"There's worse than being alone," said Neva.
Another silence; then Narcisse, still in the same train of thought, went on, "Several years ago we made a house for a couple up on the West Side—a good-looking young husband and wife devoted to each other and to their two little children. He lavished everything on her. I got to know her pretty well. She was an intelligent woman—witty, with the streak of melancholy that always goes with wit and the other keen sensibilities. I soon saw she was more than unhappy, that she was wretched. I couldn't understand it. A year or so passed, and the husband was arrested, sent to the 'pen'—he made his money at a disreputable business. Then I understood. Another year or so, and I met her in Twenty-third Street. She was radiant—I never saw such a change. 'My husband is to be released next month,' said she, quite simply, like a natural human being who assumes that everybody understands and sympathizes. 'And,' she went on, 'he has made up his mind to live straight. We're going away, and we'll take a nice, new name, and be happy.'"
Neva had so changed her position that Narcisse could not see her slow, hot tears that are the sweat of a heart in torment. To Narcisse, the reason for that wife's wretchedness was an ever-present terror lest the husband should be exposed. But Neva, more acutely sensitive, or perhaps, because of what she had passed through, saw, or fancied she saw, a deeper cause—beneath material terror of "appearances" the horror of watching the manhood she loved shrivel and blacken, the horror of knowing that the lover who lay in her arms would rise up and go forth to prey, a crawling, stealthy beast.
To understand a human being at all in any of his or her aspects, however far removed from the apparently material, it is necessary to understand how that man or woman comes by the necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter. To study human nature either in the broad or in detail, leaving those matters out of account, is as if an anatomist were to try to understand the human body, having first taken away the vital organs and the arteries and veins. It is the method of the man's income that determines the man; and his paradings and posings, his loves, hatreds, generosities, meannesses, all are either unimportant or are but the surface signs of the deep, the real emotions that constitute the vital nucleus of the real man. In the material relations of a man or a woman, in the material relations of husband and wife, of parents and children, lie the ultimate, the true explanations of human conduct. This has always been so, in all ages and classes; and it will be so until the chief concern of the human animal, and therefore its chief compelling motive, ceases to be the pursuit of the necessities and luxuries that enable it to live from day to day and that safeguard it in old age. The filling and emptying and filling again of the purse perform toward the mental and moral life a function as vital as the filling and emptying and refilling of heart or lungs performs in the life of the body.
Narcisse suspected Neva had turned away to hide some sad heart secret; but it did not occur to her to seek a clew to it in the story she had told. She had never taken into account, in her estimate of Armstrong, his life downtown—the foundations and framework of his whole being. This though, under her very eyes, to the torture of her loving heart, just those "merely material" considerations had determined her brother's downfall, while her own refusal of whatever had not been earned in honor and with full measure of service rendered had determined her salvation.
In the "Arabian Nights" there is the story of a man who marries a woman, beautiful as she in Solomon's Song. He is happy in his love for her and her love for him until he wakens one night, as she is stealing from his side. He follows; she joins a ghoul at a ghoul's orgy in a graveyard. Next morning there she lies by his side, in stainless beauty. Since her father's death, not even when Armstrong was before Neva and his magnetism was exerting its full power over her, not even then could she quite forget the other Armstrong whom she had surprised at his "business." She could no longer think of that "business" merely as "doing what everybody has to do, to get on." She had seen what "finance" meant; she could not picture Armstrong without the stains of the ghoul orgy upon him.
"And now," she thought despairingly, "he has broken finally and altogether with honor and self-respect; has flung me out of his life—forever!"
That night Narcisse took her to a concert at the Metropolitan. Her mind was full of the one thought, the one hatred and horror, and she could not endure the spectacle. The music struck upon her morbid senses like the wailing and moaning of the poverty and suffering of millions that had been created to enable those smiling, flashing hundreds to assemble in splendor. "I must go!" she exclaimed at the first intermission. "I can think only of those jewels and dresses, this shameless flaunting of stolen goods—bread and meat snatched from the poor. You know these women round us in the boxes. You know whose wives and daughters they are. Where did the money come from?" She was talking rapidly, her eyes shining, her voice quivering. "Do you see the Atwaters there with Lona Trafford in their box? Do you know that Atwater just robbed a hundred thousand more people of their savings by lying about an issue of bonds? Do you know that Trafford steals outright one-third of every dollar the poor people, the day laborers, intrust to him as insurance for their old age and for their orphans? Do you know that Langdon there robs a million farmers of their earnings and drives them to the mortgage and the tax sale and pauperism and squalor—all so that the Langdons may have palaces and carriages and the means to degrade thousands into dependence and to steal more and more money from more and more people?"
Narcisse's eyes traveled slowly round the circle, then rested in wonder on Neva. "What set you to thinking of these things?" she asked.
"What always sets a woman to thinking?"