You are smiling still, in your smug, supercilious fashion—smiling at what you promptly call old-fashioned trite truisms. I am not sure that, after they have been thought about a while, they would seem old-fashioned or stale. Rather, I flatter myself, they are the statement of a new philosophy of life. For the old theory with which you are confusing these truths was that the family is the social unit. In fact, it is not; the only social units are individuals—capable individuals. My theory, or rather my philosophy—for it is more than a theory—my philosophy is that the family is the unit of happiness. Society can—and does—get along fairly well with little or no happiness. But happiness is an excellent thing, nevertheless. And I wanted it.
Now, perhaps, you see why I was not looking forward with any exuberance of optimism to finding the woman whom I needed and wanted, and who needed and wanted me. Prompted by my experiences and guided somewhat by my shrewd and cynical friend Bob Armitage, I had been giving no small amount of spare time to observing and thinking about the American woman. And while I admired that charming lady and found her an amusing companion for an occasional leisure hour, I saw that she was not to be taken seriously by a serious person. She knew how to look well, how to make a good “front,” how to get perhaps a hundred dollars worth of pleasing surface results by squandering a thousand or two thousand dollars. As an ornament, a decoration, as a basket of rare inedible fruit to irradiate lovely costliness, she could not be beaten. As wife to a showy plutocrat, ignorant of the art of comfortable living, as head mistress to an European noble with servants trained to maintain his state in splendid and orderly discomfort, she would do excellently well. But not for the practical uses of sensible life. She had no training for them, no taste for them, no intention of adapting herself to them, whatever she might pretend in order to catch a bill-payer.
Still, I did not despair. I dared not despair. If I had, loneliness—and heartache, yes, heartache—and my sense of present and future futility would have become intolerable. On the other hand, while there was every reason for haste—when happiness was my goal, and life is short and uncertain—I was resolved to be deliberate. If I should be deceived—perhaps by the girl’s honest self-deception—into choosing wrong, how she would hate me! For not again would, or could I let a woman use me as Edna had used me. A fool is a grown-up person who has never grown up. I had grown up—had become a definite person, knowing what I wanted and what I did not want. Such persons are hated by those who try in vain to use them. My one chance lay in finding a woman with the same definite tastes as mine. Only disaster could come through the woman who might marry me, pretending to agree with me and secretly resolved to “redeem” me once she got me firmly in her grasp.
Armitage was back in New York, was eager to resume our old relations. But that could not be. I had outgrown him. And he, at the dangerous age, was allowing himself to harden into all the habits of the rich class and of middle life. Despite his efforts to conceal it, I saw that he had even reached the pass where a man of property regards a new idea as a menace to society. If it is a new invention, it may make some stock he owns worthless. If it is a new social or political idea it may make his laborers demand higher wages, or in some other way affect his dividends. And, of course, whenever a man speaks of a menace to society, he means a menace to himself whom he naturally regards as the most precious and vital thread in the social fabric. Compelled by my need for ideas to occupy me in supplement to the now thoroughly familiar and rather monotonous routine of investing and reinvesting, organizing and reorganizing, I was associating more and more with artists and writers of the sort who feel suffocated in the society of the merely rich.
Material conditions force upon men inexorable modes of life. And every mode of life breeds a definite, distinct set of ideas. Men fancy themselves original because they suddenly discover certain ideas in their brains. As well might a hen who has just eaten hot bran fancy herself original because she laid an egg. The idea was not from the man, but from his material conditions—lawyer idea, politician idea, banker idea, anarchist idea, big or little merchant idea, dog-fighter idea, professor idea, preacher idea, and so on. I was fighting to escape this to me repellent molding process—and I was making headway. But poor Armitage was rapidly yielding; his struggle, I fear, had been in its best days in large part a brassy make-believe—the valor of the trumpet, not of the sword.
He was a sorry sight. His once handsome face was taking on that petty, pinched, frost-bitten Fifth Avenue expression. And he had been driven for companionship into forming the familiar parasite circle. The chief figures in it were a decaying dandy of an old New York family who had been fawner and crumb snapper all his days, and a broken-down plutocrat who had squandered his fortune on fine women, fine wine, and fine food. The dandy gave Bob the fashionable gossip; the broken-down plutocrat gave him the gossip and scandal of the giddy part of town, also the latest gamey stories; also he—perhaps both—arranged for him the peculiar pleasures of the rich man with the palate that needs strong sensations to make it respond.
Armitage was out of the question for me. Then——
I drifted into the Amsterdam Club one evening—to write a note or send a telegram—and there sat Hartley Beechman. The instant he saw me he sprang up and made straight for me. His expression was puzzling, but not hostile—still, I was unobtrusively ready. Said he in a straight, frank fashion:
“Loring, I want to apologize to you. I made a damned ass of myself in Green Park last summer. My excuse is that I was more than half crazy——”
I put out my hand. “I half guessed at the time,” said I. “I know all about it now.”