Helen made her way through such reflections as these, not as I have written them down in words, but as one walking through the dark in a dangerous place, with cautious steps and outstretched hands, feeling the edges of strange abysses with her feet, touching unknown things that might be alive with reptilian life.
The private mental life of all women, good or bad, is usually morbid, consisting of thoughts or speculations which bring an emotional crisis and leave them in fears and tears more frequently than we can believe, judging by the faces they show.
Helen passed at this time through some such crisis. She was not changed by it, because women of that sort are the “amens” of their sex. But she was confirmed. She remembered what George had said long ago about this belief in the freedom of love. She had often recalled it, always with a pang of terror. If she had ever been jealous of him, it was in this indefinite way. Now the way that led to such love seemed to widen before her eyes.
She was alone in her room, sitting on the side of her bed during this scene with herself. You know by your own experience, if you are a married woman, that you always sit on the side of your bed when you are dramatizing the sadder prospects of going on doing your duty by this husband—or of not doing it. You chose the bed instead of a chair because of a potential sense of prostration. You prepare yourself to fall back in a storm of tears or to sink upon your knees in prayer for strength to bear this “cross.” The more modern woman is said frequently to rise unshriven, stride majestically across the room and stare at her own proudly rebellious reflection in the mirror.
Helen did none of these things. She simply sat there, dry-eyed, unprayerful, not rebellious, reviewing the future. This can be done with amazing vividness, because the future is always a repetition and development of the past. Then she made a resolution. It was that later secret marriage vow a wife sometimes takes after she is acquainted with the deflation and vicissitudes of this relation. Whatever happened, she would be a good and dutiful wife to George. She would be patient. Nothing should move her to reproach him. Thus she abandoned her rights and self-respect. I do not say that she ought to have done this; I doubt it; but the fact remains that many women do it. And in the end they frequently become sanctuaries for disgracefully defeated husbands. But to say so is not to recommend the practice. My task is to show how it worked out in this instance. And you are warned therefore that a sanctuary may become a very fine edifice, even smacking a little of worldly grandeur.
CHAPTER XIII
The little pale image of goodness so frequently seen sitting in Cutter’s car before the bank waiting for him around five o’clock in the afternoon was what remained of the original Helen two years after he had relinquished his plan to live in New York.
Keeping an entirely good resolution may be strengthening to character, but it is fearfully damaging to feminine beauty. For one thing such women lose the sense of clothes. Helen had known how to dress in the happy, wild-rose period of her youth; but how can you keep up the flaunting, flowing sweetness of your draperies when you are no longer a girl to be won, but have become a wife who has been reduced to her duties and her virtues?