She drew away from him and he saw the tears in her eyes.
“I’m a hard man to live with in some ways, Helen,” he said with a sincerity that astonished him. It made her respond at once.
“Oh, no, Douglas!” she exclaimed, in a clear voice, that told him she had recovered from her little emotional attack and had become her wholesome self again. With his habit of generalizing he instantly reflected that it must be a terrible thing for a man to live with an emotional woman.
That night it was arranged that the Burrell girls, instead of going home with their father and mother, should go to Mrs. Briggs for the Winter. Burrell insisted upon putting the matter on the most rigid business basis, and offered Helen Briggs a recompense in money that she considered wholly out of proportion to what was just. Briggs maintained in the discussion an air of jocular remoteness and, in spite of Helen’s objection, Burrell established his own conditions. When they had finally left the house, Briggs tried to give the matter a comic aspect by telling his wife that he knew the old lady expected her to get husbands for the two girls. “I suppose we’ll have the house filled with young scamps of fortune-hunters,” he said. “You’ll have a fine time chaperoning the poor girls.”
Helen knew that he was trying to hide the chagrin he felt. “I really sha’n’t mind, Douglas,” and she was sorry she could not tell him in words how happy it made her to be able to help him. But she had to be careful now not to hurt the pride that she could see quivering beneath his air of humorous indifference.
Two days later the girls came to the house to stay until their friends should go to Washington. Briggs wrote to an agent, and a month later he was established with his family in a house that would have seemed ideally comfortable but for the taste of luxury his own house in Washington had given him. Briggs saw that his fears regarding the Burrell girls had been unnecessary. Toward Helen they maintained an air of worshipful devotion that greatly amused him, and they seemed to enjoy being with the children, too. He saw that, in spite of their acquired worldly air, they were really simple country girls, easily abashed and genuinely simple and kind. He grew interested in them and he began to wonder, as he often did in the case of unattached girls, if he could not help them to find husbands. It was a pleasure to him to come home and to hear from Helen about her outings or her calls with the girls during the day. He realized with astonishment that till now Helen had led a rather restricted life, and that he had taken an unconsciously scornful interest in the things she did. At dinner he really enjoyed hearing the girls talk about the people they had met during the day, about the art-exhibits and the teas they had been at, and about the books they had read and the plays they had seen or the operas they had heard. The comments of his wife regarding the books and the plays and the operas surprised him, and made him realize that she lived in a world from which he was shut out. He had been accusing her world of narrowness, but in reality the narrowness existed chiefly in his own mind. At moments he felt a kind of jealousy of her; at other times he was ashamed of the superior attitude he had taken toward her, and he wondered if she had recognized it. The thought of the possibility that she had known of it all along gave a sudden pause to his consciousness like a symptom of sickness.
Briggs took an impersonal interest in his new humility, as he did in everything that related to the workings of his own mind. As far as he could follow them, he assured himself that he had always wished to understand his own nature just as it was, without any self-praise or palliation; and yet he had begun to make a complete revision of his opinion of himself. He wondered how far the change could be due to the change that he felt in the attitude toward him of other men. Hitherto, among men he had always been treated with consideration; now he knew himself to be regarded as a man who, if he had not failed, had not quite succeeded, and, if he had not been smirched in character, was still marked with the suspicion of taint. Most of all he dreaded betraying in his manner his knowledge of this change. He had seen so many men betray the consciousness of their own weakness. Especially he tried to avoid giving the least suggestion of bravado. He reflected on the fickleness of good opinion; he had basked in the sunshine of good opinion all his life; when it was withdrawn he felt chilled and depressed. It was when he met some of the men who had treated him with special deference and who now addressed him with easy equality or with indifference, or, as occasionally happened, with cold formality, that he felt most deeply his humiliation. But at these times he felt a swift reaction that found expression in a stubborn assertion of courage. After all, he reflected grimly, it paid to be on the level. The important thing was not to be contemptuous to slights, but to be so established in the sense of being right, that slights could not wound. He saw now that his previous attitude toward life had been false and unstable; it had never been established on rock-bottom.
In his humiliation, it was a comfort to know that there were two people in the world who knew him just as he was. Those others who despised him, believed he was worse than he could possibly have been. His wife and William Farley believed in him and counted on him. To Mr. Farley, whom he saw every day, he confided nearly all his affairs. Once he had prided himself on standing alone, trusting no one; now it helped him to place his perplexities before that quiet and shrewd intelligence. Once he urged Farley to study law and go into partnership with him, and he laughed when the journalist held up his hand in protest. He envied Farley’s unswerving devotion to ideals of service that were so like his own in his best moods, and so unlike most of the realities that he achieved. It was Mr. Farley’s advice that made him decide, after his return to New York, to keep out of active politics for a couple of years. He needed time for readjustment, he said jocosely to himself. In two years he would be ready to make a fresh start. They would be hard years, for already he missed the excitement and the sense of being associated in the large interests that politics had given him. Meanwhile, he kept assuring himself that he was young; a man’s best work in life was done after his fortieth year. Already, as he had observed with pleasure and hope, some of the newspapers were lamenting his withdrawal from politics, and were referring to some of his past services, from which he had expected no return. Here, too, he found material for his philosophy. There were men in political life who did practically nothing for which they could claim honorable credit, and who were constantly engaged in schemes either for defrauding the government or for using their opportunities for private gain. So far as he could see they suffered neither from remorse or lack of self-respect or from the resentment of their constituents. But he was not one of them. It was clear to him now that he must keep straight or take his medicine, and he assured himself that he had already had medicine enough.
ISSUED MONTHLY ON THE 15TH.