The mourning and the loss of the person who had filled and employed their lives caused the widow and the daughter to live very quietly during the succeeding year. They spent only half of their capital. For reasons of selfish and far-sighted prudence which need no detailing Frank moved away to New York within six months of his father's death and reduced communication between himself and wife and his mother and sister to a frigid and rapidly congealing minimum. He calculated that by the time their capital was consumed they would have left no feeling of claim upon him or he feeling of duty toward them.
It was not until eighteen months after her father's death, when the total capital was sunk to less than fifteen thousand dollars, that Mildred awakened to the truth of their plight. A few months at most, and they would have to give up that beautiful house which had been her home all her life. She tried to grasp the meaning of the facts as her intelligence presented them to her, but she could not. She had no practical training whatever. She had been brought up as a rich man's child, to be married to a rich man, and never to know anything of the material details of life beyond what was necessary in managing servants after the indifferent fashion of the usual American woman of the comfortable classes. She had always had a maid; she could not even dress herself properly without the maid's assistance. Life without a maid was inconceivable; life without servants was impossible.
She wandered through the house, through the grounds. She said to herself again and again: "We have got to give up all this, and be miserably poor—with not a servant, with less than the tenement people have." But the words conveyed no meaning to her. She said to herself again and again: "I must rouse myself. I must do something. I must—must—must!" But she did not rouse, because there was nothing to rouse. So far as practical life was concerned she was as devoid of ideas as a new-born baby.
There was but the one hope—marriage, a rich marriage. It is the habit of men who can take care of themselves and of women who are securely well taken care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man who marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination these scorners have! To marry for a mere living, hardly better than one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for men or women all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning money—for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the most natural, the most human action conceivable. The man or the woman who says he or she would not do it, either is a hypocrite or is talking without thinking. You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system that suffers men and women to be so crudely and criminally miseducated by being given luxury they did not earn. But to condemn the victims of that system for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer phariseeism.
Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As the weeks fled, as the bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man who might have offered himself—no matter how repellent he might have been. She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes with the mass of middle-class people for comfort. She wanted what she had—the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used. In the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many indications of depravity. In Mildred Gower's brain they were the natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her training, nothing as to her character. So, when she, thinking only of a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice.
But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered. Indeed, no man of any kind offered. Instead, it was her mother who married.
A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally thought, proposed, and was accepted. And two years and a month after Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury—and ceased to veil from her new husband the truth as to her affairs.
Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend. She was now to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders into a poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth. Not so the elderly man or woman. As we grow older, no matter how timidly conventional we are by nature, we become, through selfishness or through indifference to the opinion of others or through impatience of petty restraint, more and more outspoken. Old Presbury discovered how he had tricked himself four days after the wedding. He and his bride were at the Waldorf in New York, a-honeymooning.
The bride had never professed to be rich. She had simply continued in her lifelong way, had simply acted rich. She well knew the gaudy delusions her admirer was entertaining, and she saw to it that nothing was said or done to disturb him. She inquired into his affairs, made sure of the substantiality of the comparatively small income he possessed, decided to accept him as her best available chance to escape becoming a charge upon her anything but eager and generous relatives. She awaited the explosion with serenity. She cared not a flip for Presbury, who was a soft and silly old fool, full of antiquated compliments and so drearily the inferior of Henry Gower, physically and mentally, that even she could appreciate the difference, the descent. She rather enjoyed the prospect of a combat with him, of the end of dissimulating her contempt. She had thought out and had put in arsenal ready for use a variety of sneers, jeers, and insults that suggested themselves to her as she listened and simpered and responded while he was courting.
Had the opportunity offered earlier than the fourth day she would have seized it, but not until that fourth morning was she in just the right mood. She had eaten too much dinner the night before, and had followed it after two hours in a stuffy theater with an indigestible supper. He liked the bedroom windows open at night; she liked them closed. After she fell into a heavy sleep, he slipped out of bed and opened the windows wide—to teach her by the night's happy experience that she was entirely mistaken as to the harmfulness of fresh winter air. The result was that she awakened with a frightful cold and a splitting headache. And as the weather was about to change she had shooting pains like toothache through her toes the instant she thrust them into her shoes. The elderly groom, believing he had a rich bride, was all solicitude and infuriating attention. She waited until he had wrought her to the proper pitch of fury. Then she said—in reply to some remark of his: