“What did I say?”
“That she should have been a man.”
Dilling carefully twisted his collar free from the button. A violent physical action of any kind was foreign to him. Running the curved band between his fingers, he gave an abstracted thought to the possibility of wearing it again on the morrow, even while he turned to contradict his wife. “Nonsense, Marjorie, she liked it! All women like it; it’s a tribute to their mentality, my dear. One often has to say some such thing to a perfect ninny, but in this case I happen to be sincere and I think Miss Deane knew it.”
Marjorie did not contest the point. She never argued with Raymond, but once in a while she felt, as now, that his non-combatible correctness covered an error in judgment. Of course, he was sincere in paying a tribute to Azalea’s cleverness, and, of course, she knew he meant what he said. But that was the very trouble—the very barb that pierced her spirit!
In a strange and mysterious way (of which she was somewhat ashamed) Marjorie often reached perfectly amazing conclusions that were directly opposed to Raymond’s incontrovertible logic. And Azalea’s hurt was a case in point. Just why the words had stung, it was beyond Marjorie Dilling to explain. Orderly thinking and systematic juxtaposition of facts found their substitute in flashes of intuition which, throughout the ages, have stood for women in the place of reason. But she knew, without knowing how she knew, that Azalea would rather have impressed Raymond with her incomparable womanhood, than the fact that she was the possessor of a brain that should have functioned in the body of a man.
As for Azalea, she was not conscious that Marjorie had heard the echo of that discordant note, and she would have been inexpressibly surprised had she suspected it. Years of rigid discipline had taught her to conceal all the emotions she thought she had not strangled, and she was accustomed to being treated as a man when not as a nonentity. Times without number she had paid for an evening’s entertainment by escorting timourous and penurious ladies safely home in the silent watches of the night . . . a delicate assumption that she, herself, lacked sufficient fascination to stimulate brute design. On other occasions, hostesses frankly asked her to slip away quietly, “so that my husband won’t feel obliged to take you home, dear.” And once, a particularly considerate host glimpsing the blizzard that raged beyond his portal, had placed her in the care of a diminutive messenger boy, of some nine years, who struggled through the snowdrifts and sniffled that he had come from Hewitt’s Service, and please where was the parcel?
So Dilling’s words cut without producing an unendurable pain. The spot was well cocained and would ache long after the incision had been made. Azalea listened to his defence of his leader, his Party, and Messrs. Eastlake and Donahue, sensitive to a breath of discouragement beneath his words.
“I came to Ottawa expecting to find co-operation, and in its place fierce competition confronts me—competition,” he said, “within the very ranks of the Party! It may strike you as being particularly naive, but I confess that I had not expected to find this sort of friction. It puts a different complexion on politics.”
This was a tremendous admission for him to make, and in one of those flashing visions that supplemented her more leisured mental processes, Azalea saw that just as Marjorie groped along her level, so Dilling stumbled into pitfalls in his particular sphere, that a cumulus vapour of disenchantment threatened the horizon of his career, and that even as his wife bade fair to be a victim of the Social Juggernaut, so he would be crushed beneath the wheels of the political machine.
And they thought that this was The Land of Afternoon!