“I will of course obey your orders, Ezra,” she said with a tart emphasis on the word which made him wince, “because I hold old-fashioned ideas of what wifely duty is, quite at variance with the high standard of individual liberty as maintained and explained, I believe, by the brethren of Perfection City. You may rest quite satisfied, I will obey you.”
Having thus stabbed her husband in his most vulnerable point and dexterously driven the poignard up to the hilt in the wound, Olive walked away, leaving Ezra to feel himself a selfish brute.
Ezra spent a wretched half day of self-reproach, and then crept back repentant, begging to be forgiven for being a tyrant to his poor little pet. And his little pet who had paid for her pride with abundant tears, allowed him to kiss her and fondle her and call her sweet silly names, while she declared she never cared to see or speak to that wretched Mr. Cotterell again, and no wonder he was ashamed of his own name, etc., etc., all in the most foolish and approved manner possible to the newly married.
All the same, after a time Olive began to feel sorry for Mr. Cotterell, and to pity him for the very errors of his past life, about which she now saw that he was penitent without wishing to explain to her why. Also she had very much enjoyed meeting him; he was so fresh, cultivated, and original, in his conversation. It was really very dull sometimes with no one to talk to, and the long hot day shimmering by, making her feel as if she were a potato being slowly baked in a hotair oven. There was no excitement in the house-work and—and it was very dreary sometimes. Men delight in reverting to primitive savagery. The most highly civilized man “reverts” in a way which is surprising both for completeness and for rapidity, but women hate the process. Savage woman was a slave, and the more completely a woman becomes subject to primitive conditions the more closely she resembles a slave, and is in virtual bondage either to some human being or to hampering circumstances.
Of appropriate companions of her own sex Olive had absolutely none. Mary Winkle was a rigid reformer, a person all angles, of the sort that never becomes a companion to anyone, for she was always on the war-path, and, besides, between her and Olive there was an unexpressed, but no less real, antipathy. Her daughter, Willette, that creature half boy, half girl, and wholly wild, was always on horseback careering after stray cattle, and though by her ignorance and eccentricity she sometimes amused Olive, she had really no ideas beyond those very concrete ones impressed upon her from without by her open-air life on the prairie. Mrs. Carpenter was a good soul, but a mere stout housewife, with no ideas and only one hope, namely, “that Carpenter would give up his high-fallutin’ notions, an’ go back to York State, an’ settle down comfortable again, an’ be a preacher in a Baptist church.” Mrs. Ruby was old in body, but the youngest of them all in mind, except Uncle David, who was her senior by four years. Mrs. Ruby believed in Perfection City, though she reserved the right of private judgment on certain of the tenets of its founders, and in particular, she had lately felt misgivings as to the worldly wisdom of their principle of non-resistance. She knew, however, that the Pioneers were going to show the world the new and better way—the way which led into no competition for supremacy, but into peaceful paths of universal progress. Property and its attendant imps, greed, strife, jealousy, envy, hatred, and malice, were all banished from Perfection City, and in their place peace and good-will and perfect trust in each other were to reign forever. It was a high ideal, but not a new one. It was eighteen centuries old, though it had never yet been realised. Mrs. Ruby and Uncle David felt sure they had reached the ideal, and all through Madame Morozoff-Smith, the most whole-souled, unselfish, glorious woman of her century. It was a pity she had not a larger theatre in which to present before mankind the new principles of social life it was their privilege to put into practice.
CHAPTER X.
PRACTICAL COMMUNISM.
A day or two after Ezra had laid his commands upon his wife, as we saw in the last chapter, he came home in the evening to find her in floods of tears. Her eyelids were all red with weeping, and she broke out afresh on seeing him.
“What’s the matter?” asked Ezra, in much concern. “What has happened?”
“My poor flowers, my pretty balsams!” sobbed Olive.
“Has the calf got into your garden and spoiled your flowers, my poor child?” he said tenderly.