Beside these distracting questions, the once all-important matter of professional and worldly ambition seemed not worth troubling about. They even so vexed him that he had become profoundly indifferent as to Josephine. He saw her rarely. When they were alone he either talked neutral subjects or sat almost mute, hardly conscious of her presence. He received her efforts at the customary caressings with such stolidity that she soon ceased to annoy him. They reduced their outward show of affection to a kiss when they met, another when they separated. He was tired—always tired—worn out—half sick—harassed by business concerns. He did not trouble himself about whether his listless excuses would be accepted or not. He did not care what she thought—or might think—or might do.
Josephine was typical of the women of the comfortable class. For them the fundamentally vital matters of life—the profoundly harassing questions of food, clothing, and shelter—are arranged and settled. What is there left to occupy their minds? Little but the idle emotions they manufacture and spread foglike over their true natures to hide the barrenness, the monotony. They fool with phrases about art or love or religion or charity—for none of those things can be vivid realities to those who are swathed and stupefied in a luxury they have not to take the least thought to provide for themselves. Like all those women, Josephine fancied herself complex—fancied she was a person of variety and of depth because she repeated with a slight change of wording the things she read in clever books or heard from clever men. There seemed to Norman to be small enough originality, personality, to the ordinary man of the comfortable class; but there was some, because his necessity of struggling with and against his fellow men in the several arenas of active life compelled him to be at least a little of a person. In the women there seemed nothing at all—not even in Josephine. When he listened to her, when he thought of her, now—he was calmly critical. He judged her as a human specimen—judged much as would have old Newton Hallowell to whom the whole world was mere laboratory.
She bored him now—and he made no effort beyond bare politeness to conceal the fact from her. The situation was saved from becoming intolerable by that universal saver of intolerable situations, vanity. She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar vanity of woman, the creation of man's flatteries lavished upon the sex he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the vanity of her class—the comfortable class that feels superior to the mass of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social rank—and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human under such a weight as this. If we are at all fair in our judgments of our fellow men, we marvel that the triumphant class—especially the women, whose point of view is never corrected by the experiences of practical life—are not more arrogant, more absurdly forgetful of the oneness and the feebleness of humanity.
Josephine was by nature one of the sweet and simple souls. And her love for Norman, after the habit of genuine love, had destroyed all the instinct of coquetry. The woman—or, the man—has to be indeed interesting, indeed an individuality, to remain interesting when sincerely in love, and so elevated above the petty but potent sex trickeries. Josephine, deeply in love, was showing herself to Norman in her undisguised natural sweet simplicity—and monotony. But, while men admire and reverence a sweet and simple feminine soul—and love her in plays and between the covers of a book and when she is talking highfaluting abstractions of morality—and wax wroth with any other man who ignores or neglects her—they do not in their own persons become infatuated with her. Passion is too much given to moods for that; it has a morbid craving for variety, for the mysterious and the baffling.
The only thing that saves the race from ruin through passion is the rarity of those by nature or by art expert in using it. Norman felt that he was paying the penalty for his persistent search for this rarity; one of the basest tricks of destiny upon man is to give him what he wants—wealth, or fame, or power, or the woman who enslaves. Norman felt that destiny had suddenly revealed its resolve to destroy him by giving him not one of the things he wanted, but all.
The marriage was not quite two weeks away. About the time that the ordinary plausible excuses for Norman's neglect, his abstraction, his seeming indifference were exhausted, Josephine's vanity came forward to explain everything to her, all to her own glory. As the elysian hour approached—so vanity assured her—the man who loved her as her complex soul and many physical and social advantages deserved was overcome with that shy terror of which she had read in the poets and the novelists. A large income, fashionable attire and surroundings, a carriage and a maid—these things gave a woman a subtle and superior intellect and soul. How? Why? No one knew. But everyone admitted, indeed saw, the truth. Further, these beings—these great ladies—according to all the accredited poets, novelists, and other final authorities upon life—always inspired the most awed and worshipful and diffident feelings in their lovers. Therefore, she—the great lady—was getting but her due. She would have liked something else—something common and human—much better. But, having always led her life as the conventions dictated, never as the common human heart yearned, she had no keen sense of dissatisfaction to rouse her to revolt and to question. Also, she was breathlessly busy with trousseau and the other arrangements for the grand wedding.
One afternoon she telephoned Norman asking him to come on his way home that evening. "I particularly wish to see you," she said. He thought her voice sounded rather queer, but he did not take sufficient interest to speculate about it. When he was with her in the small drawing room on the second floor, he noted that her eyes were regarding him strangely. He thought he understood why when she said:
"Aren't you going to kiss me, Fred?"
He put on his good-natured, slightly mocking smile. "I thought you were too busy for that sort of thing nowadays." And he bent and kissed her waiting lips. Then he lit a cigarette and seated himself on the sofa beside her—the sofa at right angles to the open fire. "Well?" he said.
She gazed into the fire for full a minute before she said in a voice of constraint, "What became of that—that girl—the Miss Hallowell——"