III
All the way home, Gage had wanted to say something to his wife, something in appreciation of her beauty, something to still somehow the desire to express his love. As they stood for a moment in their hallway he sought for but could not find the words. There was in him a conflicting, a very definite enmity to her consciousness of her powers. He did not want to increase it. It seemed to him that to have her know her charm meant that she would lose it. He had seen her lose it so. When he felt that she was deliberate—
“You were very charming to-night, dearest.”
“The first duty of a woman,” she laughed, “is to be charming, if she can.”
There it was. She had set him back. He felt it cruelly. Why hadn’t she simply turned and thanked him, given him the caress he was waiting for? Why had she made it all what he suspected? She had planned every move. Probably planning now—he became stubborn, thwarted, angry.
“I didn’t care much for your friend,” he said, lighting his cigarette.
“No? But you won’t mind my having her here.”
“Well, as you know, I’d much prefer not. I don’t think that sort of woman a healthy influence.”
“And yet you know, Gage, I might be getting a little tired of merely healthy influences. The change might set me up.”
She too was strangely angry. She had been thrilled all evening by the thought of this home-coming. She had been saving up emotions to throw her into Gage’s arms. She wanted to feel—to tell him she loved him. He was making it impossible.
They stood there, longing for each other, yet on guard mentally, afraid of the other’s thrust, the other’s mockery.
“Of course I can’t refuse to let you have any friend of yours here at the house. Only if she comes, I do wish you’d excuse me as much as possible. I do not want to be rude and I certainly shall be if she involves me in these feminist arguments.”
“I don’t believe Margaret would argue with you, Gage.” She said it lightly, her insinuation that he was beyond the pale of argument flicking him with a little sting.
“Possibly not. However, I should not care to waste her time. And as I said to you to-night I don’t like her effect on you.”
“I am not particularly under her influence, Gage. I have my own ideas. What you probably mean is that you object to my doing the things which are interesting women all over the world.”
“When have I ever objected to anything you’ve done?”
“I’ve done nothing, have I? Been secretary to a few small town clubs. Kept house. Tended my babies. That’s all I’ve done except play the piano.”
“Did that dissatisfy you as much as your tone implies?”
“It’s not enough to satisfy women now.”
He shrugged.
“Well—do anything you please, my dear. I certainly won’t stop you if you run for office.”
She was very cold.
“You’re sneering at me, Gage.”
He tossed away his cigarette and came up to her where she stood, still muffled in the cloak she had worn. She was fast in his embrace and it gave her the moment of relief she had sought. She closed her eyes and lay relaxed against his shoulder. And then came the creeping little fear. He had managed her like that. He couldn’t respect her.
“Darling Helen—”
Her thought spoke.
“Margaret would never have let herself go off the point like this—”
“Oh, damn Margaret!” said Gage, letting her go, angrily.
Helen looked at him in disgust and went upstairs.
It wasn’t, thought Gage, pacing up and down the living room, as if he were a reactionary. Helen knew that. He had no objection to women doing anything. He’d said so. He’d shown it. He’d put women on his local Republican committee. And sized them up pretty well too, he told himself. They worked well enough on certain things. Some of them had good minds. But the issue with him and Helen had nothing to do with granting women a concession here and there. That was all right. The trouble was with this woman, these women who made Helen so restless, so unsettled for no particular reason, with no particular object. He hated, as he had said, the self-consciousness of it all. He hated this self-conscious talk, this delving into emotions, this analysis of psychical states and actions, this setting of sex against sex. It ate into emotions. It had made women like that Margaret. He measured his dislike of her, bitterly. Even on their wedding trip she had interfered. He remembered the first flagging in Helen’s abandonment to her love for him. That letter from Margaret, outwardly kind, he felt, outwardly all right, but suggesting things had brought it about. Helen had shown it to him.
“She’s afraid we’ll become commonplace married people,” she said, “but we won’t, will we?”
There, at the start, it had begun. Discussion when there should have been no discussion—feelings pried into. How he hated college women. It should be prohibited somehow—these girls getting together and talking about things. Forming these alliances. All along the line, for six years, and this was the first time he’d even met her, this Margaret had been held up to him. Margaret’s letters had come and with each of them would sweep over Helen that fear that she was becoming dull—sliding backward—those little reactions against him—those pull-backs. At the time Bennett was born the same thing had happened. First the natural beauty, then that fear of being swept under by “domesticity.” The way they used the word as if it were a shame, a disgrace. He felt he had never told Helen the half he felt about these things. And now that rotten oath had put him in the wrong. He’d have to apologize. He’d have to begin with an apology and there he would be put in the entire wrong again. It wasn’t as if women didn’t have to be handled like children anyhow. They did. What could you do with them when they got into moods except coax them out of it? There was Helen upstairs now, probably hating him—wishing she were free—envying that spinster friend of hers.
His thoughts took a sudden turn. She couldn’t quite wish that. Surely she didn’t want not to be married to him. She’d never said anything like that. He didn’t really think she had ever for a minute wished it. She was crazy about Bennett and Peggy. She loved him too.
On that thought he went upstairs, his apology on his lips, his mind tangled, but his need of peace with Helen very great.
CHAPTER II
FREDA
FREDA met her father on the street three blocks from home. She saw him coming, laden as usual with books, a package of papers from the psychology class to correct—and the meat. The collar of his ulster was turned up around his ears but Freda knew him even in the gathering twilight, a block away. There was a dependency about Eric Thorstad’s figure—about the meat—that was part of her life.
“Liver or veal?” she asked gayly, taking the fat package from under his arm.
“It’s a secret.”
“Sausage,” she said, “I can tell by the feel and the smell.”
“Aren’t you late, Freda?”
“I went to the movies.”
“Again? I wish you wouldn’t go so often. What do you get out of them?”
“Thrills, father dear.”
“All unreal.”
She skipped into a stride that matched his.
“A thrill is a shiver of romance,” she declared, “it’s never unreal.”
“And what gives the shiver? The white sheet?”
“I’m open minded. Could be a well tailored garden, Nazimova’s gown, a murder on a mountain.”
He laughed and they went along briskly until they came to the third in a row of small yellow frame houses, and turned in at the scrap of cement walk which led up to the porch.
In the kitchen Mrs. Thorstad turned from the stove to kiss them both.
“How was your meeting?” asked her husband.
A kind of glow came over Adeline Thorstad’s face.
“It was a lovely meeting. I am sure that it is significant that so many women, even women like old Mrs. Reece will come to hear a talk on their civic responsibilities. You should have managed to come, Freda.”
Freda put an arm about her mother’s shoulders.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I’d have spoiled the circle of thought. I don’t care whether women vote or not.”
She was six inches taller than her mother’s neat prettiness and at first glance not nearly so attractive. Her rather coarse hair was too thick and pulled back into a loose low knot and her features were heavier than those of her mother’s, her skin less delicate. The neat pyramid of her mother’s blond hair, her smooth, fair skin were almost as they had been fifteen years before. But Freda showed more promise for fifteen years hence. Her hair shaded from yellow to orange red, her eyes were deep blue and her loose-hung, badly managed figure showed a broad gracefulness that her mother’s lacked.
She had somehow taken the little qualities of her mother’s prettiness and made them grander, so that she seemed to have been modeled from an imperfect idea rather than a standard type. In her father was the largeness of build which might have accounted for her, though not too obviously for Mr. Thorstad stooped a little and days in the classroom had drained his face of much natural color. Still he had carried over from some ancestor a suggestion of power which he and his daughter shared.
“Don’t talk like that, Freda. It’s so reactionary. Women nowadays—”
“I know. But I don’t especially approve of women nowadays,” teased Freda. “I think that maybe we were a lot more interesting or delightful or romantic as we were when we didn’t pretend to have brains.”
But her mother ignored her.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” she said. “Set the table and then I must tell you my news.”
They were used to news from Mrs. Thorstad. She was full of the indomitable energy that created little events and situations and exulted in them. Victories in the intrigues of the district federated clubs, small entanglements, intricate machinations were commonplaces to her husband and daughter since Mrs. Thorstad had become district vice-president.
So now when the sausage, flanked by its mound of mashed potatoes, came sizzling to the table and Freda had satisfied her soul by putting three sprays of red marsh-berries in a dull green bowl in the middle, they looked forward to dinner with more anticipation than to Mrs. Thorstad’s surprise. But she began impressively, and without delay.
“I think that this entrance of women into politics may alter the whole course of our lives.”
Freda and her father exchanged a whimsical friendly glance in which no disrespect blended.
“No doubt,” said Mr. Thorstad.
“If I were called to public office, think what a difference it would make!”
“What difference?” asked Freda.
“Why—there’d be more money, more chances to better ourselves.”
Her husband seemed to shrink at the cheaply aspiring phrase, then looked at her with something like the patience of one who refuses to be hurt.
“So now you want to be the breadwinner too, my dear?”
Perhaps she took that for jocosity. She did not answer directly.
“I met Mrs. Brownley—the Mrs. Brownley—at a meeting not long ago. She said she thought there would be a future for me.”
“No doubt,” said her husband, again.
He gazed into the sausage platter reflectively.
Twenty years ago, he might have remembered, Adeline Miller had thought there was a future for him. She had intended to better herself through him. She was teaching then in a little town and he was county superintendent. They had met and been attracted and after a little she had condoned the fact of his Swedish name and of the two parents who spoke no English. She had exchanged the name of Miller for Thorstad, soberly, definitely determined to better herself and profit by the change.
Then there came Freda. Freda, who had stimulated them both as healthy promising babies are likely to stimulate their parents. Thorstad had become a High School instructor, then had left that position after eight years to come as assistant to the professor of psychology in the Mohawk State Normal School, at a slightly lower salary, but “bettering himself.” Ten years ago, that was. He was head of his department now—at three thousand a year. It was his natural height and he had attained it—not a prospector in his work, but a good instructor always. It had taken much labor to have come so far, nights of study, summers spent in boarding houses near the University that he might get his degrees. And Adeline had gone along her own path. During all these years in Mohawk she had been busy too. First with little literary clubs, later with civic councils, state federations, all the intricate machinery of woman’s clubdom.
She had her rewards. Federation meetings in the cities, little speeches which she made with increasing skill. She had been “speaking” for a long time now. During the war she fortified her position with volunteer speaking for Liberty Loans, War Saving Stamps. All this in the name of “bettering others.” All this with that guiding impulse to “better herself.”
Her husband made no demands on her time which interfered with any public work. If it was necessary he could cook his own meals, make his own bed, even do his own washing, and there had been times when he had done all this for himself and Freda. Not that Mrs. Thorstad ever neglected her family. The Family, like Democracy and the Cradle, were three strong talking points always. She was a fair cook and a good housekeeper, a little mechanical in her routine but always adequate. And when she was away she always left a batch of bread and doughnuts and cookies. It was never hard on Eric and he, unlike some men, was handy around the house. He was handy with Freda too from the time he dressed her as a baby until now. Now he was handy with her moods, with her incomprehensible unwillingness to better herself by sharing in her mother’s plans.
Leaning a little toward her mother now, Freda brought the conversation off generalities.
“But the news? We are all agog.”
“The news is that we are to have distinguished guests on Thursday. Mrs. Brownley, Mrs. Gage Flandon, and Miss Margaret Duffield of New York are making a tour of the country and they are to stop here for a day. I am to arrange everything for them. There is no telling to what it may lead.”
“They’re coming here?” Freda’s tone was disgusted. “A lot of women spellbinders. Oh, Lord, save us. I’m going camping.”
“It is a great privilege,” said her mother, with a tight little motion of her lips. “I shall need you, Freda.”