“I should think they would!” cried she. “And if they came I’d see to it that they were so uncomfortable that they would never come again.”
I worked hard. My salary went up to fifteen hundred, to two thousand, to twenty-five hundred. “Now,” said Edna, “perhaps you’ll get hands that won’t look like a laboring man’s. How can I hope to make nice friends when I’ve a husband with broken finger nails?”
Our expenses continued to outrun my salary, but I was not especially worried, for I began to realize that I had the money-making talent. Three children were born; only the first—Margot—lived. Looking back upon those six years of our married life, I see after the first year only a confused repellent mess of illness, nurses, death, doctors, quarrels with servants, untidy rooms and clothes, slovenly, peevish wife, with myself watching it all in a dazed, helpless way, thinking it must be the normal, natural order of domestic life—which, indeed, it is in America—and wondering where and how it was to end.
I recall going home one afternoon late, to find Edna yawning listlessly over some book in a magazine culture series. Her hair hung every which way, her wrapper was torn and stained. Her skin had the musty look that suggests unpleasant conditions both without and within. Margot, dirty, pimply from too much candy, sat on the floor squalling.
“Take the child away,” cried Edna, at sight of me. “I thought you’d never come. A little more of this and I’ll kill myself. What is there to live for, anyhow?”
Silent and depressed, I took Margot for a walk. And as I wandered along sadly I was full of pity for Edna, and felt that somehow the blame was wholly mine for the wretched plight of our home life.
When I was twenty-eight and Edna twenty-three, I had a series of rapid promotions which landed me in New York in the position of assistant traffic superintendent. My salary was eight thousand a year.
It so happened—coincidence and nothing else—that those eighteen months of quick advance for me also marked a notable change in Edna.
There are some people—many people—so obsessed of the know-it-all vanity that they can learn nothing. Nor are all these people preachers, doctors, and teachers, gentle reader. Then there is another species who pretend to know all, who are chary of admitting to learning or needing to learn anything, however small, yet who behind their pretense toil at improving themselves as a hungry mouse gnaws at the wall of the cheese box. Of this species was Edna. As she was fond of being mysterious about her thoughts and intentions, she never told me what set her going again after that long lethargy. Perhaps it was some woman whom she had a sudden opportunity thoroughly to study, some woman who knew and lived the ideas Edna had groped for in vain. Perhaps it was a novel she read or articles in her magazines. It doesn’t matter. I never asked her; I had learned that wild horses would not drag from her a confession of where she had got an idea, because such a confession would to her notion detract from her own glory. However, the essential fact is that she suddenly roused and set to work as she had never worked before—went at it like a prospector who, after toiling now hard and now discouragedly for years, strikes by accident a rich vein of gold. Edna showed in every move that she not hoped, not believed, but knew she was at last on the right track. She began to take care, scrupulous care, of her person—the minute intelligent care she has ever since been expanding and improving upon, has never since relaxed, and never will relax. Also she began to plan and to move definitely in the matter of taking care of Margot—to look after her speech, her manners, her food, her person, especially, perhaps, the last. Margot’s teeth, Margot’s hair, Margot’s walk, Margot’s feet and hands and skin, the shape of her nose, the set of her ears—all these things she talked about and fussed with as agitatedly as about her own self.