A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

But she could not believe, for long, that the whole fabric of her morals had been raised in obedience to a conspiracy. She was not virtuous, after all, because men imposed virtue on her. She had never wanted to be anything else. She could not bear, knowingly, to treat people cruelly, and as for sex, one husband and one family had occupied her fully. She was free now, but the life that was left to her could hardly be troubled by any such adventures. James, on the other hand, had not been so quietly content with virtue. She remembered now, though she had not attended to it at the time, a long defence that James had tried to make. She, he had said, had never attended to what he wanted, had never known or cared. She had merely assumed that his wants were like her own.

It was growing dark, and the city below her great leaded window showed black and yellow. She stopped her pacing to turn on the light, for she needed in her confusion the gay reassurance of the beautiful room. The light that collected its shining colours seemed to illumine her distress, making it less formidable, though not yet, alas, more clear.

She sat down in one of the painted chairs and smoothed the habitual grey silk that covered her knees. She was trying to remember what it was that James had said. He had said that lies—the lies he had told her—were the price he had had to pay for her comfort of mind and ignorance of evil—something to that purpose, at any rate, her memory was not exact. That, of course, when she thought it over, fitted in very well as part of the theory. Virtue and innocence are artificial, to be preserved only by ignorance of the world. Women, therefore, if they remain virtuous, must sympathise with men's temptations while carefully refusing to understand them. A man cannot help being tempted—that had been the burden of James's excuse—and there may come a point, of course, when he is but human. A woman, on the other hand, presumably can, since no temptation must be too strong for her. A good woman, obviously, is not tempted; if she felt the desires of men she would be, at heart, a wicked woman, not the sort of woman that James would have cared to marry. So he had married a good woman, and her goodness had gone to make things hard for him.

Mary, who detested cynicism, was dismayed by these thoughts.

Roughly, though, she told herself, they were true. James had certainly liked her to be the type of woman she was. He loved her for it, he preferred her even to his less ignorant though equally virtuous daughters. Mary wondered what Rosemary thought of it all. Mary, at Rosemary's age, had thought of nothing—Rosemary had probably reduced the whole thing to a theory. She had certainly horrified James on one occasion by saying that our divorce laws are scandalous; probably she believed in free love, whatever that might be—it was not a thing that Mary had ever pictured to herself. Fortunately it was not of much importance what Rosemary believed—she was a dear, good girl under all her modernity and could be trusted not to act on her convictions.

Mary had hardly had time to take comfort from this reassurance when a new possibility occurred to her. Supposing—impossible though it was—that Rosemary could not be trusted! Supposing she behaved exactly as James had done, that she became the mistress of another man after her marriage without telling Anthony. From one point of view the cases were parallel—whatever codes the world might accept for a man, Mary would never have married James if she had thought that he was free to deceive her. What would James have said to that?—her lip curled at the thought of his hypocritical horror; it was only afterwards that she asked herself what her own attitude would have been. Deceit, of course, is always terrible, there can be no doubt of it, but she couldn't doubt, either, that she would have forgiven Rosemary. She would have forgiven her and she would have thought Anthony a brute if he had not forgiven her too. She would have advised Rosemary, as a matter of course, to tell Anthony—well, James had told her. He had told her when he might have lied to her. She would not have believed him, but she could hardly have insisted against his denial. Unwillingly she faced a further question—would she have counselled Rosemary to tell Tony if she knew beforehand that he would not forgive? Might not she have said, even though she knew it was wrong, "It's all over my dear, you must think of the future now, and not of the past?" Tony, of course, might have divorced Rosemary—and she had run away from James.

She jumped up and went over to the window—"Very well then, very well then," her thoughts ran, "but where is your standard? Where is the basis of your judgments? How can you say, in the face of this, that you have not been cruel? What would you think if Anthony treated your daughter as you have treated James!"

Mary sat down again on the low window-ledge and looked out into the darkness. Far below her lights were moving in the cleft of the narrow street. She did not see them, or London that lay spread out towards the east. Where was her standard then, how could she decide? It had seemed easy enough to judge men and women, their virtues and their sins, but in the narrow circle of her own life justice eluded her. She had been angry with James; she had only thought of shielding Rosemary from an irresponsible and cruel world. James, after all, she told herself in excuse, was a man, a master of life. Men had made the world to please themselves, James should not have needed her protection from it. But this argument was not very convincing. James had not created modern morals: in such a sphere he was decidedly a person who took things as he found them, and if that was a sin, she, until now, had sinned as well as James.

She tried, for a short time, to reconcile her opposing points of view by the discovery of some subtler, loftier moral rule into which they might be harmoniously absorbed. She could not believe that she, a good woman, a fair-minded woman, could ultimately treat so differently a husband who sinned against her and a daughter who sinned against another person. It was only reasonable, she told herself, to assume that some reconciling system existed. This is not, after all, the first century of man's sojourn on the earth, nor his first attempt at building a civilisation. Somewhere the wisdom of the ages must have evolved a rational and merciful attitude towards human sin.

Mary searched her experience for this attitude but she did not find it. Her acquaintances, on the whole, went no nearer to discussion of the matter than scandal, and Mary was not able, looking back, to find any ethical system beneath their judgments. They forgave the people they pitied and the people they feared—anyone, in fact, whom they wanted to forgive—and they condemned the unfortunates whose affairs were mentioned when they were in a mood for condemnation. The more she thought of them, the more sure Mary felt that she could not have exposed her daughter to their comments. She must find, she decided, some more stable body of opinion, less tainted by laxity and recklessness of thought.