The absence of Edna and Margot was an enormous relief to me. Edna was constantly annoying me to accompanying her to places to which I did not care to go. I like the theatre and I rather like some operas, but when I go to either it is for the sake of the performance. Going with Edna and her friends meant a tedious social function. We arrived late; we did not hear the play or the opera. As for the purely social functions, they were intolerable. Perhaps I should not have been so unhappy had I been the kind of man who likes to talk for the sake of hearing his own voice. Women are attentive listeners when the man who is talking is worth flattering. But I talk only for purpose, and when I listen I wish it to be to some purpose also. So, Edna, always urging me to do something distasteful or giving me the sense that she was about to ask me, or was irritated against me for being “disobliging”—Edna made me uncomfortable, increasingly uncomfortable as I grew more intelligent, more critical, more discriminating. As for Margot, I could not talk with her ten minutes without seeing protrude from her sweet loveliness some vulgarity of snobbishness. It irritated me to hear her speak to a servant. I had to rebuke her privately several times for the tone she used in addressing her governess or my secretary—this when her mother and all her mother’s friends used precisely the same repellent “gracious” tone in the same circumstances. I saw that she, sometimes instinctively, again deliberately tried to hide her real self from me, that I was making a hypocrite of her. Any sort of frankness or sympathy between her and me was impossible.
A few weeks after their departure I closed the house. It came to me that I need endure its discomforts no longer, that I could get rid of those smelly, dull-witted, low-minded foreign animals, that I need not endure food sent up from a kitchen as to which I had from time to time disgusting proofs that it was not clean. I closed the house and left the mice and roaches and other insects to such short provender as would be provided by caretaker and family. I took an apartment in a first-class hotel.
When Armitage got clear of his wife he took the adjoining apartment. And how comfortable and how cheerful we were!
The women with their incompetence and indifference have about destroyed the American home. To get good service, to have capable people assisting you, you must yourself be capable. The incapacity of the “ladies” has driven good servants out of the business of domestic service, has left in it only the worthless and unreliable creatures who now take care of the homes. If you find any part of the laboring class deteriorating, don’t blame them. To do that is to get nowhere, is to be unjust and shallow to boot. Instead, look at the employers of that labor. Every time, you will find the fault is there, just as an ill-mannered or a bad child means unfaithful parents. The masses of mankind must have leadership, guidance, example. My experience has been that they respond when the dominating classes do their duty—that is, pay proper wages, demand good service, and know what good service is.
What a relief and a joy that hotel was! Armitage and I had our own cook, and so could have the simple dishes we liked. We attended to the marketing—and both knew what sort of meat and vegetables and fruit to buy, and were not long trifled with by our butcher, our grocer, and our dairyman, spoiled though they were by the ladies. And our apartments were clean—really clean, and after the first few weeks our servants were contented, and abandoned the evil ways slip-shod mistresses had got them into. Pushing my inquiries, I found that not only our hotel, but every first-class hotel in the fashionable district was filled with the remnants of shattered homes—husbands who had compelled their wives to give up the expensive and dirty attempts at housekeeping; husbands who had abandoned their families in country homes or in other cities and towns and had, surreptitiously or boldly, returned to bachelor bliss; husbands who had been abandoned by their families, none of these last cases being more heart-breaking than Armitage’s or my own. The story ran that he was on the verge of melancholia because his beautiful wife had cast him off. There was no more truth in this than there would have been in a tale of my lonely grief. Had it not been for Armitage, pointing out to me the truth, I might have fancied myself a deserted unfortunate. It would not have been an isolated instance of a human being not knowing when he is well off.
I did not see my family again until the following spring. Business compelled me to go abroad, and they had come over to London for the season.
When I descended from the train at Euston, a little confused by the strangeness, I saw my wife a few yards down the platform. Beside her stood a tall, beautiful young woman, whom I did not instantly recognize as my daughter. Both were dressed with the perfection of taste and of detail that has made the American woman famous throughout the world. I like well-dressed women—and well-dressed men, too. I should certainly have been convicted of poor taste had I not been dazzled by those two charming examples of fashion and style. They looked like two lovely sisters, the elder not more than five or six years in advance of the younger. I was a youthful-looking man, myself—except, perhaps, when I was in the midst of affairs and took on the air of responsibility that cannot appear in the face of youth. But no one would have believed there were so few years between Edna and me. Nor was she in the least made-up. The youth was genuinely there.
That meeting must have impressed the by-standers, who were observing the two women with admiring interest. I felt a glow of enthusiasm at sight of these elegant beauties. I was proud to be able to claim them. As for them, they became radiant the instant they saw me.
“Godfrey!” cried Edna loudly, rushing toward me.