings. In Langley’s room, the pale little stenographer took dictation as he walked up and down and worked out his editorials. There were editorials on the street car franchise, that hardy perennial in city problems, on the new appointment of the city planning commission, on the latest foreign tangle, on the eternal disentangling of the knot of political complications at Washington. Clearcut and well-phrased, his words came on each subject, so that the stenographer hurried to keep up with the flow of his thought, and yet something intangible had gone out of his thinking as out of the office atmosphere. The office was no longera place of romance—an adventure—a laboratory in which to solve world problems—a crusade against corruption as it had been for the past six months. It was a work-shop, a clean, orderly work-shop—and that was all. They all missed Horatia. During the first week of her absence Bob Brotherton had a maddening way of calling constant attention to it and bewailing it. He needed her for this and for that and he said facetiously that there was no use in sprucing himself up any more. No one cared for him and he would wear old clothes until she came back.
Jim had not realized how much Horatia meant to the staff. His own devotion to her had been so absorbing that he had not noticed the relations of the others. Now a stream of comments about her seemed to be floating about the office all day long. To excuse her outrageously long and indefinite vacation he had been compelled to say that she was not well and the staff felt a shadow over them. They were forever finding things in the day’s work which would have amused Horatia, forever recalling this or that incident which had amused her, forever wishing she were back. Langley alone did not comment on her, but Bob would say wisely when a particularly caustic comment came out of the inner office, “He’s not himself. He misses the young lady. He’s a different man when she’s around.”
With a great deal of wisdom he did not make that remark openly to Langley.
The Journalwas prospering more and more.It was no longer a paper to apologize for or worry about. It was getting a very substantial circulation and more and more advertisers. Jim realized that this success was due not only to the paper itself, but also to the fact that there was coming to be a place for a clean paper in the city—that more and more people liked their news straight and unadulterated and wanted to read comment on the news with which they did not necessarily a priori agree. He was stopped more and more often by old friends and urged to come to the “house”; more and more often he found himself deferred to in political discussions at the club as the judgment of last appeal. He liked it all and he improved under it. He kept up scrupulously after Horatia had gone as if to show her that he would not let her work be wasted. Yet there was a change in him and in the quality of his vigor. He was a man working for a principle and not an object, whereas before he had been working for a principle and Horatia. The eagerness had gone out of his eyes. Sometimes after the office was empty he would go into the outer office and sitting at Horatia’s desk write her letters—letters which left him sometimes pale and exhausted and sometimes set and stern. But he had one invariable habit. He tore the completed ink-written papers into tiny pieces and stuffed them into the wastebasket before he left the office and went home. There was also often a curious look on his face as he looked over his mail, and sometimes he would lay an envelope carefully aside untileverything else had been attended to and then fall upon it as if he were famished. The envelopes were rather more frequently present at first than later after Horatia had left town.
In the hurt anger of her vacation’s first twelve hours she had quite decided not to write to him at all. During the second twenty-four hours she wrote ten letters and mailed one brief little note saying that she was sorry if she had hurt him and that she wanted above all things not to hurt his work or affectThe Journal, stated where several of her copy sheets had been left and urged him to take a vacation himself and get a genuine rest. She ended by saying that Maud wanted her to go with them to a country place near Lake Habitat and that she thought she probably would go. Jim looked a little grim at that because Lake Habitat was where the Wentworth cottage was and he knew Maud. But he read on to her conclusion, a conclusion so honest, so sweet and so suffering that the tears came into his eyes.
“It’s so hard, Jim. I feel empty and faint and I try to move about but I seem like waxwork. Everything seems awfully mixed up in me. Nothing in the world matters except you and yet we mustn’t fling ourselves blindly into sentimental fervors if we really don’t belong together in every way. I can’t write. Good-night—and God bless you.”
That was the last letter of such a kind that Jim received. The next one was merely a note telling him that she was surely going with her sister andgiving her address in case her successor onThe Journalor Jim, himself, should need her. It was a much more controlled note and of course Jim did not know that it, like its predecessor, had been written after much vain effort and tearing up of letter paper. There had been a day when Horatia, who had been shopping in town alone, had almost gone toThe Journaloffice. She hesitated and trying to gather resolution went into a tea room and ordered some iced drink. The room was crowded and another woman coming in sat down opposite her before they looked at each other. It was Grace Walsh. With no change of color Grace rose, but Horatia put out a detaining hand.
“Don’t move—please.”
“I’d like to stay if you don’t mind,” said Grace sincerely. “There are one or two things I didn’t write you. My new companion in the flat is quite anxious to stay on there. I suggested that you’d be undoubtedly willing to sublet.”
“Gladly.”
“Are you still with your sister?”
“Yes—I’m going to the country with her tomorrow.”
“It’s your vacation, I suppose?”
It was very hard to dissemble before those calm, disillusioning, serious eyes of Grace.
“A kind of vacation,” said Horatia, a little heavily.
A strange look came over Grace’s face—a look of anger, the look which a mother has when her child is ill-treated.
“You’ve been suffering.” Without any ado of conscious readjustments they passed from an attitude of armed neutrality to a disarmed, a benevolent neutrality.
“Yes.”
“Some man—some damned man—no, don’t tell me—poor little Horatia—won’t you believe me when I tell you none of them is worth it? I wish to heaven that women would stop letting themselves suffer. They’ve borne the emotional burdens long enough. Why shouldn’t we take men as they take us—as part of the day’s work? Look here, Horatia, you’re worth any ten men I ever saw. Don’t let them wear you down.”
“I’m not.”
“You look frazzled.”
“I thought you liked men,” said Horatia, irrelevantly, “and disliked women.”
“I like men and I like women when they are individuals—but women in relation to men are usually unspeakable—and men in relation to women are vile. We need to stand alone, Horatia—to shake things off. To feel—and to know when to stop feeling.”
“To stop feeling,” repeated Horatia.
Grace leaned over and put her hand on the other girl’s.
“It’s hard—but it can be done,” she said and there was almost a mesmeric quality in her sure, slow voice.
“I think we do need to learn that,” agreed Horatia.
She rose to go.
“Some time when I’m a lot bigger and better and more controlled and not so cheap, I want to talk with you, Grace,” she said; “I know you’re right in lots of things but the addition of your ideas is wrong. The grand total of your philosophy is wrong. It’s got to be wrong. I won’t have it right. But we do need to learn to stop feeling.”
Grace’s look followed her with a queer yearning in it—her eyes seemed to say that she had not finished all she wanted to say.
Horatia went out to the street. The incoherent conversation had checked her desire to see Langley. It had given her a cue. She would stop feeling. Instead of toThe Journaloffice she went to a large shop and tried on hats before a many-sided mirror and was surprised to find herself succeeding in her deliberate mental effort to get her mind away from its pain. The hats interested her. Each one appeared to change her character and she began to speculate on how she would like to change her type during the summer with Maud and the Clapps and Wentworths. The saleswoman brought her the kind of hats she usually ordered—large sailors—plain wing-trimmed shapes, but Horatia laid them aside.
“That is the girl I am escaping from,” she said to herself, removing a straight-brimmed gray sailor, and she pointed to one on a model. It was of plain soft yellow chiffon and drooped a littleabout her face. Under it she looked provocative, as if deliberately intending to charm.
She had never tried on such a hat before and she lingered before her image in the mirror while the saleswoman poured out tributes.
“I’ll take it,” she said, and proceeded with unparalleled extravagance to choose two more, one of black with soft waving feathers and one of rose felt that crushed itself into different shapes on her head. Then, urged by the saleswoman, who was gathering momentum, she bought a rose sweater to wear with the rose hat, drew a check that half appalled and half amused her and went home to Maud. Maud, receiving three hat boxes next morning, was amazed and delighted. Evidently Horatia intended to play the game. She pressed a yellow frock on Horatia which she insisted was necessary to the well being of the yellow hat and mourned because she herself could not wear yellow. Horatia was very gay. She pirouetted in her hats before Harvey and to her amazement found that she was shaking off her worries and her unhappiness. She wanted to go to the country place and be still more happy. She insisted that unless they made it decently gay there she wasn’t going to stay. And while Harvey chuckled and Maud opened her eyes she danced upstairs to her room, closed the door, flung the yellow hat in the corner and wept into Maud’s Madeira counterpane, suddenly intolerably homesick for nothing in the world so muchas her typewriter inThe Journaloffice, the twinkle of the lake under her window and the sound of Jim’s voice in the next room, giving orders, telephoning, dictating.
ANTHONY’S sister stood in her cool country living room, arranging her flowers. There were a mass of them that she had brought in from the rough-and-tumble garden by the cottage wall—hollyhocks, tall and pink and already in their place in a green vase against the wall—cerise cinnamon phlox, filling the air with their vivid fragrance, a riot of nasturtiums of all colors, sweet peas whose pastel lavenders and pinks were spoiled until Marjorie put them in a glass basket before a little mirror, poppies, and deep orange African marigolds. Marjorie separated them from each other and then reassembled them, mixing in now bachelors’ buttons with marigolds, and baby’s breath with poppies. She was quite absorbed and her brother, lying on a cushion-piled settle, watched her admiringly and for a few moments silently. When he spoke he seemed to be taking up an interrupted conversation.
“You’re sure she is coming then?”
“Mrs. Williams told me so in town yesterday.”
“And you think that the skillful Maud was trying to hint that it was off between Horatia and Jim Langley?”
“She had a saddened and romantic air aboutHoratia. I don’t know exactly what she was trying to imply. But from a rather steady stream of inquiries as to your whereabouts I was inclined to have vulgar suspicions that she was really interested in you and your movements. And then she said, ‘I suppose you know how it is, Mrs. Clapp, when these young things turn to you with their romantic difficulties.’ And then she giggled. How that remarkable young woman can giggle!” finished Marjorie.
Anthony sat puzzling.
“Of course Horatia doesn’t tell her a thing,” he said, “but that sort of woman is astute as the devil in some ways. Well, if she comes down here, Langley or no Langley, I’m going to go after her. If she wanted to marry Langley badly enough she has had time enough to make sure by this time. But it’s ridiculous to think of her wasting her time on one of these awfully complicated intellectual emotional affairs if it’s not going to come to anything. If she doesn’t want me she can tell me again—stronger—to get to hell out—and I’ll get. But I’m going to get the thing settled. I thought maybe I’d get over it when I got West. I didn’t see a girl while I was out there who seemed real at all. And I’d catch myself mooning. It’s unhealthy. It’s got to be stopped.”
“You want to remember,” said Marjorie, “that Horatia has had a hard summer and that she will be tired. Don’t rush her too hard or she’ll go to pieces or send you packing from sheer weariness.”
“I don’t mean to tire her. I want to rest her.” There was a strange mixture of protectiveness and sullenness in Anthony’s tone.
“It’s all nonsense anyway,” he went on, “to think of her wearing herself out in that miserable office. Girls oughtn’t to be allowed to knock themselves to pieces that way. Where it’s necessary it’s bad enough but when a girl——”
“Has only to sit back and let you support her,” laughed Marjorie.
“When a girl is like Horatia she’s altogether too valuable to throw herself away for some fetish like earning a living. You know exactly what I mean and you agree with me too, Marge.”
“It all depends on how much you can make her care for you.”
“I could make her care from sheer force of imitation if I could get this Langley stuff out of her head.”
“Granted. But if she does happen to be in love with Langley?”
“He’s no person for her to marry.”
“You can’t do it by dogma, my dear.”
Anthony shook himself like an impatient puppy.
“Well, I’ll be damned if I don’t find some way to do it.”
“Love is queer,” reflected Marjorie, “in its effect on people. Now you show it principally by a marked increase in profanity.”
Anthony grinned and left her.
The cottage stood well back from a road whichwound itself around a series of lakes and up steep hills into a district which was almost mountainous. Anthony knew every foot of the country and loved it as well as his cottage which had been the scene of so many pleasant parties, both his own and Marjorie’s. It was the place above all which he would have chosen for this biggest adventure of his life. The place which Maud had taken was a few miles farther up the road but within easy distance. There was every reason for Anthony’s contemplative smile as he swung down the wooded road.
The Williams party arrived a few days later with some bustle. It was Maud’s first venture into country residences and though it was on a small scale it appealed to her immensely. Only her sudden acquaintance with Marjorie Clapp had given her courage for the move, for the district in the hills was a refuge for a society somewhat older and better acquainted than Maud’s town crowd. She and Harvey had taken the children away for the summer once before, but going to a summer hotel was a different and incomparably insignificant thing beside the pride of belonging to a genuine summer colony. She had asked Mrs. Clapp a little diffidently about places in the hills and Mrs. Clapp had been unexpectedly helpful—even giving her the name of a special cottage which could probably be rented. An unpretentious little cottage enough but pleasant to Maud because the Hilltons, the Straights, the Clapps and the Morrises wore their ginghams andsun hats within a radius of ten miles, pleasant to Jackie because he had been promised a rabbit, pleasant to Harvey on account of a neighboring trout stream, and pleasant to Horatia because the woods around it offered refuges and solace.
Harvey took them up in the new stream line touring car which was the outward sign of his increasing prosperity, and while Maud watched a road map to be sure that Harvey would not miss the road which went by the Country Club which the summer-people had built, Horatia sat with her arm around a weary little Jack, breathing in the freshness of the woods with their summer scents and thinking. She felt very old and disappointed and disillusioned, and she thought with envy of the first time she had driven over this road with Anthony in the winter, feeling so happy and full of love for Jim. Maud poured out a steady stream of comment and conjecture—and Horatia hardly listened, knowing that expression and not attention was what Maud sought. She had never liked her sister so well as she had during these past days. Maud had let her alone and asked no questions. She seemed to be waking into a kind of appreciation of Horatia’s feelings and Horatia was very grateful, entirely ignorant as she was of Maud’s unrelinquished plans about Anthony. Horatia had just thought of Anthony for the first time in weeks. She had thought of him as the man who had driven the car when she had gone through these places thinking of Jim, and first rejoicing in the happiness of love.
They reached their cottage and Maud was soon unpacking and opening the house while the cook, imported lest life in the country become too strenuous, began to prepare dinner. Horatia, bravely attired in her rose sweater and hat, started out for a walk. She wanted to adjust her thoughts and get perfectly calm, for she meant to be a gay companion and not a doleful one.
Little leaf-covered paths wandered into the woods here and there. She turned at random into them and went along, anxious to lose her loneliness in the greater loneliness and friendliness of the forest. And here, for the first time, she succeeded. The trees were motionless in the still afternoon. Their branches curved and interlocked and made great, cool, dark green shadows. The ferns stirred as she passed and she heard the lazy chirping of some birds. It was deep and still and calm and sure, so that in the midst of it Horatia became calm and sure for a moment. She felt her ache for Jim’s presence pass, and for the first time since she had gone from him there came a feeling that she was back where she belonged. For the first time she felt awakened pleasure and she stood very still, almost afraid to stir lest the peace that was filling her should change to misery again. After a little she went on. She did not want to go back to the cottage yet. Later she would be ready for them but as yet she was ready only for herself.
And so Anthony came upon her—a bright bit of color in the midst of the woods with her eyesshining with peace. At the sight of her he felt the flush of his own face. It was all very well to be full of bravado before Marjorie but in the presence of Horatia his confidence waned. Yet she was clearly glad to see him.
“I heard you were West.”
“I came back last week and heard that your sister had taken the Warner cottage. I was hoping you’d come out with her. Every month seems the best out here but this one is especially nice. And there are wonderful places to walk and ride. We have a swimming place and a very poor tennis court——”
“I don’t think I shall like the tennis court half as well as just this. I like your woods.”
“So do I,” answered Anthony with happy sympathy. “Let me show you a finer place than this though. Deeper in.”
They went on until they came to a little clearing like a great room with the trees interlocked above it. Along one side ran a tiny clear stream.
“But this is too perfect. This isn’t natural.”
“This is my room. I made it myself and furnished it by opening up the stream. The bed was there for it but the water had been choked by a dam of leaves. I cleared it out and now you see I have running water in my room. That’s all I need.”
“It’s the most beautiful interior decoration I ever saw.”
“You shall have a key for that.”
He did not keep her. But he walked towardshis sister’s cottage and they came out in her garden. Horatia went into the house to see Marjorie and the children. She felt curiously at home there, and Marjorie was so very glad to see her that Horatia felt even more happy. She thought suddenly that she could tell Marjorie a little about Jim, and that Marjorie was the only person in the world to whom she could tell even a little. But there was little time to think. Everyone wanted to plan things to do and to arrange for many things. Then Anthony insisted that he had walked her unconscionably far and to save her stiffness he must take her home. She got into the car with delightful familiarity. Anthony said never a personal word and if he thought them, Horatia did not guess. She found him very handsome in his country khaki and even more wholesome than ever. She was in a mood to yearn for wholesomeness.
Maud would have Anthony stay for dinner. Horatia found herself urging him too and to her greater surprise found herself thoroughly anticipating dinner. She had not been hungry for some time but tonight——
“I’ve never seen Horatia eat so much,” said Anthony, “except on a memorable evening at the Redtop Hotel.”
Banter and nonsense—healthy nonsense. How restful they were after introspection and worry. How friendly and cheerful everyone was, and how quiet and peaceful it was about them. Maud watched Anthony as she crocheted a sweater forherself—Anthony watched Horatia—Harvey with a secret amusement watched his wife and his sister-in-law, but Horatia watched no one. She was revelling in peace. Jim was in her mind but no longer torturing her. She thought of him as loving her and of herself as loving him. No solutions of her difficulty came to her and she did not look for any. She was content to be in the midst of life. It no longer frightened her.
“Good-night,” said Anthony. “I’ll be over often. Look for me on the doorstep every morning.”
PERHAPS the modern substitute for the coquetry of the old-fashioned woman before marriage is the introduction of “problems” into her love-making. The man still courts—a little more discreetly than he used to but much after the same plan—but whereas the woman of a generation ago was supposed to lead him a whimsical chase, now giving, now withdrawing her favor, refusing to admit her feelings, the typical woman of today is apt to admit her feelings readily enough, but she preludes her submission to them by the introduction of a host of “problems.”
Sometimes it is the problem of whether she wants to have children or not—sometimes the question of giving up a separate, wage-earning existence, sometimes a theory against the inequality of marital concessions, sometimes this, sometimes that. But questions of this sort have become such common experience that one wonders sometimes if the whole thing is not a development of the old feminine practice of playing with a man from behind a feather-fringed fan. Not that these women of today consciously concoct their problems to trouble their lovers or excite further ardor in them—far be it from the thoughts of most of them to so illegitimately fan a man’s flame, and perhaps the whole suggestion is unworthy and unfair. Still, so many girls have these preliminary problems before they marry—so many courtships are painful, harassed affairs these days—so many moonlit nights are spent in putting questions which do not read, “Will you love me always?” but “Will I be able to maintain my individuality?” or in the bewildering phrase of poor Lady Harmon, “my autonomy,” that this dwelling upon mating problems among women surely looks like a modern group movement. And no reflection either on the honesty or fervor of contemporary women. The same doubts stirring in their minds have always stirred in the minds of courted women—doubts as to whether such happiness, such devoted love as comes in the first fragrant period of love-making can endure and what will happen if it does not endure? Formerly women teased their lovers for assurances of perpetual love. The woman now, more wise, more honest, more skeptical too, about perpetual love, puts a different face on her questions. She asks—“And if this love does not turn out well, what then? Shall I be wrecked? Can I maintain enough of my independence, of my beauty and strength, to play the game through? Will this man be grasping and demanding? Is love an exhilaration worthy of the submission of my body and spirit?”
The woman of today is not miserly. She has no idea—not nearly so much as her old-fashioned sister of doling out her love. She is a marvelousspender. But she is not a spendthrift and she has had enough teaching in the economics of life to demand value received. If love is worth while she is capable of giving everything magnificently. If it is not, she grudges giving, having put permanently behind her the theory that woman’s lot is pitiful and one of resignation. And yet sometimes she does give everything, knowing it is a gamble, just as the girl of the old game gave everything often enough, even when her lover’s “love you always” rang false in her ears.
Horatia’s problem, of course, might have been one of a dozen. The incident of Mrs. Hubbell was analyzed rightly enough by Jim as being merely illustrative of a lack of faith in him. She had neither complete faith in him nor complete faith in marriage and her lack of faith was entirely in consonance with her time. Mrs. Hubbell loomed large in her mind while she was in the midst of her argument with Jim. But she was not in the country for a week before she thought of her problem in terms which almost eliminated Rose.
In the first flush of her love for Jim she had yielded to her temperamental love for romance and to emotional wonder at finding herself beloved and suddenly more important than ever before. But with the approach of the great question of marriage she had found that her mind began to question many things. She soon saw that what she was facing was not a minor point of whether Jim was to see Rose Hubbell or not, butwhether her need of Jim and his of her was great enough to supersede all doubts, all fears, all worries about marriage. Little by little she postponed a final consideration of these questions. Life in the country was easy enough but none the less full of events. There was a great deal of lazy intercourse with people, a great deal of exercise, motoring—and Horatia found that she was able to give herself up quite happily to the enjoyment of natural beauty—fresh morning air, sunsets on the little lake and green afternoons in the woods. She was not ashamed of that. The sensations of beauty and the elevation of spirit that came with it were so far from trivial that they justified her for feeling happy so soon after her break with Jim. She withdrew a little from the memories of his love into contemplation of the fact of it.
At this distance it was peaceful to think of his love and in this calmer mood she did not question the depth of feeling of either of them. The questions of outcomes she laid aside for the present and she moved through this setting of natural beauty with heart and head held high. Some time she would move to a solution—not yet. Of course she did not realize how dangerous to her love for Jim all these distractions were nor how dangerous her friends meant them to be. She never thought of Anthony as a lover. A false step from him or Maud would have driven her away in those first days, but Anthony’s attitude was perfect. He was the admirable friend and companion just asHoratia had wished and just as she had asked him to be. He established her confidence in him again. They walked and rode and swam together. No excursion was complete without Anthony.
And they grew very close to one another. There was one silver night when they rode for endless hours under the moonlight—a white road stretching forward over the hill-tops and luring them always farther. The lights went out in the little villages and they became black and mysteriously still.
“Dead little houses,” said Anthony, “why are people so silly as to sleep inside them?”
He was full of life that night. Horatia was close to him—still—happy—his machine quivered and sped under his touch and he had all that he loved most in the world around him. Horatia’s own youth woke in answer to this appetite for life which showed in the man’s firm, vigorous handling of his wheel and the joyous lift of his head.
“Are you happy, Horatia?”
“Quite happy.” She was sincere. There were no problems or worries in her head, the moment was enough.
“We get along pretty well,” said Anthony happily.
“Don’t we.”
Horatia never thought that Anthony might be making love to her. Love to her was already couched in different terms. She liked his phrasing and she liked him. He was such a human companion and they were alone before such vastnesses that she found herself responding to the touch of his shoulder. They were leaning back in the roadster, shoulders touching lightly.
“Life’s queer, Anthony. When we expect to be happy we aren’t and when you don’t expect it, it comes.”
“We don’t know when to expect it,” answered Anthony sagely.
He talked well that night and from that night on as she thought of her future Horatia began to compare and contrast Anthony’s plan of life. On this ride he left out most of his vehement, laughable sociology, and talked of business. He had been fascinated, startled by the vast machinery of moving grain across the world. The great scale on which it was done thrilled him. “Feeding the world,” he said, with no great humanitarian feeling but as if the magnificence of the act had gripped his imagination. He was going to take charge of part of the business after he had seen the eastern end of it.
“I thought you wanted to travel before you began work.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I want to be a man—a mature man soon—and a mature man must have a job.”
Self-absorbed Horatia, who did not guess from those words of what else he was thinking! But she did not trouble about Anthony much. She generalized Anthony.
“Yes—we—all men and women must work.”
“Not women always and not as hard as men.”
Horatia waived the point. It was a nice gallantry, she thought. She was not ready to work anyway, just yet.
They passed a strange light half hidden in the bushes just then, and whatever else Anthony had meant to say was quite forgotten for the moment. He was suddenly alert. Without a word he went into reverse and backed up to the roadside.
“Stay where you are, Horatia,” he said briefly and decisively.
She leaned forward. He was beside the light and suddenly she saw what Anthony had seen at once. It was an overturned roadster—its tail light gleaming in the marshy grass. She saw Anthony peering around, then bending. With a leap she was beside him and he gave her a quick, appraising glance.
“When I lift,—pull.”
Amazingly she was pulling, pulling and brushing aside obstacles that felt like the overturned paraphernalia of the car. She was pulling a woman—a girl awkwardly thrown prostrate and still. And then they found the man. Anthony seemed to know exactly what to do. He was almost professional.
“We’ll leave him—it’s no use,” he said. “And carry her. Hold her in your lap and I’ll drive. We can’t waste a minute.”
The inert body of the girl hung heavily over the side of the car and Horatia’s lap.
“How far must we go?”
“Five or six miles. I saw the man’s letters—he seems to come from there—Winchester.”
At the Winchester hospital they found after an anxious hour that the girl was only stunned and bruised. She would be all right. She was easily identified—a girl about town.
The young man seemed to be a person of prominence. An odd stiffness of local scandal hung over the necessary inquiries. Evidently the association of the man and girl was not discussible. The police notified the man’s father and a party set out for the wreck with Anthony as guide.
Horatia had a glimpse of a white, stricken, elderly man bending over the body and heard him groan in horrified pain. There was nothing left for them to do. They turned towards home.
“Poor devil,” said Anthony, “he’s gone and there’s an awful gap somewhere. Because he wanted to be a bounder. Nice-looking fellow he was, too.”
“Let’s get home quickly,” begged Horatia.
Anthony turned to look at her.
“Sorry it happened,” he said briefly, “but you were game, Horatia. Lord, but you were game.”
She tried to smile and only succeeded in turning very faint.
“I never saw a dead person before except my mother, and I can’t remember that.”
“You never——” Anthony stopped the car and put a quick arm about her shoulders. “What a damned shame! Just rest—just forget it.”
From that night they were closer comrades than ever before. And it was during the weeks that followed that Horatia found herself writing less and less to Jim. It was very hard to write. She couldn’t put all she wanted to say in one letter and she didn’t know whether he would understand all the things she was thinking unless she wrote him very fully. That could all come later, she told herself—now she wanted strength and calmness. Nothing, according to Marjorie Clapp, was so worth while as strength and health. And more and more she found Marjorie and Anthony establishing standards by which she measured life.
They were so sure, and yet not sure as Maud was sure—with aggressiveness and assertiveness. They did not try to decide everything for everyone and they were slow of condemnation in most respects and rather open to new beliefs.
“Have you no imperfections?” wailed Horatia to Marjorie.
Marjorie stared at her. “What have I been assuming?” she asked in horror. “What sort of prig——”
“It’s because you don’t assume. Because you are modern without bragging of it and conservative when it is for the safety of things. Because you are actually getting somewhere.”
“Well,” said Marjorie, “one of my imperfections is that I fairly soak in such talk about myself. I’ve been through the mill, Horatia. I’ve wondered and puzzled and hated being called areactionary. There was a time when bobbing my hair and taking a lover instead of a husband seemed the brave thing to do. And then I decided that it wasn’t, after all. That it was my fear of being called stupid and not my conviction of what was progress that was holding me back from the commonplaces of being a wife and mother. Inwardly I approved of lots of things and outwardly I was afraid to give in to them for fear of being ordinary. But I’m sure now. I’ve burned my bridges. I want to give my children the best of the old régime. The new régime will unavoidably make advances to them and they may accept a lot of them. That’s all right too—the old and the new make a fine blend. And I try to keep in touch with things so nothing will shock or frighten me. Why are you so worried?”
“I’m not really, just now. I’m as content as a cat. But I suppose I ought to know where I stand and as a matter of fact I don’t. I ought to know what people I want to run with. I’ve seen a lot of kinds. And I don’t really fit in anywhere. Someone told me that I was only fit to do lip service to modernism, the other day. That bothered me. I had taken it for granted that I was a modern. It seemed indecent not to be.”
“But you are. Anyone who sees you knows that you are carrying on into the future.”
“This person didn’t think so.” And for the second time, omitting her personal connection, Horatia told Grace’s story.
“Poor Grace,” said Marjorie.
“That’s just it. I didn’t feel ‘poor Grace.’ I felt ‘plague-stricken—unclean Grace.’ And it began in me a lot of uncertainties. If she was like that—if marriage was as wretched and unreliable as she claimed—where can I turn for faith? You help restore faith but what if you are a shining exception?”
Anthony came in and stood against the door looking tall and immensely confident. Perhaps Marjorie felt he was the answer to Horatia’s appeal. Anyway she went away and sent them iced tea and sandwiches.
AT just what point Horatia realized that Anthony still loved her and that his love could be called by no other name was quite cloudy in her own mind. Perhaps her first intimation of it came that very afternoon when he stood looking at her silently after Marjorie slipped away. It was a very revealing look and Horatia would have been stupid indeed not to have felt its quality. She pulled herself alert from the relaxed position she had been indulging in on the cushioned settee and put her hands laughingly to her disheveled hair.
“Please don’t embarrass me, Anthony. I know I’m tousled.”
“I love to look at you tousled. I love to look at you anyway and at any time. It’s all——” he stopped and pulled her to her feet, retrieving himself gaily. “Don’t bewitch me, young woman. Didn’t I get my orders not to be in love with you?”
But there was a tense look in his eyes that set Horatia wondering.
Five months ago she had been filled with humiliation and actual distaste by his declaration of love for her. Two months before, when she had first come to the country, she would have been revolted and frightened away. But thesituation was changed. Anthony had grown to be a part of her life. And he was more skilful than he had been in the spring. He was very slow in his love-making, careful not to outrage her feelings, careful not to ask for anything. By words sometimes, but more often by the devotion of actions, by the constant protective care with which he surrounded her, Horatia was brought into consciousness of his love. It was easy for her because he asked for nothing. She could like him as much as she pleased and take comfort in the hundred intangible expressions of his love without feeling that she was involved in a love affair. And Jim was not there and his letters were few and repressed in tone. He was her lover—and she was his, thought Horatia, whether she was disappointed or not. That was her promise, but it seemed one which her mind insisted on rather than a conviction springing from the depth of her heart.
Accepting the love-making of two men is often possible, even to a fine, high-minded virtuous woman, if only fastidious ways save her from any sense of promiscuity. Anthony’s first attack coming in the spring, when Horatia was surrounded by the very present sense of Jim’s love, when she was fresh from his arms, had made her feel indecent. But now, removed from Jim, cooled and drawn little by little into a new atmosphere, Anthony’s love filled her at first with a gentle regret and then little by little, accepting his attentions and never finding the moment when she was bothable and willing to tell him that she did not want him to care for her, there came to be a question about Anthony in her mind. It was, for instance, difficult to say to him when he was folding a wrap about her shoulders, “You must not be so considerate of me if your consideration means that you love me.” Yet, accepting publicly a hundred special attentions and thoughtfulnesses, seeing in Maud’s glances and in Marjorie’s what they hoped and expected, the thing lost its repugnant aspect. She could hardly feel that this devotion of Anthony’s which everyone approved of and which was so gentle a thing, could be shameful, especially when she was not reinforced by the expression of Jim’s love. Sometimes an unpleasant thought rose in her mind, contrasting this steady devotion, unreturned and unwelcomed, with the love of Jim which circumstances seemed to have so easily defeated. Yet it was significant that Anthony did not find a chance to make love to her openly and fervently and that she kept him from any declaration. One thing she knew very clearly—that she would hate to put Anthony definitely out of her life and that the moment of doing so could be postponed. Her sister did not plan to return until October. There was still a month before she need face issues. If she dabbled sometimes in the thought of Anthony’s life, that was only natural for he spread his plans before her. It would be an orderly, progressive life, fine, easeful and not selfish so much as concentrated on self-development.
“But Anthony, where does your duty to society come in?”
“In being a decent, useful citizen myself. Not in trying to pauperize other people—or humiliate them. In voting right and standing right on things—sounds awfully priggish, but really I suppose it’s summed up in being an example as far as a very imperfect person can be, and in doing my own job.”
“But somebody has to pioneer for the weak ones.” She was thinking of Langley to whom it could never have occurred to be an example to society but who worked unremittingly on the chance that he might reduce the hypocrisy and selfishness and viciousness around him. It came to her that Anthony’s method was infallible as far as it went and Jim’s dangerously fallible and uncomfortable. Anthony would never have anything to reproach himself with—Jim might have much. He was answering.
“There wouldn’t be so many weak ones if everyone did his job and did it right. The weak ones are the result of bad living and the ones who go out to reform all this weakness—who are they?—old maids—unhealthy and unhappy—freak men, abnormal in their living. I tell you the country needs steadying, Horatia, and steadying by example, not by speech-making.”
“And that method is self-preservation for you, of course—and comfort,” said Horatia, a little caustically.
“Yes—of course. I think it should be. I think—I think it’s much more sensible to preserve yourself, for you and all women to establish homes and families and keep healthy instead of running around city streets and city slums.”
Horatia chuckled. “You’re a divine advocate of woman’s place in the home. You make it seem so tempting.”
The feeling in his face leapt into flame.
“Can I make it tempting enough?”
She drew away a little nervously.
“Oh, personally, I’ll always prefer the streets. I’m a natural born gutter-pup.”
“You’re naturally the most wonderful woman in the world and you’re meant for the truest and best things.”
“Don’t praise me, please, Anthony. I hate it.”
“Then don’t say such silly things.”
He walked up and down and then returned to her, still trying to plead impersonally.
“I’m not a bully or a reactionary—I don’t want to run anybody’s life. I don’t believe in this male superiority stuff either. And I’ve been with you and Marjorie enough to have an enormous respect for women. She’s not tied down. She’s the freest woman I know.”
“Yes, because she is doing what she wants to do.”
Gradually in this way a choice was placed before Horatia, a choice of lives. She evaded the main issue, the issue which would ultimately make choice for her—that must be which man drew her most. She compared lives as if it were aproblem in sociology she had before her. Anthony had respected her desire to have him keep from definite questions but she knew that he was laying his life before her. And she reviewed it. She saw that she and Anthony together and others like them, mental aristocrats, secure in material things, could take their places in a society of flux and uncertainty, and be beacon lights of strength and security, she as a woman, raising woman’s functions to fine dignity, strong in love and content and purpose. She saw herself taking up the burdens which other cheaper women laid down, dignifying a home and wifehood and maternity.
And on the other side stretched life with Jim, a life of puzzles, inquiries, unsolved problems, a life among the problems of the world, solving them not by keeping unsullied but by enduring with them, by growing weary and impatient and often arriving at no solution. And the domestic side of life with Jim would be a life without great regularity or great certainty of ease—how could she fit Jim into domestic routine and how could she fit in these strange friends of Jim’s whom he refused to give up, into a life of dignity and order? Even against his protests, the work would call her back to it and she would have to adjust her wifehood and child-bearing to all this—and there would never be enough money so that they could live in the careless ease which took money for granted. Jim’s side seemed to suffer in comparison with the other life and yet why was itthat she did not make a decision against it and put it out of her mind?