“Not a worm,” declared he. “No American woman ever divorced a title unless she was either in terror of her life or in terror of being robbed to the last penny and kicked out.”
“Thank God all our women aren’t title crazy,” said I.
“How do you know they aren’t?” retorted he. “Do you know one who has been tempted and has resisted?”
I had to confess I did not.
“Then you thanked God too soon. The truth is our women are brought up to be snobs, spenders—useless, vain parasites. Their systems are all ready to be infected with the title mania.”
Armitage, on his favorite subject, talked and talked. I did not listen attentively—not so much because I did not like what he was saying or because I thought him prejudiced as because I knew him to be a secret snob of the thoroughgoing variety. I suspected that if things were reversed, if he could get a title by marriage and a position that would enable him to swagger and would make everyone bow and scrape, he would put the eagerest of the female title-hunters to the blush. It may be just and proper to criticise women for being what they are. But let us also hear in mind that it is not their fault but the fault of their training; also that the men do no better when they have the chance to live in idle vanity upon the labors of some one else.
On the following Monday my emissary returned from Garton Hall full to the brim with news.
But first he had again to assure himself that there was no pretense in my seeming anxiety to be free. I saw doubt of me in his eyes before he began his adroit cross-examination. I gave no sign that I knew what he was about; for in those cases the one chance of convincing is to submit to whatever tests may be applied. It was not unnatural that he should doubt, coming as he did direct from seeing and talking with the charming Edna. Men are habitually fools about women—not because women make fools of them but because they enjoy the sensation of making fools of themselves. That is a sensation much praised by poets, romancers, sentimentalists of all kinds; and because of this praise it has come to have a certain fictitious value, has come to be a cheap way for a man to imagine himself a devil of a fellow, a figure of romantic recklessness. There is no limit to which the passion for living up to a pose will not carry a man. Men have flung away their fortunes, their lives, for the sake of a pose; martyrs have burned at the stake for pose. So a man of experience even more than your ordinary brick-brained citizen is distrustful of his fellow men where women are concerned. And it is nothing against Armitage’s intelligence, nor any sign of his having a low estimate of my strength of mind, that he tried to make absolutely sure of me before proceeding.
Then, too, there was Edna’s charm. Women—I mean, our fashionable and would-be fashionable American women of all classes, from Fifth Avenue to the Bowery, from Maine to the Pacific—women are parlor-bred—are bred to make an imposing surface impression. The best of them fool the most expert man, as Edna had been fooling Armitage during those two days down in the country. A man has to live with them to find them out. And often, our men, being extremely busy and kindly disposed toward their women and unobservant of them and uncritical of them, do not find them out for many years. The house is run badly, the money is wasted, the children are not brought up right. But the man lets it pass as “part of the game.” He tells himself that not much but good looks is to be expected of a woman; he buries himself still deeper in his business. Then— If he is a successful man, along about forty when he has got up high enough to be able to relax from the labor of his career and thinks of enjoying himself, he tries to form an alliance for pleasure with his wife. And lo and behold, he discovers that he is married to a vain, superficial fool.
There could have been no more delightful experience than passing a few days in the society of Edna. She had educated herself, admirably, thoroughly, for show. She could have fooled the fashionable man his whole life through, for one cannot see beyond the range of his own vision. She might have fooled many a serious man of the narrow type; an excellent shoemaker might easily be misled by a clever showy jack of all trades into thinking him a master of all trades so long as he avoided betraying his ignorance of shoemaking. But your successful American man of the highest type, having a broad range of practical interests, becomes a shrewd judge of human values. Thus, the American woman who can pass for brilliant in fashionable society at home or abroad cannot deceive the American man—for long. Not when he lives with her. No wonder she finds him coarse; who does not wince when vanity is stepped on or ignored? No wonder she thinks him uninteresting. A child would have an equally poor opinion of any person inexpert at catcher, marbles, and mud pies.