“With a masculine intellect! I comprehend, me boy. Don’t multiply epithets on my account. As I’ve said, I don’t presume to question the wisdom of your choice in this particular case, and that your inamorata is the best of her kind, but personally, I don’t take to the kind. By Jupiter! I was telling Jones of Illinois, last night, of an incident that gave me a ‘scunner’ against woman authors, twenty years ago. Mrs. Shenstone of New York was a literary light in her day. There’s a fashion in writers, as in everything else, and she went out with balloon skirts and chig-nongs. But she was a star of the first magnitude in her own opinion, and, at any rate, something in the stellar line in others’ eyes. Her husband had money and she was a poor girl when she married him. They say he made a show of holding his own while the shekels lasted. A more meek-spirited atomy I never beheld than when they called upon my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lamar from Charleston, then staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, one evening, when I chanced to be sitting with the Lamars in their private parlor. And as sure as I am a sinner and you’re another, the card brought in to Mrs. Lamar was ‘Mrs. Cordelia Shenstone and husband.’ The last two words were added in pencil. Fact, ’pon honor! Mrs. Lamar carried the card home and had it framed as a domestic and literary curiosity.”
“You cite an extreme case”—another glance at the slow clock. “If that woman had been a shopkeeper, or a dressmaker, with the same arbitrary, selfish spirit, she would have been guilty of the same gross violation of taste and feeling.”
“Maybe so! maybe so! But the writing woman is a prickly problem in modern society. She is leading the van in all revolutionary rot about women’s wrongs and women’s rights. The party can’t do without her, for the rank and file couldn’t draft a resolution or write a report to save their lives, and they’ve flattered up our blue-stocking until she steps out of all bounds. It makes a conservative patriot’s blood run cold to think what the upshot of it all is to be. And I confess I don’t like to anticipate seeing your cards engraved—‘Mrs. Clytemnestra Ashe and husband.’”
A dark red torrent poured over the listener’s face. Physically and morally, he was thin-skinned.
“There is nothing of the Clytemnestra in her make-up, sir. No woman ever made could rule me, were she my wife. Agnes is too gentle and too sensible to attempt it. As to the cards!” He went to a drawer and took out a bit of pasteboard which he tossed to his kinsman, with a derisive laugh. “That is all settled, you see. Come in!” to a knock at the door.
When the tardy best man appeared, the Hon. Simeon Barton, his head on one shoulder, and eyes half shut, after the manner of an impudent cock-sparrow, was scanning the engraved inscription,
Mr. and Mrs. Barton Ashe,
170 West —— St.
“Leave the ‘Simeon’ out, do you? Clytem—Agnes doesn’t like it, maybe?” And without waiting for a reply—“Good-evening, Mr. White. I’m just advising Bart here to use up this batch of cards plaguey quick, to make room for ‘Mrs. Ashe and husband.’”
Mr. White laughed a little and politely. The jest was in miserable taste, but much was pardonable in rich uncles who were self-made men, when they showed a disposition to help make their nephews. A glimmer of like reasoning may have entered Barton’s mind, for he turned an unshadowed brow to the eccentric millionaire.
“When that time comes I shall employ you to draw up the articles of separation. White, here, is witness to the agreement.”