Yes, Edna came very near to marrying him. She was a lady. She did not know exactly what that meant. The high-life novels she read left her hazy on the subject, because to understand any given thing we must have knowledge that enables us to connect it with the things we already know. A snowball would be an unfathomable mystery to a savage living in an equatorial plain. A matter of politics or finance or sociology or real art, real literature, real philosophy, seems dull and meaningless to a woman or to the average mutton-brained man. But if you span the gap between knowledge of any subject and a woman’s or a man’s ignorance of that subject with however slender threads of connecting knowledge, she or he can at once bridge it and begin to reap the new fields. Edna could not find any thread whatever for the gap between herself and that fairy land of high life the novels told her about. In those days there was no high life in Passaic. I suppose there is now—or, at least, Passaic thinks there is—and in purely imaginary matters the delusion of possession is equal to, even better than, possession itself. So, with no high life to use as a measure, with only the instinct that her white smooth hands and her dresses modeled on the latest Paris fashions as illustrated in the monthly “Lady Book,” and her music lessons, her taste for what she then regarded as literature—with only her instinct that all these hallmarks must stamp her twenty-four carat lady, she had to look about her for a matching gentleman. And there was Charley, the one person within vision who suggested the superb heroes of the high-life novels. I will say to the credit of her good taste that she had her doubts about Charley. Indeed, if his sweet smell and his smooth love-making—Charley excelled as a love-maker, being the born ladies’ man—if the man, or, rather, the boy, himself had not won her heart, she would soon have tired of him and would have suspected his genuineness as a truly gentleman. But she fell in love with him.
There was a long time during which I thought the reason she returned to me—or, rather, let me return to her—was because she fell out of love with him. Then there was a still longer time when I thought the reason was the fact that the very Saturday I got a raise to fourteen a week, he fell from twelve to eight. But latterly I have known the truth. How many of us know the truth, the down-at-the-bottom, absolute truth, about why she married us instead of the other fellow? Very few, I guess—or we’d be puffing our crops and flirting our feathers less cantily. She took up with me again because he dropped her. It was he that saved her, not she or I. Only a few months ago, her old mother, doddering on in senility, with memory dead except for early happenings, and these fresh and vivid, said: “And when I think how nigh Edny come to marryin’ up with that there loud-smelling dude of a Charley Putney! If he hadn’t ’a give her the go by, she’d sure ’a made a fool of herself—a wantin’ me and her paw to offer him money and a job in the undertakin’ store, to git him back. Lawsy me! What a narrer squeak fur Princess Edny!”
Be patient, gentle reader! You shall soon be reading things that will efface the coarse impression my old mother-in-law’s language and all these franknesses about our beginnings must have made upon your refined and cultured nature. Swallow a caramel and be patient. But don’t skip these pages. If you should, you would miss the stimulating effect of contrast, not to speak of other benefits which I, probably vainly, hope to confer upon you.
She didn’t love me. Looking back, I see that for many months she found it difficult to endure me. But it was necessary that she carry off—with the neighborhood rather than with me—her pretense of having cast off Charley because she preferred me. We can do wonders in the way of concealing wounded pride; we can do equal wonders in the way of preserving a reputation for unbroken victory. And I believe she honestly liked me. Perhaps she liked me even more than she liked her aromatic Charley; for, it by no means follows that we like best where we love most. I am loth to believe—I do not believe—that at so early an age, not quite seventeen, she could have received my caresses and returned them with plausibility enough to deceive me, unless she had genuinely liked me.
And what a lucky fellow I thought myself! And how I patronized the perfumed man. And what a thrashing I gave him—poor, harmless, witless creature!—when I heard of his boastings that he had dropped Edna Wheatlands because he found Sally Simpson prettier and more cultured!
I must have been a railway man born. At twenty-two—no, six months after my majority—I was jumped into a head clerkship at twelve hundred a year. Big pay for a youngster in those days; not so bad for a youngster even in these inflated years. When I brought Edna the news I think she began to love me. To her that salary was a halo, a golden halo round me—made me seem a superior person. She had long thought highly of my business abilities, for she was shrewd and had listened when the older people talked, and they were all for me as the likeliest young man of the neighborhood.
“I’ve had another raise,” said I carelessly. We were sitting on her front porch, she upon the top step, I two steps down.
“Another!” she said. “Why, the last was only two months ago.”
“Yes, they’ve pushed me up to twelve hundred a year—a little more, for it’s twenty-five per.”
“Gee!” she exclaimed, and I can see her pretty face now—all aglow, beaming a reverent admiration upon me.