Before his wife bought a new gown she submitted the style and colors to what seems literally to have been her other half, and he solemnly pondered over both before pronouncing his august and final opinion.
If they had children, the interest was naturally extended. His concern in health and in illness, in play and in study, was nothing short of meticulous. I asked my informant if Frenchwomen would ever again submit to a man's making such an infernal nuisance of himself, and, sad as she still was at her own great loss, she replied positively that they would not. They had tasted independence and liked it too well ever to drop back into insignificance.
"Nor," she added, "will we be content with merely social and domestic life in the future. We will love our home life none the less, but we must always work at something now; only those who have lost their health, or are natural parasites will ever again be content to live without some vital personal interest outside the family."
Words of tremendous import to France, those.
VII
I caught a glimpse more than once of the complete submergence of certain Frenchwomen by husbands too old for war, but important in matters of State. They bored me so that I only escaped betraying acute misery by summoning all my powers of resistance and talking against time until I could make a graceful exit. They were, these women (who looked quite happy), mere echoes of the men to whom their eyes wandered in admiration and awe. The last thing I had imagined, however, was that the men would concern themselves about details that, in Anglo-Saxon countries at least, have for centuries been firmly relegated to the partner of the second part. How many American women drive their husbands to the club by their incessant drone about the iniquities of servants and the idiosyncrasies of offspring?
And much as the women of our race may resent that their rôle in matrimony is the one of petty detail while the man enjoys the "broader interests," I think few of us would exchange our lot for one of constant niggling interference. It induces a certain pleasure to reflect that so many Frenchwomen have reformed. Frenchmen, with all their conservatism, are the quickest of wit, the most supple of intellect in the world. No doubt after a few birth-pains they will conform, and enjoy life more than ever. Perhaps, also, they will cease to prowl abroad for secret entertainment.
VIII
Nothing, it is safe to say, since the war broke out, has so astonished Frenchwomen—those that loved their husbands and those that loved their lovers—as the discovery that they find life quite full and interesting without men. At the beginning all their faculties were put to so severe a strain that they had no time to miss them; as France settled down to a state of war, and life was in a sense normal again, it was only at first they missed the men—quite aside from their natural anxieties. But as time went on and there was no man always coming in, husband or lover, no man to dress for, scheme for, exercise their imaginations to please, weep for when he failed to come, or lapsed from fever heat to that temperature which suggests exotic fevers, they missed him less and less.
Unexpected resources were developed. Their work, their many works, grew more and more absorbing. Gradually they realized that they were looking at life from an entirely different point of view.