“Oh, how can you be so insensible!” cried she, all unstrung again and, I could not but see, genuinely so. “I never could face the scandal of a divorce. I didn’t realize. It would kill me. How did Hilda face it?—and all these other nice women? I should hide and never show my face again.”
She was agitating me so wildly that I felt I could not much longer conceal it. “I must go,” said I, pretending to yawn. “Sleep on it. Perhaps to-morrow you’ll feel differently.”
She tried to detain me, but I broke away and fled. To be almost free and then to have freedom snatched away! Not out of reach, but where it can be reached easily if one will simply stretch out his hand somewhat ruthlessly. By no means so ruthless as my wife had been a score of times in gaining her ends without regard to me. Why not be ruthless? Had she not been ruthless? Had she not given me the right to compel her to free me? More, did she not herself wish to be free? And was she not now restrained, not by consideration for me, not by any decent instinct whatsoever, but solely by a snobbish groveling fear of public opinion?—a senseless fear, too?
We are constantly criticising people—by way of patting ourselves on the back—because they take what they want regardless of the feelings of others. A form of self-righteousness as shameless as common; for we happen not to fancy the things they show themselves inconsiderate and swinish about. But—when we really do want a thing—what then? How industrious we become in appeal to conscience—that most perfect of courtiers—to show us how just and right it is that we should have this thing we want! Having set myself drastically to cure self-fooling years before—when first I realized how dangerous it is and how common a cause of failure and ruin—I was unable to conceal from myself the cruelty of forcing Edna to divorce me. My conscience—as sly a sophist and flatterer as yours, gentle reader—my conscience could not convince me. Cruel things I had never done—that is, not directly. Of course I, like all men of action, had again and again been compelled to do them indirectly. But not by my own direct act had I ever made any human being suffer. I would not begin now. I would not commit the stupidity of trying to found my happiness upon the wretchedness of another. I could feel the withering scorn that would blaze in Mary Kirkwood’s honest eyes if I should go to her after having freed myself by force, and she should find it out. I see your sarcastic smile, gentle reader, as I thus ingenuously confess the selfish fear that was the hidden spring of my virtue. Your smile betrays your shallowness. If you knew human nature you would know that all real motives are selfish. The differences of character in human beings are not differences between selfish and unselfish. They are differences between petty, short-sighted selfishness and broad, far-sighted selfishness.
When I saw Edna again she was still wavering. She had come to America with her mind made up for divorce, if I could by hook or by crook be induced to consent. She had been frightened by this attack upon her—frightened as only those who live a life of complete self-deception can be frightened by a sudden and public holding up of the mirror to reflect their naked selves. She was, of course, easily able to convince herself that her own motives in seeking a divorce were fine and high and self-martyring. But she could now see no way to convince others. In the public estimation she saw she would be classed with Lady Blankenship, with Mrs. Ramsdell, with all the other women who had got divorces to better themselves socially or financially.
Instead of dying out the scandal grew. The daily papers took up the hints in the society journal’s veiled paragraph, had long cabled accounts of Count von Biestrich, of his attentions to Edna, told when and where they had been guests at the same châteaus and country houses, made it appear that they had been no better than they should be for nearly a year. Edna was prostrated.
“There’s only one answer to these attacks,” she said to me. “You must give up your apartment and move to this hotel. We must open the house and live in it together and entertain together.”
I was not unprepared. I had threshed out the whole matter with myself, had made my choice between the two courses open to me—or, rather, had forced myself to see the truth that there was in decency but the one course. “Very well,” said I to her—and that was all.
I moved to the Plaza the same day; I was seen constantly with her; I did my best to show the world that all was serene between us. In fact, if you saw us during those scandal-clouded days you may have thought us a couple on a honeymoon. Behind the scenes we quarreled—about anything, about everything, about nothing—as people do when forced to play in public the farce of billing and cooing lovers. Especially if one of them has not the faintest glimmer of a sense of humor. But in public——
The newspapers soon had to drop their campaign of slander by insinuation.