The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had read magazine articles on “Why American Women Marry Foreigners” and similar analyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said to one’s face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner, with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,—that brought it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies, they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.
“Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn’t he?” commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the refreshment room. “He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he landed.”
Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour’s silence. From the scraps of talk that were intelligible, it might have been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.
Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-room on the second floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she saw a man’s figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity. A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman’s sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng of admirers. Lydia’s heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse, astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily: “Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn’t you think any of us would realize that they are good—our men are—good and pure and kind! Didn’t you think we’d know that anything that’s the matter with them must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers! It’s not fair to blame everything on the men! It’s not fair, and it can’t be true! We’re all in together, men and women. One can’t be anything the other isn’t!”
She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the man’s eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women. The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as grave as her own. Finally, “Madame, you should be French,” he told her.
The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia’s eyes wavered. “I mean,” he went on in explanation, “that you are acting as my wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the first to—Madame, I should like to know your husband!” he exclaimed with another bow.
“My husband is like all other American men,” cried Lydia sharply, touched to the quick by this reference. “It is because he is that I—” She broke off with her gesture of passionate unresignation to her lack of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.
“Oh, I can’t say what I mean—you must know it, anyhow! You blame the fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives, and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to be—to be—to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were half so—fine—as you tell us, why haven’t we changed things?”
The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. “Exactly! exactly! exactly, Madame!” he cried. “It is the question I have asked myself a thousand times: Why is it—why is it that women so strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the society in—”
“Perhaps it is,” said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the surface again and furnishing her fluency, “perhaps it is because people who see our faults don’t help us to correct them, but flatter us by telling us we haven’t any, and all the time think ill of us behind our backs.”