“Not I,” said Edna.
“Then I’ll drop off at Passaic alone, and hire a trap, and give Mary a seat in it as far as her cousin’s. I’m not proud of my parents, the more shame to me. But there’s a limit to my ability to degrade myself.”
Edna and I had not lived together all those years without her learning the tone I use when I will not be trifled with. She did not argue. She sat silent and pale beside me. When the train stopped at Passaic she followed me from the car. Mary descended ahead of us and moved off at as brisk a pace as tight corsets and stiff new shoes would permit, in a direction exactly opposite that we were to take.
“Aren’t you glad we didn’t go on?” said I, eager to make it up.
She made no reply. She maintained haughty and injured silence until we were within sight of the houses. Then she said curtly:
“I’ll do the talking about our plans for them.”
“That’ll be best,” said I, most conciliatory.
I had not intended to say this. There had been a half-formed resolution in my mind to oppose those plans. But her anger roused in me such a desire to pacify her that I promptly yielded, where, I must in honesty confess, I was little short of indifferent. American husbands have the reputation of being the most docile and the worst henpecked men in the world. All foreigners say so, and our women believe it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The docility of American husbands is the good nature of indifference. A friend of mine has the habit of saying that his most valued and most valuable possession is his long list of things he cares not a rap about. It is a typically American and luminous remark. The men of other nations agitate over trifles, love to have the sense of being master at home—usually their one and only chance for a free swing at the joyous feeling of being boss. The American man, absorbed in his important work at office or factory, and not caring especially about anything else, lets thieving politicians rule in public affairs, lets foolish, incompetent women rule in domestic affairs. He has a half-conscious philosophy that he is shrewd enough, if he attends to his business, to make money faster than they can take it away from him, and that, if he does not attend to his business only, he will have nothing either for thieving politician and spendthrift wife or for himself. If you wish to discover how little there is in the notion of his docility, meddle with something he really cares about. Many a political rascal, many a shiftless wife, has done it and has gotten a highly disagreeable surprise.
Perhaps what I saw had as much to do with my tame acquiescence in my wife’s projects as my desire to have peace between her and me, when peace meant yielding what only a vague and feeble filial impulse moved me to contest. I had what I thought was a clear and vivid memory of my natal place and Edna’s—how the two houses looked, how small and shabby they were, how mean their surroundings, how plain their interiors. But as we drove up I discovered that memory had been pleasantly deceiving me. Could these squalid hovels, these tiny, hideous boxes set in two dismal weedy oblongs of unkempt yards—could these be our old homes? And the bent old laboring man and his wife—we had drawn up in front of my home—could they be my father and my mother?
A feeling of sickness, of nausea came over me. Not from repulsion for my parents—thank God, I had not sunk that low. But from abhorrence of myself, so degraded by the “higher world” into which prosperity and Edna’s ambitions had dragged me that I could look down upon the gentle old man and the patient, loving old woman to whom I owed life and a fair start in the world. My blood burned and my eyes sank as they greeted me, their homely old hands trembling, their mouths distorted by emotion and age and missing teeth. I turned away while they were kissing Edna, for I felt I should hate her and loathe myself if I saw the expression that must be in her face.