There was no provision then or even now at Ellis Island to exclude these lepers of decaying civilization afflicted with the most insidious social diseases of the mind. They had a fine time working up conditions which were presently to result in mental, moral and social unrest, strikes and the perversions of all sound doctrines. The universities in particular received these doctrines gladly—mere theories, so far as the deans and doctors were concerned, upon which they performed intellectual stunts before their classes; trapeze work, nothing more. At that time the most unscrupulous men in this nation were these teachers of youth. Now they may name their converts by the millions; but then the “young gentlemen” who listened had not got a working use of this diablerie. They talked of liberty as if liberty was license by way of appearing swank intellectually.
George had come home that summer fresh cut from the classroom of a certain professor who held advanced views on what men were really entitled to in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
One evening he was seated beside Helen on a bench beneath an arbor covered with vines of trailing clematis. They had been there a long time. Nothing had happened, to put it exactly as Helen inwardly interpreted the situation. Nothing could happen yet, to put it according to George’s decision. He had been home barely two weeks. Helen impressed him as being so ineffably innocent, so remote from his passion that it would be almost an insult to make love to her. Love enjoined silence like the benediction in a church.
They sat beneath the star-white clematis blossoms, confounded with each other. Helen waited. If only he would say something that would ease her of this pain, this humiliation of feeling as she did toward a man who might regard her merely as a friend! She thought he might be interested in her; he had been there almost every evening since his return. But she did not know. What suspense lovers bear when the whole tittering world knows the truth they dare not believe.
George started to smoke, tilted his chin up, expelled a twin bugle of smoke from his nostrils, narrowed his eyes and stared into the immensity of the night. He was very handsome posed like this, and knew it.
Men are much more presumptuously vain than women. They can be vain with no preparation, in their shirt sleeves, with a three days’ stubble of beard on their faces and no hair at all on their heads. Their vanity seems to be a sort of rooster-tail instinct, with which they have been endowed so that they may do the work of the world and waste no time primping. It is an illusion, of course, this physical egotism, but the queer thing is that it is an illusion of them shared by most women. So they get away with it. And few of them ever know how purposefully and sardonically they are afflicted by Nature with homeliness.
On the other hand, when you get down to the psychological facts, I doubt if women are vain at all. They may be beautiful, but even at that they have so little confidence in their beauty that the last one of them must finance her assurance with all the make-believe art of loveliness. I suppose she has discovered that it is not beauty that wins the lover, but it is the deliberate proclamation she thus makes to him of her charms. And this is no illusion. For the history of that grotesque sex is that the average man will pass a naturally beautiful woman every time to pay his court to a painted, powdered and puffed woman who is not nearly so good-looking, if you washed her face and buttoned her up to the neck-line of modesty.
Here was Helen, for example, seated beside this young man, all whiteness and sweetness, eyes so blue that even in this moonlit darkness they showed like sunlit skies, lips pink, parted like the petals of a rose, teeth like pearls glistening between—the very emblem of loveliness; and yet she was in an anguish of uncertainty, lest he did not and never would care for her. I don’t know—this may be one of the scurvy tricks Nature plays on women to keep them humble. If so, it is not the only one. I admire the achievements and beauties of Nature as much as any one, but I must say from first to last her methods appear to me unscrupulous.
The silence had grown oppressive. Helen made some slight movement. She probably clasped her hands and squeezed her patience. It was hard to be omitted so long from his thoughts. The rustle she made, faint as it was, recalled him, as he let her know with a glance.
“I was just thinking, Helen, what a sorry little runt of a town this is,” he said, lifting his chin a trifle higher over the little runt of a town.