II
It was a wonderful evening for Freda. In the thoroughly friendly atmosphere she expanded. She made it wonderful for Gage too. He had the sense of an atmosphere freed from all censoriousness of analysis. Freda was drinking in impressions, finding her way by feeling alone. He basked in the warm worshipful admiration she gave his wife.
They left early and Gage drove them home, leaving Freda at her hostess’ door with a promise to give her a real drive some day and an admonition not to fall in love with any young wastrel. Part of their bantering conversation had been about Freda’s falling in love and how completely she was to do it.
“I’ll let you look him over if you will, Mr. Flandon.”
“Fine,” he said, “I’ll see if he’s the right sort.”
He had told Helen he was going to drop in at the club for a few minutes and see if he could find a man he wanted to see. But the object of his search was not to be seen and Gage was about to leave the lounge when Walter Carpenter called him. Carpenter lived at the club. He was stretched in one of the long soft chairs before the fire, his back to the rest of the room. Gage stopped beside him.
“How’s everything?”
“So-so.”
Walter offered a cigar, and indicated a chair.
“No—I think I’ll go on home,” said Gage, taking the cigar.
“Better smoke it here.”
For all his casualness it was clear that Walter wanted company. Gage dropped into the nearby chair and they talked for a few minutes, without focusing on anything. Then Walter began.
“Wonderful girl, that Vassar friend of Helen’s.”
“Margaret Duffield? Think so?”
“I’ve never seen a girl I liked as much,” said Walter.
He said it in the cool, dispassionate way that he said most things, without any embarrassment. Embarrassments of all sorts had been sloughed off during the fifteen years of Walter’s business and social achievements. Gage looked at him frowningly.
“You don’t mean you’re serious—you?”
“Why not—I?” repeated Carpenter, grinning imperturably.
He didn’t look serious or at least impassioned, Gage might have said. His long figure was stretched out comfortably. It was slightly thickened about the waist, and his sleek hair was thinning as his waist was thickening. His calm, well-shaven face was as good looking as that of a well-kept, well-fed man of thirty-seven is apt to be. It was losing the sharpness and the vitality of youth but it did not yet have the permanent contours of its middle age. And it bore all the signs of healthy living and living that was not only for the sake of satisfying his appetites.
“Why—it never occurred to me,” said Gage, puffing a little harder at his cigar.
“That I might get married?”
“I don’t know. I rather thought that if you married you’d pick a different sort of a girl.”
“I might have done that a long time ago. I’ve seen enough sorts. No—I never have seen one before who really—”
He paused reflectively, unaccustomed in the language of emotion.
“She’s a fine looking girl.” Gage felt he must pay some tribute.
“She is fine looking. She has a face that you can’t forget—not for a minute.”
“But,” said Gage, “you must know that she’s the rankest kind of a woman’s righter—a feminist.”
“What’s a feminist?” asked Walter calmly.
“Damned if I know. It means anything any woman wants it to mean. It’s driven everybody to incoherence. But what I mean is that that kind of woman doesn’t make any concessions to—sex.”
They lifted the conversation away from Margaret into a generalization. Both of them wanted to talk about her but it couldn’t be done with her as an openly acknowledged example.
“Well,” answered Carpenter, “perhaps that was coming to us. Perhaps we were expecting women to make too many concessions to sex. There are a lot of uncultivated qualities in women you know. They can’t devote all their time to our meals and our children.”
“I don’t object to their devoting their time to anything they like. I do object to their scattering themselves, wearing themselves out on a lot of damned nonsense. Let them vote. Granted we’ve got to have a few female political hacks like this Thorstad woman. It won’t hurt her any. It’s all right for Mrs. Brownley—and that type of wise old girl—to play at politics. But for a woman—a young woman who ought to be finding out all the things in life that belong to her, who ought to be—letting herself go naturally—being a woman—for her to go in for a spellbinder’s career is depressing and worse.”
Walter smiled quizzically.
“Haven’t women always been just that, spellbinders? Isn’t that the job we gave them long ago? Haven’t women been spellbinders for thousands of years?”
“God knows they have,” said Gage.
He was silent for a moment, recollecting his argument, then plunged on.
“It was all right when it was instinctive and natural but now it’s so damned self-conscious. They’re picking all their instincts to pieces, reading Freud on sex, analyzing every honest caress, worrying about being submerged in homes and husbands. It’s wrecking, I tell you, Walter. It’s spoiling their grain. And I’ll tell you another thing. It’s the women’s colleges that start it all. If I had my way I’d burn the things to the ground. They start all the trouble.”
Walter broke the silence again.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you was because some of the difficulties you suggest were simmering in my own mind. And it always seemed to me that you and Helen got away with the whole business so well. You’ve had children—you’ve managed to keep everything—haven’t you worked it out for yourself anyway?”
“You can’t work it out,” said Gage, impatiently, “by just having children. It doesn’t end the chapter.”
“It’s a difficult time.”
“It’s a rotten time. You know I can’t help feeling, Walter, that the women of this generation are potentially all that they claim to be actually. It isn’t that I’d deny them any chance. But to let them be guided by fakirs or by their own inexperience will land them in a worse mess than ever. Look at some of them who have achieved prominence-pictures in the New York Times anyway. Their very pictures show they are neurasthenic. Look at the books written about them that they feed on. Books which won’t allow a single natural normal impulse or fact of sex to go unanalyzed. Books which question every duty. Books which are merely tracts in favor of barrenness. Books written almost always by people who live abnormally. After a diet of that, can any woman live with a man wholesomely—can she keep her mind clear and fine?”
Walter shook his head—then laughed.
“Well—what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m not going to do a damned thing but growl about it, I suppose. As a matter of fact I don’t care what most women do. But when I see the fakirs lay their hands on Helen—Helen, who is about as perfect a woman—” he stopped abruptly, and then went on. “I’m not a very good person to talk to on this woman question. I’m balled up, you see. I only know that the trend is dangerous. They got their inch of political equality. Now they want an ell. They don’t want to be women any longer.”
“It’s all interesting,” answered Walter. “Of course, it’s difficult not to think in terms of one’s own experiences. Now I never have seen a woman like Miss Duffield. Of course I haven’t an idea that she’ll have me. But personally I’d be quite willing to trust to her terms if she did. I’ve never seen a woman of more essential honesty.”
They were disinclined to talk further. Gage, after a few trivialities, left Walter to his dream, conscious that what he had said had produced no disturbance or real question in the other’s mind. It was easy for one to transcend generalities with the wonderful possibilities of any particular case, Gage knew. He’d done it himself.