III
He went off quite in the wrong frame of mind to deliver his lecture. When he had taken a stealthy peep at his audience, he became actually nervous. The Moral Courage Club seemed to be made up almost entirely of women—rows and rows of earnest faces. It would be very unpleasant to wound and distress them, as his words were sure to do, especially as they had all contributed toward the fee he was to receive. For a minute he was almost tempted to soften some of his remarks, but his reformer’s ardor flamed up again, and he went out upon the platform bravely.
The sight of their feathers and furs and earrings helped him. After all, they were nothing but barbarians, who must be enlightened at any cost. He began. He told than, as kindly as possible, how selfish, how greedy, how uncivilized they were, how unpleasant they looked in their skins of dead animals and feathers of dead birds, with all their savage and unesthetic finery; how brutally they preyed upon man.[Pg 7]
“Marriage ruins a man,” he said. “It stifles his ambitions; it coarsens him, it debases him. It outrages his manly self-respect. He is debarred from wholesome and essential experiences. He is shamefully exploited. He is forced into hypocrisy and deceit. Partly from his native kindliness, partly from his woman-directed training, he never dares to tell the truth to the opposite sex.”
And so on, directly into those earnest faces, framed by all their barbaric plumes and furs and jewels. To his surprise and dismay, none of them changed, grew abashed or angry or stern. They were only interested, all of them.
They came up in a body when he had finished, and congratulated him.
“You are always so stimulating!” said one.
“You brush aside the non-essentials!” said another.
“It gives one a new outlook!”
“I hope to see it in print. It is so suggestive, dear doctor!”
Only one of the earnest horde made any sort of individual impression, and that was a slender, dark, elegant woman who approached him after every one else had gone.
“Doctor!” she said in a low, thrilling voice. “I feel that I must speak to you. Let me take you home in my car, won’t you?”
She was interesting, distinguished, and, he fancied, intelligent; so he was quite willing to follow her to her waiting motor-car and to seat himself beside her.
“Your lecture,” she began. “It’s such a startling idea to me—that of man being the victim in marriage.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s not the conventional, romantic idea, of course.”
“Nor the true one,” she cried. “Oh, doctor, your brain may be right, but your heart is wrong! There is so much that you don’t seem to know—to understand! You don’t seem to realize how hideously we suffer—what we endure. I cannot pretend to be impersonal. I want to tell you the truth—a side of it that you don’t know. I want to tell you of one case. Then you must tell me what you think.”
She laid her hand on his arm and looked earnestly into his face.
“I want you to hear my story, and then tell me frankly whether or not my husband was a victim!”
It was a very long and very harrowing story. It obliged them to go to the lady’s house and to have tea there, and to sit in her charming little sitting-room until dark, in order that it should all be told.
She was Mrs. Hamilton, she said, known to Marian, as to all other women of any social pretentions in that particular suburb, as the martyr wife of a fiendish husband. What she had suffered no one knew—except the twenty or thirty people whom she had told. She ended in tears.
Andrew comforted her with kindly words and complete exonerations. He said that she was blameless. The clock struck six, and he rose to take leave.
“Good-by!” said Mrs. Hamilton, giving him her slender hand. “Doctor, you’ve helped me. You’ve understood. Mayn’t I see you again? You don’t know what sympathy means to a lonely, heart-broken woman.”
He assured her that he would be delighted to come again, as soon as he had a free moment.