The Eddy: A Novel of To-day

by Clarence Louis Cullen

She looked at him with a sort of weary curiosity.

"It is just as I have said," she murmured after having made this inspection of him. "It has never been your fault. You have, in your way, been kind to me. You still are. You care for me in your way. But it is a bad way, Fred. I know that now. It is too late, of course. Nevertheless, I am going to make what amendment I can. I must try to preserve at least a shred of womanhood. I am sure you are not going to take it angrily or bitterly. But we have reached the parting of the ways, my friend. You have been fair enough, from your point of view, through the whole wretched business. It has been my fault, my weakness, from the beginning."

Judd plumped into a deep chair near her and, pondering, blew great smoke-rings at the portieres.

"The thing is," he said, presently, "that you've lost your nerve. And, having lost it, why, you've gone into the camp of the folks you call the Smugs. Am I right?"

"You are utterly wrong," she replied, spiritlessly. "I have little toleration for—well, death-bed repentances. That is too old and too unconvincing a story. A woman does as she likes, flouts the world, snaps her finger at usage, until she becomes middle aged or near it; then she begins to fumble her beads, takes on the face of austerity, and condemns, right and left, the lapses of the younger generation of defiant women. I haven't the least use for that sort of thing. It is simply that I have arrived at the knowledge that a woman is an idiot not to conform and to stay conformed. It is mere madness for a woman to suppose that she can fight so unequal a battle against the world's opinion as I have foolishly tried to fight. It makes no difference as to a man. He can do as he pleases. I suppose it was the inequality of that law that goaded me into it all in the first place. But I've lost. I see now that there never was the possibility of any other outcome."

"You get a bit beyond me, you know," said Judd, not argumentatively, but as one seeking enlightenment. "I am willing to grant that men have the best of it, and all that sort of thing. But women know the rules of the game. Then why can't they play the game without moaning and kicking to the umpire?"

"There isn't any umpire except conscience," she answered him. "There isn't any arbitration for a woman. She is what the steel-sheathed law of the ages says she is to be, or she is not. I have not been, and I have lost. That is all. I am not so futile as to complain of the game. I despise myself for having been so opaque as to suppose that I could defy the rules, win, and not be disqualified—as I have been, of course, ever since I tried it."

"It's queer," said Judd, reflectively, after a pause, "how these man-made laws sooner or later anchor all you women, after you've made your flights. The whole thing, you know, is an idiotic system. They try to regulate us by rote and rule, by bell, book and candle. But, after all, they only think they're regulating us that way, don't they? I wonder how many of us really follow their rules? Mighty few that I know of. Openly, we subscribe to all of the iron-bound tenets, privately we laugh at them and do the best we know to rip them apart. It's all a matter of being found out; of being caught with the goods. A woman, of course, has to watch out for more danger signals than a man. But they're pretty clever little watchers, believe me."

"Well, you can't blame them for that," said Mrs. Treharne. "Most of them, at any rate, have the common sense not to attempt to brazen matters out, as I have."

"I see what you mean," said Judd, cogitatively. "Your idea is that it is a woman's business to get all that she can out of life, and that the only way for her to get the most out of life is to pretend to agree to the rules as they've been made for her, and then, if she feels disposed to kick over the traces, why, to keep under cover about it. You're right in that view, of course. But, after all, what difference does it make? Sooner or later, no matter how we play the string, they toss us into a box and plant us. When it comes to that, I can't see why you should permit what you call your conscience to make a wreck of you in this way. What have you done? Why, you've been my companion. Will you be good enough to tell me how that companionship could possibly have been made any better than it has been if, at its outset, a man in a surplice or a mouthing justice had mumbled a few so-called binding words over us? Faugh! You can't believe such crass humbug. The so-called 'consecration of matrimony' is a good enough phrase and a good enough scheme to keep groundlings up to the mark. Don't you suppose we'd have fought and barked at each other just the same if we'd been married according to the frazzled old rule? At that, I'd have married you years ago, just to straighten you out, if there had been the least chance of my prevailing upon my wife, who made life a hell for me with her whinings, to get a divorce from me. But, now that the thing has ambled along to this stage, what's the use of talking about quitting?"