"You ought to come with me," rejoined she. "But you never will."
"I've no time for foolishness. And I'm sure you haven't either."
"What ought I to do with myself?"
"What other good women do. Our mothers didn't hang about clubs."
"No. But these aren't pioneer times. Things are entirely different nowadays. That was why—" She did not finish. She did not wish to remind him how he had refused to let her either share his life or make a life of her own. She refrained because the subject might be unpleasant to him. It was no longer unpleasant to her; she now had not the least desire to share his life, was in a way content to drift aimlessly along with the rest of the aimless women.
"Yes, many of the women are different nowadays," said he. "The more reason for my wife's conducting herself as a woman should."
She flushed with sudden anger. "Why can't you accept a woman as a human being?" exclaimed she. "Oh, you men—tempting—compelling—us to be hypocrites—and making our natural impulses rot into vices because they have to be hid away in the dark."
"We will not quarrel," said he, in the calm superior tone he always took when their talk touched on the two sexes. "I simply say I will not tolerate my wife's being a club lounger."
To have answered would have been to say what must precipitate a furious and futile quarrel. She kept silent, with less effort than many women would have to make in the circumstances. She had had the conventional feminine training in self-suppression, that so often gives women the seeming of duplicity and only too often imperceptibly leads them into forming the habit of duplicity. She had also had special training in self-concealment through having been brought up austerely. She kept silent, and made up her mind to obey. She had heard much talk among the women at the club about the "rights of a wife"; but it had not convinced her. She could not see that she, or any other of the women married as was she, contributed to the family anything that entitled her to oppose the husband's will as to how it should be conducted. And she would have scorned to get by cajolery what she could not have got honestly. She was thus the good wife, not through fear of him, for she was not a coward and he was not the sort of small tyrant that makes the women and the children tremble; nor was it because she was faithful to her marriage vows, for she never thought of them. Her submissiveness was entirely due to the agreement she had tacitly signed the day she went back to him, after the talk with her mother. In return for shelter and support she would be, so far as she could, the kind of wife he wanted.
She kept away from the club, stayed at home; and soon the telephone bell was ringing, and pleading voices were giving the flattering proof that in her abrupt divorce from the social life of the town the sense of loss was by no means altogether on her side. And presently over came Sarah Carpenter escorted by her big handsome brother, Shirley Drummond, "as a committee of two," so Sarah put it, "to investigate and report on your cruel and inhuman treatment of us." It was dull, frightfully dull, at the club house, she went on to explain. They did nothing but sit round and try to guess why Courtney Vaughan had dropped them. "And have you forgotten the flower show you were planning? and the play you were going to organize? and the Venetian fête?"