Were I not sure I should quite wear out the forbearance of gentle reader, I should linger to describe this marvelous charity plant for providing idle or social-position-hunting rich women with spiritual pleasures— I had almost said debaucheries, but that would be intruding my private and perhaps prejudiced opinion. I have no desire to irritate, much less shake the faith of, those who believe in Holy Cross and its “uplift” work. And I don’t suppose Holy Cross does any great amount of harm. The poor who prostitute themselves to its purposes are weak things, beyond redemption. As for the rich who waste time and money there, would they not simply waste elsewhere were there no Holy Cross?
My wife was, at that time, a very ignorant woman, thinly covered with a veneer of what I now know was a rather low grade of culture. That veneer impressed me. It had impressed our Brooklyn friends of St. Mary’s. But I fancy it must have looked cheap to expert eyes. Where her surpassing shrewdness showed itself was in that she herself recognized her own shortcomings. Rare and precious is the vanity that comforts and sustains without self-deception. She knew she wasn’t the real thing, knew she had not yet got hold of the real thing. And when she began to move about, cautiously and quietly, in Holy Cross, she realized that at last she was in the presence of the real thing.
My big responsibilities, my associations in finance, had been giving me a superb training in worldly wisdom. I think I had almost as strong a natural aptitude for “catching on” to the better thing in speech and manner and in dress as had Edna. It is not self-flattery for me to say that up to the Holy Cross period I was further advanced than she. Certainly I ought to have been, for a man has a much better opportunity than a woman, and one of the essentials of equipment for great affairs is ability to observe accurately the little no less than the large. Looking back, I recall things which lead me to suspect that Edna saw my superiority in certain matters most important to her, and was irritated by it. However that may be, a few months in Holy Cross and she had grasped the essentials of the social art as I, or any other masculine man, never could grasp it. And her veneer of “middle-class” culture disappeared under a thick and enduring coating of the best New York manner.
“What has become of you?” I said to her. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“I don’t understand,” said she, ruffling as she always did when she suspected me of indulging in my coarse and detestable sense of humor.
“Why, you don’t act like yourself at all,” said I. “Even when we’re alone you give the uncomfortable sense of dressed-up—not as if you were ‘dressed-up,’ but as if I were. I feel like a plowboy before a princess.”
She was delighted!
“You,” I went on, “are now exactly like the rest of those women in Holy Cross. I suppose it’s all right to look and talk and act that way before people. At least, I’ve no objection if it pleases you. But for heaven’s sake, Edna, don’t spoil our privacy with it. The queen doesn’t wear her coronation robes all the time.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said she.
“Don’t you?” cried I, laughing. “What a charming fraud you are!” And I seized her in my arms and kissed her. And she seemed to yield and to return my caresses. But I was uncomfortable. She would not drop that new manner. The incident seems trifling enough; perhaps it was trifling. But it stands out in my memory. It marks the change in our relationship. I recall it all distinctly—how she looked, how young and charming and cold, what she was wearing, the delicate simple dress that ought to have made her most alluring to me, yet made me feel as if she were indeed alluring, but not for me. A subtle difference there, but abysmal; the difference between the woman who tries to make herself attractive for the sake of her husband and the woman who makes toilets in the conscious or half-conscious longing successfully to prostitute herself to the eyes of the public. I recall every detail of that incident; yet I have only the vaguest recollection of our beginning to occupy separate bedrooms. By that time the feeling of alienation must have grown so strong that I took the radical change in our habits as the matter of course.