A friend of ours whom we had expected to find out here had only the week before been obliged to pack up on a few hours’ notice and go to California. She had just built a new house and had been in it hardly two months and now she has to begin in a new environment all over again. The great tragedy in this case is that the husband cannot stay long away from a high altitude and the wife must probably always live at a low one.
Of the fashionable element in the Springs a certain elderly lady told me with bated breath:
“It is the fastest society on earth! They just live for excitement, and they don’t attend church half as regularly as they go to each other’s houses to dance or gamble. If you see a woman out walking or driving with a man, it’s more likely another woman’s husband than her own. My dear, you may call such a state of affairs modern and up to date, but I call it shocking—that’s what I call it!”
She, dear soul, is from Salem, Massachusetts, and I can well believe that she thinks as she spoke. There is also a younger woman, the wife of a prosperous manufacturer whose home is in Omaha. The old lady from Salem I had known in York Harbor, Maine, but the Omaha lady we “picked up an acquaintance with” through the offices of E. M. in saving the life of an attenuated specimen of a dog from the grip of one whose looks were more flattering to the species.
Apparently the old lady and the younger one sit and exchange opinions all day, a rather needless effort, as they share the same in the first place. At almost any hour that you pass them the old lady is saying:
“My dear, that is Mrs. Smith talking to Mr. Baldwin!”
And the younger, aghast, echoes, “Well, who’d have thot it!” (“Thot” is not a misprint, that is the way she pronounces it.) And then in unison they wonder where Mr. Smith can be and why Mrs. Baldwin is not out walking with her husband.
Colorado. Pike’s Peak in the Distance
The point of view of the old lady and the younger one represent not unfairly the attitude of the majority of wives in the two thousand miles we had come through since leaving the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, New York. An opposed attitude jumps from Central Park East to Colorado Springs. Central Park West is curiously like the gap between. On Fifth Avenue and South and East and again in Colorado Springs a wife does not believe the happiness of family life dependent upon her husband’s never speaking to another woman but herself. More often is the shoe on the other foot. The husband generally goes from his office to his club, the wife more than likely goes with an agreeable young man to a dancing tea. Parlor Snake is the New York vernacular for the ideal type of a five-o’clock young man! Once west of Fifth Avenue and for two thousand miles thereafter nothing like this at all! For Mr. X. to cross the threshold of Mrs. B.’s house unless accompanied by Mrs. X—and sometimes several little X.’s—would be just cause for storms and tears, if not for divorce. Even we as strangers could see wives trailing like veritable shadows behind their husbands. Let Mr. X. stop for a second to speak to any Mrs. W., Y. or Z. and Mrs. X. sidles up and clings to husband’s sleeve as though a few sentences uttered apart from a general conversation were affronts upon the security and dignity of a wife.