No word of greeting was exchanged between this husband and wife—not even a look. She did not so much as unpurse her lips to smile. His arrogant silence implied that he was alone in this car. Yet we must know that it was his wish she should come for him, since she so often did come and wait for him with this look of dutiful patience.
The married relation is not vocative. It tends toward silence and a sort of dreary neutrality, arrived at by years of mutual defeats. It is easier for a man to be agreeable to another woman who is not his wife for the simple reason that he is innocent of this stranger. She knows none of his faults and she has not failed him in anything. And every woman knows that she is instinctively more entertaining to a man who is not her husband, even if she despises this man and truly, patiently loves her husband, because she is under no bond to agree with him nor to avoid his prejudices. There is nothing accusative or immoral in this fact, any more than there is in a momentary change of thought. It is perfectly natural, when you consider how many years they must dwell upon the same common sense of each other.
If the weather was fine, Cutter only stopped long enough to drop Helen at the house. He might tell her he would be late for dinner or he might be late without telling her. Then he was driven at the same spanking, glittering speed to the golf and country club for a foursome previously arranged.
Cutter had imported the idea of this club. As Cadmus introduced letters into Greece, so had he brought golf to the business men of Shannon. Until then middle-aged citizens accepted the sedentary habits of their years and went down to their graves corpulent and muscleless, developing only a little miserliness toward the last or a few crapulous vices. But now these men, grown bald and gray, who had never spent a surplus nickel nor taken more exercise than healthy invalids, hired caddies for fifty cents an hour, and spent recklessly for golf sticks and especially golf stockings and breeches. And they were to be seen any afternoon stepping springily over these links, whacking balls—for the ninth hole at least—with all the reared-back, straddle-legged, arm-swinging genuflections of enthusiastic youth. Missionaries have spent twenty years in the heart of Africa without accomplishing so much healthful good for the savages there. But in that case the idea of course is not to prolong the life of a savage, but to save his soul. Still, Cutter was a successful missionary in this matter of golf, because the souls of the men in Shannon had long been sufficiently enured to the gospel to be saved, if they could be.
As for the women, that was a different matter. Very few people ever worry seriously about the salvation of these milder creatures. Until quite recently they have been so securely preserved, sheltered and possessed that it was actually difficult for a woman to lose her soul by any obvious overt transgression. Even then you could not be sure she had lost it, since she suffered such overwhelming martyrdom for her offense. And we do not know what kind balances may be arranged in the Book of Life for these poor victims of life in the flesh.
There was also a different standard for women in the matter of outdoor exercise, even at so recent a date as this of which I write. They might caper adventuresomely in the open as girls, but the idea of a married woman spreading her feet and swinging her club at a ball on the golf links at Shannon was unthinkable. If they wanted the air, let them go out-of-doors; if they wanted exercise, let them go back indoors and do something.
So Helen never accompanied her husband to the golf links. She always went in the house and did things that would please him, or at least satisfy him when he came home.
They were still living in the house at the end of Wiggs Street. No changes had been made in it, not a stitch had been added to it. It was simply laundered, so to speak, once in so often with a fresh coat of white paint.
But it was not so sparsely settled within as it had been when she came there as a bride.
Two years after Helen’s marriage Mrs. Adams had passed away with no to-do about going at all. She was ill three days, very quietly and comfortably unconscious. Then she had gone to join that highly respectable class of saints in paradise to which no doubt her carpenter husband already belonged. Helen inherited her mother’s estate, which consisted of a few thousand dollars’ worth of securities in her safety box at the bank, the cottage on Wiggs Street and the contents of this cottage. The cottage was promptly sold and, together with the sale of the securities, furnished George with the money for his first successful speculation.