And I could get no further.
Before I returned to New York in the autumn I had added a lot of far western enterprises to my already long list of occupations. Everything I touched seemed to succeed. Even my new secretary, Rossiter, proved better than Markham. Markham had an indifferent memory and a fondness for women that was trying. Rossiter forgot nothing and was as shy of the women, including the ladies, as was Lord Blankenship, who yawned and retreated at the very sight of a skirt. The news from England was altogether satisfactory. An heir was hoped for, and Crossley had become a devoted husband and was about to enter politics. This struck me as a huge joke, the more so because I knew that in England Crossley would be welcomed as a source of real strength to his party. It seemed to me amazing how England could stagger along when she was being managed by such men and was grateful for it. But when I spoke to Blankenship about it, he set me to thinking from a different standpoint.
“My son-in-law is going into politics,” said I. “In America he couldn’t be elected dog-catcher.”
“Oh, I fancy money will do most anything most anywhere,” said he.
The news from Paris was equally good. Edna had settled there after a joyous summer going from country house to country house in Britain, and from château to château in France. She had seen one château which she wished me to buy, and she begged me to come over and inspect it. She did not explicitly say so, but I read between the lines that she was greatly strengthening her social position by giving out that she purposed buying a big place. You may imagine how much enthusiasm for her such an announcement would create among noble down-at-the-heel families eager to exchange unsalable old rook-roosts for American dollars. I could hear her talking—how subtly she would put forth the suggestion, how diplomatically she would discuss each worthless stone heap in turn—and how she would rake in the invitations so difficult to get unless one happens to know how, and so easy when one does know.
But with my arrival in New York I had a reverse. A cable came from Edna saying that she was sailing at once and wished to see me.
I could not imagine what she wanted, and I did not waste much time in making guesses. One evening, when Armitage and I were dining together in the Federal Club—Blankenship had sailed for home—the idea flashed into my mind that perhaps Edna wanted a divorce. Immediately I felt that I had hit upon the precise reason for her coming. You will have no difficulty in imagining what was the next idea in my train of thought. If she divorced me I should be free to marry whom I pleased!
It was stupid of me, but in all my revolvings of my hopeless love for Mary Kirkwood never once had I thought of divorcing my wife. I cannot account for this lapse, except as an instance of the universal human failing for overlooking the obvious. There was no religious scruple in my early training to make me shy of divorce. On the contrary, my parents, like most old-fashioned Americans of faiths other than Episcopal and Catholic—and Episcopalians and Catholics were few in the old American stock, except in New York and Baltimore and South Carolina—most old-fashioned Americans believed that living together in wedlock without love was sin, that divorce was no mere necessary evil, but a religious rite as sacred as marriage itself. A house, they held, is either a House of Hate or a House of Love, and no one should remain in a House of Hate, and no child should be brought up there.
No doubt, if Edna and I had been living under the same roof the idea of divorce would have taken form, actively definite form, long before. But we had no home to be a House of Hate. We did not hate each other; we bored each other. And as we were not poor, we lived far enough apart not to annoy each other in the least. I cheerfully paid any ransom she exacted for leaving me free—and you may be sure she was not inexpensive. She had her own fortune—and it gave her quite an income—but she husbanded that. She insisted upon state and equipage, not to mention such small matters as stockings at fifty dollars a pair and chemises at three hundred dollars apiece—for, she knew how lovely she was and demanded for her beautiful body the most beautiful garments that could be devised by French ingenuity at combining cost and simplicity. I was—by instinct rather than by avowed principles—thoroughly old-fashioned in my family ideas. Indeed, I still am; and I say this with no apology. It may be that woman will some day develop another and higher sphere for herself. But first she would do well—in my humbly heretical opinion—to learn to fill the sphere she now rattles round in like one dry pea in a ten-gallon can. I want to see a few more women up to the modern requirements for wife and mother. I want to see a few more women making a living without using their sex charms—a few less ’tending the typewriter with one eye while the other and busier is on the lookout for a husband. I believe in emancipation of women—in votes for women—in all that sort of thing. The one and only way to learn to swim is in the water. I am sick and tired of woman the irresponsible, woman the cozener and milker of man, woman the dead weight upon man, and drawing the pay of a housewife and shirking all a housewife’s duties. So, you see, I am the friend of woman—not of woman’s vanity and laziness and passion for parasiteism, but of woman’s education and self-respect and independence.