“Then you’ve got to take that chance,” said she.
“I didn’t expect you to talk like this,” said I. “The only reason I haven’t spoken of my troubles before was that I feared you’d forbid me to do what I was being tempted to do.”
And that was the truth about my feeling. I had always heard—and had firmly believed—that woman was somehow the exemplar of ideal morality, that it was she who kept men from being worse than they were, that the evil being done by men pursuing success was done without the knowledge of their pure, idealist wives and mothers and daughters. I can’t account for my stupidity in this respect. Had I not on every side the spectacle that gave the lie to the shallow pretense of feminine moral superiority? Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and simply spends; was it not the women, the ladies, who were edging on the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses, the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy clothing, the costly jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift squandering upon the degrading vanities of social position?
I laughed somewhat cynically. “No wonder you’ve always refused to learn anything about business,” said I. “It’s a habit among big business men to refuse to know anything as to the details of a large transaction that can be carried through only by dirty work. If we don’t know, we can pretend that the dirty work isn’t being done by or for us—isn’t being done at all.”
“Now you are getting coarse,” said my wife. “Do you know what I think of you?” I could not see her expression, but the voice always betrays if there is insincerity, because we do not deal enough with the blind to learn to deceive perfectly with the voice. Her tones were absolutely sincere as she answered her own question: “I think it is cowardly of you to come to me with your business troubles. If you were brave you’d simply have quietly done whatever was necessary to save your family. Yes, it is cowardly!”
“I didn’t mean it as cowardice,” said I, admiring but irritated by this characteristic adroitness. “In the stories and the plays that give such thrills, the husband, in the crisis and tempted to do wrong, appeals to his wife. And they are brought closer together, and she helps him to do right, and everything ends happily.” Again I laughed good-humoredly. “It doesn’t seem to be turning out that way, does it, dear? My heavenly picture of you and Margot and me living modestly and making up in love what we lack in luxury—it doesn’t attract you?”
She said in her patient, superior tone: “I suppose you never will understand me or my ideals. What you’ve been doing in annoying me with your business, it’s as if when I was giving a dinner I assembled my guests and compelled them to watch all the preparations for the dinner—the killing of the lambs and the fish and the birds, the cleaning, all those ugly and low things. Bringing business into the home and the social life, it’s like bringing the kitchen into the drawing-room.”
The obvious answer to this shallow but plausible and attractive cleverness of hers did not come to me then. If it had I’d not have spoken it. For of what use to argue with the human animal, female or male, about its dearest selfishnesses and vanities? Of what use to point out to human self-complacence, greediness and hypocrisy that a “refined” and “cultured” existence of ease and luxury can be obtained only by the theft and murder of dishonest business—that for one man to be vastly rich thousands of men must somehow be robbed and oppressed, even though the rich man himself directly does no robbing and oppressing? If I have sucking pig for dinner, I kill sucking pig as surely as if my hand wielded the knife of the butcher. But the human race finds it convenient and comfortable not to think so. Therefore, let us not bother our heads about it.
At that period of my career I had not thought things out so thoroughly as I have since—in these days when events have compelled me to open my eyes and to see. In my hypocrisy, in my eagerness to save myself, I was not loth to take refuge behind the advice given by my wife partly in genuine ignorance of business, partly in pretended ignorance of it.
Said I: “I suppose you’re right. I ought to think only of my family. Heaven knows, my rascal friends aren’t thinking in my interest. If I don’t do it, no one will. There’s no disputing that—eh?”