As she entered the drawing-room she came from out of doors, a slender, unfleshly figure, all intellect and idea. Her vices being wholly of the spirit were not recognized as vices, so that she passed as the highest type of the good woman which the continent of America knows anything about. Being the highest 234 type of the good woman she had, moreover, the privilege which American usage accords to all good women of being good aggressively. No other good woman in the world enjoys this right to the same degree, a fact to which we can point with pride. The good English woman, the good French woman, the good Italian woman, are obliged by the customs of their countries to direct their goodness into channels in which it is relatively curbed. The good American woman, on the other hand, is never so much at home as when she is on the warpath. Her goodness being the only standard of goodness which the country accepts she has the right to impose it by any means she can harness to her purposes. She is the inspiration of our churches, and the terror of our constituencies. She is behind state legislatures and federal congresses and presidential cabinets. They may elude her lofty purposes, falsify her trust, and for a time hoodwink her with male chicaneries; but they are always afraid of her, and in the end they do as she commands. Among the coarsely, stupidly, viciously masculine countries of the world the American Republic is the single and conspicuous matriarchate, ruled by its good women. Of these rulers Miss Marion Walbrook was as representative a type as could be found, high, pure, zealous, intolerant of men’s weaknesses, and with only spiritual immoralities of her own.
Seated in one of her slender upright armchairs she had the impressiveness of goodness fully conscious of itself. A document she held in her hand gave her the judicial air of one entitled to pass sentence.
“I’m sorry, Barbara; but I’ve some disagreeable news for you.”
Barbara woke. “Indeed?”
“I’ve just come from Augusta Chancellor’s. She talked about—that man.”
“What did she say?”
“She said two or three things. One was that she’d met him one day in the Park when he decidedly wasn’t himself.”
“Oh, it’s hard to say when he’s himself and when he isn’t. He’s what the French would call un original.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. The originality of men is commonplace as it’s most novel. This man is on a par with the rest, if you call it original for him to have a woman in the house.”