“You have created a place to live in where nobody can live except as you do,” he went on.
He took no notice of the fact that she sat with one hand on her breast, staring at him with a look of mortal pain.
“Well, I will be more considerate of you than you can be of me, Helen,” he began again. “We will drop the idea of going to New York. You like this place. I might be contented here myself, if I had nothing to do except keep it. But I have my business, a man’s name and reputation to make. I will stay here when my affairs don’t require me to be somewhere else. You understand,” giving her an eye thrust.
“Yes,” she answered, meeting this thrust steadily. She was dying to her happiness, not without reproach, but without fear.
He crossed his legs and swung his foot after this deed. He did not tell her that Shippen had offered him a partnership in a big business the night before. In view of her unreasonable prejudice against Shippen, this information would only have furnished her with stronger objections to his plans.
The point was that she had failed him as a helpmate in the career he had chosen. He purposed to alter his course accordingly. He would do the square thing by her. She was his wife. He had that affection for her; but she should not block his way. He meant to get on with her or—without her. Other men did. He knew successful men in New York, whose wives spent half their time in Europe or somewhere else. He supposed he might do better than that. The bank in Shannon would require a good deal of his time. He would come home occasionally. He must spend a few days out of every month there.
This was the end. Helen sensed it. She saw his side of the situation. She had failed her husband. She had been obliged to do so. He had never expressed the least regret because she had not borne children, but she knew that if they had had children, this would have made all the difference. She supposed she herself might have been a different sort of woman if she could have been a mother. Her influence as a wife had never reached beyond the door of their home. Now she had failed him at this upward turn in his career.
She had been a good wife to him according to the Scriptures, but he needed another kind of wife, one who could fill a public position, a wife according to the world. She grasped this fact clearly, held it before her, regarded it with remarkable intelligence during a strictly private interview she had with herself on this subject some time the next day. She wondered how many wives combined the two offices which George required of her. If you were the social official of his home, if you “played the game,” as he called it, how could you be—well, the kind of wife she had been to George?
She thought of Shippen in connection with this reflection. She could not have told why, but she did. She was not so stupid as not to suspect that Shippen had something to do with this sudden desire that George had to live in New York. “Playing the game” meant coming in constant contact with men like Shippen, women like the women they had discussed that night at dinner—Shippen and soubrettes; somebody’s wife they had seen in a café with a man who was not her husband and whom they had discussed with a curious sort of grinning admiration, as if this lady was a lady to be reckoned with.
Helen was wrong, of course, in the picture she drew of the game the worldly wife must play. But there was this much sanity in her point of view: Such a wife cannot always choose her partner nor the card she must play. It is a skin game, matrimonially speaking, and sometimes the one skinned is the husband, more frequently it is the wife, even if it is only the gossips who do the skinning.