“He wrote me on Tuesday,” said my wife, “that he’d been engaged to Theodora for six months. It is infamous. I wrote him that, if he sacrificed all his chances for position and recognition in New York by marrying an adventuress, he needn’t expect me to do anything for him.”
“Now you realise that I knew what I was about when I shook him off,” I said.
“Yes, James. And after all the care I gave him, after all I did for him! To defy me, to trample on my love, and marry that worthless nobody with her beggarly income! I had arranged for him to marry Natalie Bradish. She’d have helped us with her splendid family.”
I smiled. “She wouldn’t have had him, my dear,” I said; “she will marry Walter.”
“No—she would have married James. She was crazy about him.”
This amazed me—women are always thinking each other sentimental, yet every woman ought to know that at bottom all women are sensible and never take their eyes off the main chance. But I said nothing. I was too well content with matters as they stood. Women are so perverse that had I joined her just then in attacking James she might have veered round to him again on impulse.
Now that he has thwarted her ambitions for him, and for herself through him, she will be bitter in her hate where I shall be calm in mine. She had her whole heart in the social strength she was to gain by his making a brilliant marriage. He has crushed her heart, has killed the affection she had for him. She would have forgiven him anything but a wife offensive to her.
I don’t altogether like the idea of this sort of mother love. Men should be just; but women should be merciful and loving. New York and wealth and the social struggle have made her too hard. However, I’m not quarrelling seriously with what works so admirably for my purpose as to James. Our common disaster in him will draw us nearer together than we have been for years—at least until the next wrangle over an expense account. For years we have had opposite interests—I, to restrain her; she, to outwit me. Now we again have a common interest, and it is common interest that makes husband and wife live together in harmonious peace.
Nothing happens with me as with ordinary human beings. What could be stranger than that my new era of domestic quiet should be founded, not upon love or affection or feelings of that sort, but upon hate—upon my and her common hate for our unworthy elder son?