A Woman Ventures: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

She overheard two men at the office talking of an adventure he had had while he was in Chicago. She did not hear all, and she got no details, but there was enough to let her see that he had not lived up to their compact. “Now I understand his letter,” she said. “It was the result of remorse.” And with a confused mingling of jealousy and indignation, she reviewed his actions toward her immediately after his return. She now saw that they were planned deliberately to make it impossible for her to think him capable of such a lapse. She could follow the processes of his mind as it worked out the scheme, gauging her credulity and his own adroitness. When she had done, she had found him guilty of actions that concerned their most sacred relations, and that were tainted with the basest essence of hypocrisy.

“I shouldn’t care what he had done,” she said to herself bitterly, “if he had been honest with me—honestly silent or honestly outspoken. I cannot, shall not, ever trust him again. And such needless deception! He acted as if I were the ordinary silly woman who won’t make allowances and can’t generously forgive. I love him, but——”

“I love him, but—” that is always the beginning of a change which at least points in the direction of the end. At first she was for having it out with him. But she decided that he would only think her vulgarly jealous; and so, with unconscious inconsistency, she resolved to violate her own fundamental principle of absolute frankness.

A few weeks and these wounds to her love, inflicted by him and aggravated by herself, seemed to have healed. They were again together almost every day and were apparently like lovers in the first ecstasy of engagement. But while he was completely under her spell, her attitude toward him was slightly critical. She admired his looks, his physical strength, his brilliant quickness of mind, as much as ever. At the same time she began to see and to measure his weaknesses.

She was often, in the very course of laughter or admiration at his cleverness, brought to a sudden halt by the discovery that he was not telling the truth. Like many men of rapid and epigrammatic speech, he would sacrifice anything, from a fact of history to the reputation of a friend, for the sake of scoring a momentary triumph. And whenever she caught him in one of these carelessly uttered falsehoods she was reminded of his falsehood to her—that rankling, cankerous double falsehood of unfaithfulness and deceit.

Another hastener of the mortal process of de-idealisation was the discovery that his sparkle was hiding a shallowness which was so lacking in depth that it offended even her, a woman—and women are not easily offended by pretence in men. His mind was indeed quick, but quick only to see and seize upon that which had been discovered and shown to him by some one else. And so forgetful or so used to borrowing without any sort of credit was he, that he would even exhibit to Emily as original with himself the ideas which she had expressed to him only a few days before. He had a genius for putting everything in the show-window; but he could not conceal from her penetrating, and now critical and suspicious eyes, the empty-shelved shop behind, with him, full of vanity and eagerness to attract any wayfarer, and peering out to note what effect he was producing. She discovered that one of the main sources of his education was Stilson—that it was to an amazing, a ridiculous, a pitiful extent Stilson’s views and ideas and knowledge and sardonic wit which he bore away and diluted and served up as his own. Comparison is the life and also the death of love. As soon as she began to compare him with Stilson and to admit that he was the lesser, she began to neglect love, to leave it to the alternating excessive heat and cold of passion.

But all these causes of a curious decline were subordinate to one great cause—she discovered that he was a coward, that he was afraid of her. The quality which she admired in a man above every other was courage. She had thought Marlowe had it. And he was physically brave; but, when she knew him well and had got used to that cheapest form of courage which dazzles the mob and deceives the unthinking, she saw a coward lurking beneath. He wrote things he did not believe; he shirked issues both in his profession and in his private life; he lied habitually, not because people intruded upon his affairs and so compelled and excused misrepresentation, but because he was afraid to face the consequences of truth.

In February she was saying sadly to herself: “If he’d been brave, he would have made me come to him, could have made me do as he wished. Instead——” She was not proud, yet neither was she ashamed, of the conspicuous tyranny she had established over him.

“It seems to me,” she said to Joan at breakfast one morning, to draw her out, “that the only way to be married, is for each to live his own life. Then at least there can be none of that degrading familiarity and monotony.”

Joan shook her head in vigorous dissent.