“By every woman in New York who is worth the notice of an intelligent being. With one distinguished exception. Mrs. Ashe’s absence was the occasion of universal regret. As a well-wisher let me warn you that you may be mobbed some day for your unconscionable cruelty to the highest order of created things; for imprisoning the eagle and stilling the song of the lark. At least fifty people asked me to-day why Agnes Welles had disappeared from the literary firmament. For one and all, I had one and the same reply. ‘She has taken the bridal veil,’ I said, tears in eyes and voice. ‘In consequence of that piece of barbarity, and for no other cause, the places that once knew her know her no more.’ One woman—I won’t divulge her name, lest you should hate her—said she ‘should as soon think of chaining a thrush to the leg of a kitchen chair as of obliging that glorious young thing to resign her Heaven-appointed mission for the position of caterer, housekeeper, and seamstress.’ I shall work that bon mot into my next literary letter to the Boston Globe. Another delightfully satirical creature advised me to take up the cause of ‘Great Women Married to Small Men,’ in my next series of papers upon ‘Unconsidered Wrongs of Our Sex.’ You see the reputation you are earning for yourself with the powers that be!”
Barton Ashe was a sensible man, well educated and well bred. Under favoring circumstances, as when inspired by the society of his wife and her loving appreciation, he was quick with repartee and apt at fence even with a wordy woman. Under the present onslaught he was furious and dumb. Had a man insulted him, and less grossly, he would have knocked him down or given him his card and demanded a meeting elsewhere. This berouged and bedizened old maid compromised him in the eyes of solid men and giddy girls by entering into conversation with him at all. Each shrill word was a prickle in a pore of his mental cuticle. She advertised his wife as one of her kind, arraigned him as despot and churl, menaced him with public exposure, and posed as Agnes’ champion against the oppressor on whose side was the power of law and tradition—made him ridiculous to all within the sound of her brazen tongue—and he was powerless.
He did the only thing possible to a man calling himself a gentleman, when baited to desperation in a public place by a woman who passes for a lady—he lifted his hat silently and pulled the strap to stop the car. Other passengers than Miss Marvel marked the dark face and blazing eyes, and curious regards wandered back to the offender, smiling to herself at this new proof of her ability to, in her favorite phrase, “drive a poisoned needle under a man’s fifth rib.”
“Great Women Married To Small Men!”
The most offensive count in the unanswered indictment seemed to be flung after him by the shrieking March wind. Until this moment of intensest exasperation he had never consciously compared himself mentally with his wife. That spiritually she was purer and better he was ever ready to admit. The gallant alacrity with which men yield the palm of virtue and piety to women may be due to the candor of real greatness, but a keen student of human contrarieties is excusable for likening it, sometimes, to the ostentatious generosity of the child who surrenders to a playfellow the wholesome “cookey,” while he holds fast to the plum cake for his own delectation.
“Great” and “Small” were explicit terms that threw our hero upon the hostile-defensive. Agnes was a pearl among women, as good, true, and sweet as any man need covet for a lifelong companion. She kept his house well and his home bright, her sympathies were ready, her love was poured out upon him in unstinted measure, she studied his tastes, humored his few foibles, in brief, filled his life, or so much of it as she could reach, most satisfactorily. Her mind was fairly stocked with miscellaneous information; she had remarkable facility in composition and graceful fancies, and, above all, the happy knack of saying, in a telling way, things people cared to hear. Being in “the literary ring,” she had secured a respectable audience, and, being a tactful woman, she had kept it.
“Great,” she was not, in any sense of the word, except according to the perverted standard of the “Club” gang, the mutual-admiration circle, with whom every poetaster was a Browning, and the writer of turgid essays a Carlyle or Emerson.
He gave a scornful snort in repeating the adjective. Agnes would be the first to deprecate the application of it to herself. Yet—if she had not invited the commendation of the Précieuses ridicules—had her name never been bandied from mouth to mouth in public, the antithetical “small” had never been fitted to him. Husband and wife were in false positions. That was clear—and galling. Almost as clear, and harder to endure, was his conviction that the situation could not be altered for the better.
He had not made up his mind to graceful acceptance of the inevitable when he fitted the latchkey in the door of his own house.
The popular impression as to the housewifery of pen-wrights had no confirmation within the modest domicile of which Agnes Ashe was the presiding genius. During her mother’s protracted invalidism and her own betrothal she had studied domestic economy, including cookery, with the just regard to system and thoroughness that made her successful in her other profession of authorship. Her computations were correct and her methods dainty. She deserved the more honor for all this because she was not naturally fond of household occupations. If she reduced dusting to a fine art, mixing and baking to an exact science, it was conscientiously, not with love for the duties themselves.