“Servants,” said he. “I suppose you burnt them? You didn’t show them to your wife?”
“Heavens, no,” replied I. “Why unsettle her? Why upset a pleasant arrangement? My wife finds MacIlvane useful. I find him invaluable. He saves me hours of time. He spares me hours of boredom.”
“My feeling about Courtleigh,” said Armitage. “And both those chaps are comfortably trustworthy.”
“I hadn’t thought of MacIlvane in that way,” said I. “I know my wife—and that’s enough.”
Armitage reflected with an amused smile on his face. Finally, he said: “I don’t suppose there ever were since the world began so thoroughly trustworthy women as these American women of the fashionable crowd—those that have very rich husbands—and only those, of course, are really fashionable. They may flirt a little, but never anything serious—never anything that’d give their husbands an excuse for throwing them out—and lose them their big houses and big incomes and social leadership.”
I had not thought of these aspects of the matter. I based my feeling of security solely on my knowledge of my wife’s intense self-absorption. All the springs of sentiment—except the shallow spring of highfaluting talk—had dried up in her. She would listen to MacIlvane’s flatteries as long as he cared to pour them out. But if he ever tried to get her to think of him, she would feel outraged.
“I suppose,” pursued Armitage, “we’d be tremendously amused if we could overhear those chaps talking to our wives about us. They don’t dare presume to the extent of mentioning our names. But they hand out generalities of roasting—how stupid most American men are, how superior the women are, what a tragic condescension for a wonderful American woman to have to live with a man who couldn’t appreciate her.”
I nodded and laughed.
“Nothing a woman loves so much—an American woman with a little miseducation befogging her mind and fooling her as to its limited extent—nothing she so dearly loves as to hear that she has a great intellect and a great soul, complex, mysterious, beyond the comprehension of the vulgar male clods about her. That’s why they like foreigners. You ought to watch those foreign chaps flatter our women—make perfect fools of them.”
But I had no desire to watch women in any circumstances. I had no active resentment against them as had Armitage. I simply wished to be let alone, to be free to pursue my ambitions and my ideas of self-development. I had ceased to feel about Margot. I was merely glad she was not a boy; for I felt that if she were a boy, I should have to assert myself and do some drastic and disagreeable—and almost certainly disastrous—disciplining in my family.