A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

[CHAPTER XVII]

MARY spent the next day reading The Shareholder's Guide to Company Law. She did not remember much of it when she had finished, but her aversion to James's proposals had increased. Once she had sold her part of the business in return for money or shares in the new company she would not be able to do anything—if she had read the book aright—without standing up at a General Meeting and delivering a speech. Of that, she felt, she was incapable. There would be not only James to fight, but the new shareholders. She pictured them as stout hard men who would laugh loudly at her. For a few moments she held this pleasant little nightmare in her mind and it decided her. Well then, she must not give way to James, she must refuse to sell.

It was easy in her queer, gaily coloured flat to feel capable of such defiance. It was less easy to think coherently about what James would say. With the thought of him and his offences her mind became confused. She could not envisage him calmly, she could not forget how different he was from the James whom she had loved. She decided that she was not prepared to consider him, and until the evening she put him, as far as she was able, out of her mind.

In the evening a large envelope came from the bank. It bore Trent's writing, and she opened it fearfully to find nothing inside it but some letters and the post-card from Rosemary. Rosemary, in Italy, was having lovely weather and getting on splendidly—as Mary put the post-card down she felt a kindlier feeling towards James. It was generous of him to have sent on her letters. It occurred to her suddenly that with all his faults James had always been generous to her, and often sympathetic. Whatever credit was due to him for that he still deserved—the fact that one is deceiving a person does not make it easier to sympathise with them.

Next day when she awoke in her room,—Chinese blue, sea-green, and indigo, not the colours she would herself have chosen for a bedroom, but stimulating in the early morning,—she came to the conclusion that she had been a little unjust to James. She had taken it for granted that ever since his fall his whole relation with her had been built up of fraud and hypocrisy. Now she could see that she had certainly been wrong. For a month or two James must have suffered from a waning uneasiness, after that he had probably taken his guilt for granted. If he had been kind to her it had been because he was naturally kind. She need not feel that she had been insulted by every different instance of his affection.

She was astonished with herself now for not having understood this before. She had made the discovery of his fault, she reflected, at an unfortunate moment. The more she thought of it, the more sure she felt that James had not let his adventure alter his affection for his wife. The different planes of James's being were unconnected, his mind was not logical. She reminded herself that she had not lived with him for twenty-seven years without getting a glimpse of his attitude towards his business. The business—she turned over restlessly—the business was a problem less easy of solution. For James's infidelity she had simply to forgive him, and within a week he would have forgotten it. But his business was his life.

She must, she told herself, be more energetic. She must not trust to the chance thoughts of the moment. She must sit down on the red and orange sofa, absurd as it might seem, and make herself think, or she would find herself sliding into some plausible position that had no solid reasoning to support it. And by and by she would need solid reasoning—when it came to explaining her conclusions to James. If she could not think yet, she could read, and read she must.

As she became more intimately acquainted, in the week that followed, with what the London Library could tell her of our industrial system, she found her conception of her problem alter. She could laugh now, a little drearily, at the thought of James heading a band of willing but ignorant employers. The facts she learned now were not different in kind from the facts she had known when she invented that pleasing legend, but her attitude towards them was changed. She had not to fit them into her ideal notion of James. Not that he, in this new light, appeared any more a harsh or dishonest man than the majority of the gentlemen who direct the creation of our country's wealth. In some ways, indeed, he seemed even better than they. He might treat his employees badly, but he did not cheat the public. To Mary, that seemed, on the whole, the lesser virtue, but she recognised that to James it might fairly be a cause for pride.

James did not consider himself a cruel employer, and he did not consider himself, either, a hypocrite or a man of loose morals. He seemed to himself, as he seemed to other men, a generous and honourable person. To her, and by her standards, on the contrary, he did not seem so, and the world respected her standards too. She was a good woman, with a good woman's point of view. The world does not like to see a woman uphold immorality, or starve her servants in order to make money. Nevertheless, when James did these things, she was bound, according to the world's judgment, to forgive him, or give way to him, as the case might be. Men praised her stricter standard as long as she applied it to nobody but herself.

For a moment of one darkening winter's afternoon it seemed to Mary that men stood before her, stripped of all but their wickedness, as they might have stood before Miss Percival. Men's chief demand of women was that they should be pleasing when men had time to think of them and quiet when men had not; to this end then women were to keep themselves busy practising a morality too exacting for men themselves. It would be a sad world without virtue, therefore let others be virtuous—from a business point of view an excellent argument. The poor lady paced her room in the painful agitation of one who discovers that he has played the part of a dupe.