Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His passion for high principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy with his career.
“She is too intelligent, too high-minded,” he often reassured himself, “to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling. She has heard nothing but class-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people, with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as they are.”
So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity: “Poor fallen queen—to marry beneath her. How she must have fought against the idea of such a plebeian partner.”
“Plebeian—you?” Marian looked at him proudly. “Why, one has only to see you to know.”
“Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain, ordinary, common, untitled Americans.”
“Why, so were mine,” she laughed.
“Don’t! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known that.”
“I am absurd, am I not?” Marian said gaily. “But let me have my craze for well-mannered people and I’ll leave you your craze for the—the masses.”
They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation; for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this matter—his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a sociological unit.
He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening, Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct suggested nothing to her, bored her.