So it came to pass that by the opening of the season Edna and I were installed in the big house, decidedly improved now thanks to the collecting both of ideas and of things she had done abroad. And we were giving all kinds of parties, with me taking part to an extent I should have laughed at beforehand as impossible. She had become so irritating to me that the mere sight of her put me in a rage. Have you ever been forced into intimate daily contact with a nature that is thoroughly artificial—after you have discovered its artificiality, its lack of sincerity, its vanity and pretense and sex trickery? There is, as we all know, in everyone of us a streak of artificiality, of self-consciousness, a fondness for posing to seem better than we are. But somewhere beneath the pose there is usually a core of sincerity, a genuine individuality, perhaps a poor thing but still a real thing. It may be there was this reality somewhere in Edna. I can only say that I was never granted a sight of it. And I rather suspect that she, like most of the fashion-rotted women and men, had lost by a process of atrophy through suppression and disuse the last fragment of reality. Had Gabriel’s trumpet sounded and the great light from the Throne revealed the secrets of all hearts, it would have penetrated in her to nothing but posing within posing.
I shall get no sympathy from man or woman—or fellow-beast—after talking thus of a woman and a lady. It is the convention to speak gallant lies to and about women—and to treat them as if they were beneath contempt. So my habit of treating them well and speaking the truth about them will be condemned and denounced with the triple curse. Well—I shall try to live through it.
Except in occasional outbursts when her rude candor toward me would anger me into retort in kind, I concealed my feeling about her. I knew it was just, yet I was ashamed of it. Our quarrels were all surface affairs—outbursts of irritation—the blowing off of surplus steam, not the bursting of the boiler and the wrecking of the machinery. If you happen to take into your employ any of the servants we had in those days—Edna’s maids or my valet or any other of the menials so placed that they could spy upon our innermost privacy—I am confident that in return for your adroit, searching questionings you will hear we were no more inharmonious than the usual married couple past the best-foot-foremost stage. I did not swear at her; she did not throw bric-à-brac at me. And once, I remember, when I had a bad headache she stayed home from the opera—on a Monday night, too—to read to me. It is true the new dress in which she had expected to show herself was not ready. But that is a detail for a cynic to linger upon.
Three months of New York, and she was bored to extinction. I had confidently been expecting this. I watched the signs of it with gnawing anxiety, for I was very near to the end of my good behavior. If possible I wished to stay on and help her toward a rational frame of mind—one in which she would see that divorce was the only possible solution of our impossible situation. But I began to fear I should have to give up and fly—to hunt or to inspect western mines and railways. She was bored by the women; they seemed shallow dabblers in culture after the European women. She was offended by their nervousness about their position; it made them seem common in contrast with the Europeans, born swells and impregnably ensconced. She was bored by the men—by their fewness, by the insufferable dullness of those few—all of them feeble imitations of the European type of elegant loafer.
“These men have no subtlety,” she cried. “They have no conversation. When they’re alone with a woman—you should hear them try to flatter. They are as different from the European men as—as——”
“As a fence-painter from an artist,” I suggested.
“Quite that,” said she, and I saw her making a mental note of the comparison for future use—one of her best tricks. “Really, I prefer the business men to them. But one cannot get the business men. What a country, where everyone who has any brains is at work!”
“If you are unhappy here, why not go abroad?” said I amiably. “Margot is always waiting for you.”
“But how can I go abroad?” railed she. “There’ll be another outbreak of scandal. Was ever a woman so wretchedly placed! What shall I do! If I had some one to advise me!”
It was interesting to hear her, determined, self-reliant character though she was, thus confess to the universal weakness of the female sex. Women, not trained to act for themselves, can hardly overcome this fundamental defect. That is why you so often see an apparently, and probably, superior woman weaken and yield where a distinctly ordinary man would be strong and would march ahead. The trouble with Edna was that she had no definite man behind her, spurring her on to action. In all she had done from the beginning of our married life she had felt that she had me to fall back on, should emergency arise—an unconscious dependence, one she would have scornfully denied, but none the less real. In this affair there was no man to fall back on.