As I was leaving—for we were not dining together that evening—she said:
“I shall think about your proposal.”
I looked straight at her. “Tell me whether you will or will not confirm your own proposal,” said I. “And don’t delay too long. Unfinished business makes me nervous.”
She returned my look with quiet composure. “I shall let you know to-morrow,” said she.
X
Among my acquaintances, both in and out of fashionable society, there were not a few jealous husbands. I knew one man who, in the evening, made his wife account for every moment of the day, and tell him in detail how she was going to spend the following day, and during business hours he called up irregularly on the telephone. He was not content with the effective system of espionage which a retinue of servants automatically establishes. Another man—to give a typical instance of each of the two types—hired detectives from time to time to watch his wife living abroad “for her health and to educate her children.” In a decently ordered society this sort of jealousy is rare. Only where the women are luxuriously supported parasites and the men are attaching but the one value to the women—the only value they possess for them—only there do you find this defiling jealousy the rule instead of the exception. Naturally, if the woman is mere property the man guards her as he guards the rest of his material possessions; and the woman who consents to be mere property probably needs guarding if she has qualities of desirability discoverable by other eyes than those of her overprizing owner.
This jealousy was in the air of the offices and clubs I frequented. But it had somehow or other never infected me. Was I occupied too deeply with other matters? Was I indifferent? Did my own disinclination to dalliance make me slow to appreciate the large part dalliance now plays in American life? I do not know why I was free from jealousy. I only know that never once had my mind been shadowed by a sinister thought as to what my wife might be about, far away and free. Possibly my knowledge of her absorption in social ambition kept me quiet. Certainly a woman whose whole mind and heart are set upon social climbing is about the last person a seeker for dalliance would invest.
I had never heard a word or a hint of a scandal about her—for the best of reasons; she did nothing to cause that kind of talk. But, how curious is coincidence! On the very evening of the day of our divorce discussion Edna had her first experience of scandal, and I immediately knew of it. After leaving her I went to the Federal Club, where I often took a hand in a rather stiff game of bridge before dinner. I drifted into the reading room, glanced idly at the long row of current magazines. In full view lay the weekly purveyor of social news, a paper I had not looked at half a dozen times in my life, and then only because some one had asked me to read a particular paragraph. The week’s issue of this scandal monger had just come in. I threw back the cover, let my glance drop upon the page. I was hardly aware that I was reading—for my thoughts were elsewhere—when I became vaguely conscious that the print had some relation to me. I reread it; it was a veiled attack upon Edna. All unsuspected by her husband—so the story ran—she had come to America to divorce him that she might marry a German nobleman of almost royal rank. A voice close beside me said:
“What is it amuses you so in that dirty sheet?”
It was Armitage. I started guiltily. Then my common sense asserted itself, and I pointed to the paragraph. When he had read it I said: