Edna became a crank on the subject of food—what is called a crank by the unthinking, of whom, by the way, I was to my lasting regret one until a few years ago. For a year or two her moves in this important direction were blundering, intermittent, and not always successful—small wonder when there is really no reliable information to be had, the scientists being uncertain and the doctors grossly ignorant. But gradually she evolved and lived upon a “beauty diet.” Margot, of course, had to do the same. She took exercises morning and night, took long and regular walks for the figure and skin and to put clearness and brightness into the eyes. I believe she and Margot, with occasional lapses, keep up their regimen to this day.
The house was as slattern as ever. The diet and comfort and health of the family bread-winner were no more the subject of thought and care than—well, than the next husband’s to his wife. She gave some attention—intelligent and valuable attention, I cheerfully concede—to improving my speech, manners, and dress. But beyond that the revolution affected only her and her daughter. Them it affected amazingly. In three or four months the change in their appearance was literally beyond belief. Edna’s beauty and style came back—no, burst forth in an entirely new kind of radiance and fascination. As for little Margot, she transformed from homeliness, from the scrawny pasty look of bad health, from bad temper, into as neat and sweet and pretty a little lady as could be found anywhere.
You, gentle reader, who are ever ready to slop over with some kind of sentimentality because in your shallowness you regard sentimentality—not sentiment, for of that you know nothing, but sentimentality—as the most important thing in the world, just as a child regards sickeningly rich cake as the finest food in the world—you, gentle reader, have already made up your mind why Edna thus suddenly awakened, or, rather, reawakened. “Aha,” you are saying. “Served him good and right. She found some one who appreciated her.” That guess of yours shows how little you know about Edna or the Edna kind of human being. The people who do things in this world, except in our foolish American novels, do because they must. They may do better or worse under the influence of love, which is full as often a drag as a spur. But they do not do because of love. I shall not argue this. I shrink from gratuitously inviting an additional vial of wrath from the ladies, who resent being told how worthless they in their indolence and self-complacence permit themselves to be and how small a positive part they now play in the world drama. I should have said nothing at all about the matter, were it not that I wish to be strictly just to Edna, and she, being wholly the ambitious woman, has always had and still has a deep horror of scandal, intrigue, irregularity, and unconventionality of every sort.
It was necessary that we move to a place more convenient to my business headquarters in New York City. A few weeks after I got the eight thousand a year, Edna, and little Margot and I went to Brooklyn to live—took a really charming house in Bedford Avenue, with large grounds around it. And once more we were happy. It seemed to me we had started afresh.
And we had.
II
Why did we go to Brooklyn?
By the time Edna and I had been married six years I learned many things about her inmost self. I was not at all analytic or critical as to matters at home. I used my intelligence in my own business; I assumed that my wife had intelligence and that she used it in her business—her part of our joint business. I believed the reason her part of it went badly was solely the natural conditions of life beyond her control. A railroad, a factory could be run smoothly; a family and a household were different matters. And I admired my wife as much as I loved her, and regarded her as a wonderful woman, which, indeed, in certain respects she was.
But I had discovered in her several weaknesses. Some of these I knew; others I did not permit myself to know that I knew. For example, I was perfectly aware that she was not so truthful as one might be. But I did not let myself admit that she was not always unconscious of her own deviations from the truth. I had gained enough experience of life to learn that lying is practically a universal weakness. So I did not especially mind it in her, often found it amusing. I had not then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to their husbands about big things and little, and that those women who profess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirections, such as omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising. Self-respect, real personal pride, I have discovered in spite of the reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern development, is still in embryo; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are either the most ignorant of ourselves or the most hypocritical.
But back to my acquaintance with my wife’s character. When I told her we should have to live nearer my work, my new work, than Passaic, she promptly said: