Fosdick decided that "delicacy" was unnecessary, as Armstrong was out of the Carlin family. "It's all very well," said he, "for a young fellow to go crazy about a girl when he's courting. But to keep on being crazy about her after they've got used to each other and settled down—it's past me. It defeats the whole object of marriage, which is to steady a man, to take woman off his mind, and give him peace for his work. In my opinion, there's too much talk about love nowadays. It ain't decent—it ain't decent! And it's setting the women crazy, with so much idle time on their hands. Morris is stark mad about that wife of his, and all he gets out of it is what a man usually gets when he makes a fool of himself for a woman. She thinks of nothing but spending money, and she keeps him poor. The faster he earns, the wilder she spends. I suppose he thinks she cares for him—when working him is simply a business with her."
If Fosdick had known what Mrs. Morris was about at that very hour, there would have been even more energy in his denunciation of her. As soon as her husband had got home the previous night, he had confided to her the whole of his new and dazzling opportunity—not only all that his secret employer expected him to make of it but all that he purposed to make of it. She was not a discreet woman; so, it was fortunate for him that her listening when he talked "shop," as she called his career, was a pretense. She gathered only what was important to her—that he felt sure of making a great deal out of the new venture.
He meant reputation; she assumed that he meant money. She began to spend it the very next day. Even as Josiah Fosdick was denouncing her, she was in an art store negotiating for a set of medieval tapestries for her salon. As antiques, the tapestries were wonderful—wonderful, like so large a part of the antiques that multimillionaires have brought over for their houses and for the museums—wonderful as specimens of the ingenuity of European handicraftsmen at forgery. As works of art, the tapestries were atrocious; as household articles, they were dangerous—filthy, dust- and germ-laden rags. But "everybody" was getting antique tapestries; Mrs. Morris must have them. She was an interesting and much-admired representative of the American woman who goes in seriously for art. To go in seriously for art does not mean to cultivate one's sense of the beautiful, to learn to discriminate with candor among good, not so good, not so bad, and bad. It means to keep in touch with the European dealers in things artistic, real and reputed; to be the first to follow them when, a particular fad having been mined to its last dollar, they and their subsidized critics and connoisseurs come out excitedly for some new period or style or school. Mrs. Morris was regarded as one of the first authorities in fashionable New York on matters of art. Her house was enormously admired; she was known to every dealer from Moscow to the tip of the Iberian peninsula; and incredible were the masses of trash they had worked off upon her and, through her recommendations, upon her friends.
Her "amazing artistic discernment"—so Sunnywall, the most fashionable of the fashionable architects, described it—was the bulwark of her social position. Whenever a voice lifted against the idle lives of fashionable people, how conclusive to reply, "Look at Mrs. Joe Morris—she's typical. She devotes her life to art. It's incalculable what she has done toward interesting the American people in art." She even had fame in a certain limited way. Her name was spoken with respect from Maine to California in those small but conspicuous circles where possession of more or less wealth and a great deal of empty time has impelled the women to occupy themselves with books, pictures, statuary, furniture they think they ought to like. To what fantastic climaxes prosperity has brought the old American passion for self-development! The men, to shrewd and shameless prostitution in the market-places; the women, to the stupefying ignorance of the culture that consists in the mindless repetitions of the slang and cant and nonsense of intellectual fakirs.
Mrs. Morris told her husband about the new tapestries at dinner. That was her regular time for imparting to him anything she knew he would be "troublesome" about; and it was rapidly ruining his digestion. She chose dinner because the presence of the servants made it impossible for him to burst out until the fact that the thing was done and could not be undone had time to batter down his wrath. Usually she spoke between soup and fish—she spoke thus early that she might gain as much time as possible. So often did she have these upsetting communications to make that he got in the habit of dreading those two courses as a transatlantic captain dreads the Devil's Hole; and on evenings when the fish had come and gone with nothing upsetting from her, he had a sudden, often exuberant rush of high spirits.
"I dropped in at Violette's to-day for another look at those tapestries," she began.
At "Violette's" he paused in lifting the spoon to his lips; at "tapestries" he pricked his ears—one of the greatest trials of his wife's married life was that independent motion of his ears, "just like one of the lower animals or something in a side show," she often complained.
"And I simply couldn't resist," she ended, looking like a happy, spoiled child. He dropped the spoon with a splash.
"Do be careful, Joe," she remonstrated sweetly. "We can't change the dinner-cloth every night, and such frequent washing is ruinous. I had them sent home, and you'll be entranced when you see them."
"Did you give Violette his original price?" he demanded, as his color, having reached an apoplectic blue-red, began to pale toward the normal.