I dropped back in my chair. I was stunned. It seemed to me I had never heard anything quite so infamous in my life. And as I reflected on what she had said I wondered that I had not realized it before. I recalled a hundred significant facts that had come out in talks I had had with men, women, and children in this fashionable world from which we were excluded, yet with which we were in constant and close communication.
“The question is, what are you going to do,” proceeded Edna.
I shook my head, probably looking as dazed as I felt.
“What does that headshake mean?” demanded she.
“You—taught Margot to be a—a—like those other girls?” said I.
“Oh, you fool!” cried Edna. And in excuse for her, please remember I had ever been a dotingly bored slave of hers—as uxorious a husband as you ever saw—and therefore inevitably despised, for women have so little intelligence that they despise a man who loves them and lets them rule. “You fool!” she repeated. “Yes, I brought her up like a lady—taught her to cultivate nice things and nice people. What should I teach her? To associate with common people? To drop back toward where we came from—where you belong?”
“Yes, I guess I do,” said I.
Up to that time I had interested myself in only one aspect of human nature—the aspect that concerned me as a business man. But from that time I began to study the human animal in all his—and her—aspects. And it was not long before I learned what that animal is forced to become when exposed to the powerful thrusts and temptings of wealth and social position. In our alternations of pride and humility we habitually take undue credit or give undue blame to ourselves for what is wholly the result of circumstance. The truth is, we are like flocks of birds in a high wind. Some of us fly more steadily than others, some are quite beaten down, others seem almost self-directing; but all, great and small, weak and strong, are controlled by the wind, and those who make the best showing are those who adapt themselves most skillfully to the will of the wind.
At the time when Edna and I were talking I had not become a philosopher. I was in the primitive stages of development in which most men and nearly all women remain their whole lives through—the stage in which you live, gentle reader, with your shallow mistaken notions of what is and your shallower mistaken notions of what ought to be. So, as Edna uncovered herself to me, I shrank in horror. It was fortunate—for her, at least—that I had always trained myself never to make hasty speeches. My expertness in that habit has probably been the principal cause of my business success, of my ability to outwit even abler men than myself. I did not yield to the impulse to burst out against her. I compressed my lips and silently watched as she lifted the veil over our family life and revealed to me the truth about it.
“What are you going to do?” she asked impatiently, yet with a certain uneasiness born no doubt of a something in my manner that made her vaguely afraid, for while she knew I was her slave and despised me, as I was to learn, for being so weak before a mere woman, she also knew that, outside of her domain, I was not her slave nor anybody’s, but planned and executed at the pleasure of my own will.