"What ails you, Clarissa? Did that lecture you delivered before the Saturday Afternoon Club go to your head?"
Clarissa flushed. Her club paper on "After the Home--What?" was a sensitive subject. She already had been chaffed a good deal about it.
"Of course I know," she said with dignity, "that I am not a genius. I can't organize. I can't write. I'm not pretending to be in the class with Ibsen or Olive Schreiner or Sonia Kovalevsky! No, nor with the American women who are going to work {139} out their ideas. I don't believe I'd make a good social worker, either. I have n't enough patience and tenderness. But I can talk. You know I can talk, Paul."
Yes, he knew it. To his cost, he knew it. She had the gift of fluent, winning speech, speech with an atmosphere, a charm. Uncouth theories acquired grace on her lips, and plausible theories seemed stronger than they were. She ironed shirt-waists badly, and the starch stuck to the irons, but she could make the worse appear the better reason with deftness and dispatch. Somewhere, somehow, a coal from the sacred fire had touched her lips. You might be indignant, outraged, at her theories, but you never refused to listen while she set them forth.
"I figure it this way," she continued. {140} "In all great causes, the people who can think and write need the help of the people who can talk, to disseminate their ideas, to popularize them, to get them brought home to the people who don't think and don't read, and yet have influence. That shall be my métier. I can do it. I can do it well. I will do it for a living wage and put my heart and soul into doing it. Without going outside a very narrow field,--say, that of parlor talks,--I can yet be a promoter of great causes. I will be a walking-delegate from the Union of the Elect! I will fight the good fight for Utopia! Why, Paul, I can make it glorious!"
Her face shone with a wonderful light. Her slender, delicately rounded figure vibrated with enthusiasm. She did not see the expression on her husband's face. When great thoughts were {141} astir in Clarissa s brain, her high imperturbability, her bright serenity, were maddening. To assail them, logic was as useless as passion. She was simply in another world from this.
Her husband sat down heavily. He felt an unacademic desire to box her ears. Perhaps, had he done so, there would have been no story, for like most women with erratic nerves Clarissa Charleroy had the elemental liking for a masterful man.
However, her husband's Huguenot blood and scholastic training did not help him to carry out such primitive impulses toward domestic discipline. He was a man of sturdy build, with a fine head and brown eyes of the gentle, faithful kind. Conscientious, persistent, upright, he perfectly fitted that old-fashioned description our fathers loved, "a scholar and a gentleman." It {142} cannot be denied that this type is out of place in our modern life; it is especially at a disadvantage when confronted with such a modern wife as his.
"Do you mean to--to leave Marvel and me?" he inquired in a voice that was not as even as he could have wished.
His back was toward the window. His wife could not see that he had turned white, but she did notice that he looked steadily down into the palms of his hands.