The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

Ken was acutely apprehensive, but of what he was apprehensive he did not know. The thought that Andree and Maude were together, chatting, becoming acquainted, seemed to him very threatening. He had been in a holiday humor, but that humor was gone. He frowned and was conscious of both irritation and depression. It was not right for them to meet. Something was sure to come of it.

It was not at all that he felt that Andree was not a fit companion for Maude Knox. That was not it. He was not ashamed of Andree, and, strangely enough, when one considers his temperament and the hereditary impulses which stirred within him, he was not ashamed of his relations with her. It was an intangible apprehension, a feeling that one woman whom he knew he loved and another woman with whom he might be in love could not meet without unpleasant results to him.

There was curiosity, too, which grew stronger. More than once he had compared Andree with Maude Knox when neither was present, but now they were together, at his side, under his eyes.... He edged away a trifle with elaborate unconsciousness, and presently reached a point from which he could study the girls with covert glances.

It was not so much their appearances that he compared as it was their selves as he knew them, and as they were indicated by what met the eye. He was trying to arrive at a knowledge of what each girl meant in his life, what she could contribute to his life. Perhaps this was wholly selfish, but choice must ever be selfish. It is after choice is made that one may be generous and self-denying.

The contrast between Andree and Maude was so extreme that they seemed to have nothing in common but their sex, and as Ken considered he saw they had not even this in common. At least their conception of it and of its duties and possibilities and obligations and uses were as different as the color of their eyes or the expressions of their faces. One could not see Andree without being conscious that she was a woman, of the femininity of her, and that the chief business of her life was to be the complement of some man. The first emotion that Andree excited was tenderness.... As one looked at Maude Knox his first thought was comradeship, followed by a mental note that she would be reliable, capable of taking care of herself. Maude was not beautiful, but she was pretty, with a clean-cut, boyish prettiness that spoke of health of mind and of body. She was not the sort a man would fall in love with at first sight, but rather one who would first be admired and then loved.... Andree would be loved first, then admired as the sweetness of herself unfolded under the urging of love. Andree was fragile. Ken looked at her lips, perfectly drawn, delicate, sensitive—her most eloquent feature. They were lips to kiss, lips to give kisses. There, perhaps, stood the chief difference between these girls and their attitude toward life: that Andree would give, give, give—asked no other happiness but to give of herself and her sweetness and her tenderness and her love—while Maude would demand an exchange. She, too, could love, but always there would be inhibitions and reservations. She would take thought of practical matters, be efficient in love and marriage. Not that she would be selfish, Ken felt sure, but that she would see to it her relations with the man she loved would be well organized and stabilized. She would be a wife and a comrade to the man she married, and perhaps a dominant force; Andree would be wife and sweetheart, with no thought of dominating, but only of giving, of adding to the happiness of the man she loved.

If love were cruel to Andree, and the man she worshiped unkind, she would fade silently, withdraw into herself, and suffer; Maude would have suffered, but she would have faced the matter and held her own. It would be possible for Maude to go through life alone; that Andree should do so was utterly unthinkable. This was, perhaps, because Andree thought of herself only as a woman, and as a woman whose life must be bound up with the life of some man. Maude Knox thought of herself as an individual, a distinct entity with rights and purposes which must not be invaded or interfered with.

A man might expect help, encouragement, even dynamic career from Maude Knox. He might expect a wonderful fidelity from her. She would take an interest in his life and would want to have a finger in the shaping of his destiny. Andree would play her part in his life less obtrusively, but perhaps as powerfully by keeping alive his love and by lavishing her love upon him. She would ask nothing, demand nothing except a continuance of love and a lavishment of tenderness. So long as love endured she would follow him to the highest success without taking any great thought of that success, or she would have descended with him to the depths of failure without bewailing that failure—for success to her meant but one thing, and that thing was love.

Maude was the ideal wife in a partnership of man and wife as Americans have come to look upon that relation. The vestibule of the Presbyterian church would receive Maude with fulsome compliments and would congratulate Ken upon making a wise selection. Everybody would say that he had won a splendid wife ... and it would be true. She was a typical American wife—that is to say, she embodied those things which Americans have set as their ideals of wifehood.... He wondered what the vestibule would say of Andree, even granting that Andree’s conception of virtue were the American conception. He could not imagine, though he could well imagine the stir she would create. She would be too beautiful—so beautiful as to excite righteous suspicion. She would be beautiful in a foreign sort of way, and therefore a sinful sort of way. The vestibule would never forgive her because she had lived in Paris and because she did not pronounce English as well as it did—through its nose. They would never be able to see into her heart nor to understand the marvel of her goodness.... She was as far outside their experience as she was actually outside Ken’s experience, who studied her hourly, but never understood her and never would understand her.... She would always be a mystery and an anomaly to him. She would always be to him a creature who was guilty according to his inherited conscience and yet escaped the accusation or the stain of guilt. She was bad, yet she was wholly good.

He said this to himself, and then hotly denied it. She was not bad. In his heart he knew she was not bad, and he knew as well that he had never approached a soul which was as clean, as unselfish, as purely tender as hers.... Maude Knox was good, too, capable of unselfishness and fine tenderness. But she could never accomplish what Andree had accomplished. She could never do as Andree did and retain her purity.... He did not realize that this was because Maude herself would have believed herself to have lost her purity.

For Kendall the matter marched back to the attitude he had absorbed from his mother—that relations between the sexes were wicked in themselves and could never be anything else, but that by some miraculous quality belonging to a formula pronounced by a parson it became permissible for designated couples to practise wickedness without fear of punishment. The wickedness remained, but the formula remitted the punishment. That was his mother’s belief.... She had been bitterly ashamed when Kendall became evident, because he was testimony to the world that she had been guilty....