In college the quirk came out again once in a while. But Gage never became markedly queer. Impossible for an all-American half-back to do that. And he never mixed with the “queer ones.” What eccentricities he had, what flights of imagination he took were strictly on his own.
In due course he was admitted to the bar and on the heels of that came Helen. Those who saw him in his pursuit of Helen said that he seemed possessed. For once his imagination had found an outlet. For once all those desires which rose above his daily life and his usual companions had found a channel through which they could pour themselves. Eager for life as Helen was, full of dreams, independences, fresh from her years at college, she could not help being swept under by the torrent of desire and worship that he became. They soared away together—they lost themselves in marriage, in the marvel of child creation.
The war came. Gage met it gravely, a little less spread-eagle than most of his friends. He had a year in France and came back with a fallen enthusiasm. He never talked about that. He had plunged into money making. The small fortune his father had given him on his marriage had been absorbed in starting a home and Helen had nothing of her own. They needed a great deal of money and Gage got it, trampling into politics, into business, practicing law well all the time. He was now thirty-eight and had accumulated a remarkable store of influence and power. Very close to the Congressman from his district, keen and far sighted, as honest in keeping promises as he was ruthless in dealing with political obstructionists, he was recognized as the key man to his very important district. He knew politics as he knew law but he built no ideals on it. It was perhaps his very thorough knowledge of the deviousness of its methods which made him reluctant to have Helen meddle with it. For although he had accepted the suffrage of women as a political phenomenon which had to be taken in hand and dealt with, he had no belief that the old game would change much.
He nearly always looked his full age. His face was one of those into which deep lines come early, well modeled, but with no fineness of detail. And his large built body, always carelessly dressed, was the same. Yet there were times, Helen knew, when his eyes became plaintive and wondering and he looked as the little boy who was sent away to be “hardened” must have looked. Only he was learning to cover those times with a scowl.
He was finding that he could not quiet all the mental nightmares he had with his love for Helen. Because that love itself was infested by this strange new “woman problem.” What securities of opinion had been swept away by study, by war, what questions in him were left unsatisfied—those things were hidden in him. He had clung to love and faith in marriage. And now that stronghold was being attacked. He was hearing people who called it all fake, all false psychology. And he did not know how much Helen believed these people. He felt her restlessness in horror. He saw no direction in which she might go away from him where she would not meet destruction, where false, incomplete ideas would not ruin her. It was making him a reactionary.
For, because he had no solution himself, he was forced to fall back on negations. He denied everything, sank back into an idealism of the past.
“I liked that girl,” he said to his wife about Freda, “no fake.”
“None,” answered Helen. “I hoped you’d like her, Gage.”
“She says that the trouble with women is that they’ve lost the spirit of romance and that they’ve dug the romance out of men’s souls too.”
It was what he himself had said but it was easier to put to Helen in that way.