Neither spoke immediately. Finally Mary said: “I suppose that’s as bad an omen as to break a mirror 228 under a ladder on Friday the thirteenth. Now shall I have the men sweep the office out? There is no reason we cannot get to work to-morrow.”
“Wait a moment about sweeping out offices and going to work,” Steve insisted. “If you want to break the hoodoo you have just brought on yourself by smashing up wedding cake––let me talk and act as high priest.”
She shook her head. “You promised, and you’ve been true-blue––don’t spoil it. Besides, it can do no good.”
“I want to ask a question,” he insisted. “I’m not going to break faith with you or take advantage of knowing what you told me. I shall always try to appreciate the honour done me, no matter if I am unworthy. I want to ask a question in as impersonal a way as if I wrote in to a woman’s column.” He tried to laugh.
“Ask away.” Mary sat down in the nearest chair, the broken cardboard box at her feet.
“Why is it that a man can honestly be in love with the woman he marries and yet in an amazingly short time find himself playing the cad in feeling disappointed, discontented, utterly lacking affection? It’s a ghastly happening. Why is it he saw no handwriting on the wall? I am not stupid, Mary, neither am I given to inconstancy––I’ve had to struggle too much not to have my mind made up once and for all time. Why didn’t I see through this veneer of a good time that these Gorgeous Girls manage to have painted over their real selves? Why did I never suspect? And what is a man to do when he discovers the disillusionment? You see it all, there’s no sense in not admitting it––why do I find myself ill 229 at ease, now tense, now irritable over trifles, now sulky, despondent––as plainly sulky and despondent as a wild animal successfully caged and labelled, which must perforce stay put yet which will not afford its spectators the satisfaction of walking wistfully from cage corner to cage corner and yowling in unanswered anguish!”
“Is it as bad as that?” she asked, softly.
He nodded as he continued: “I sometimes feel the way the monkish fraternity did at Oxford when they claimed ‘they banished God and admitted women.’ I want a man-made world, womanless, without a single trace of romance or a good time. Not right, is it? Sometimes I think I’ll crack under the pretense, go raving mad and scream out the whole miserable sham under which I live––and every time I indulge myself in such a reverie I find myself writing Beatrice an extra check and going with her to this thing or that, steel-hammer pulses beating at my forehead and a languor about even the attempt at breathing.”
Mary would have spoken but he rushed ahead: “I like this fire, this debris. Most people would curse at it––it’s real and rather common, sort of plain boiled-dinner variety. It gives me an excuse to take time off from the eternal frolic. I’m glad when there’s a strike or a row and I dig out of town to stay in a commercial hotel. I have to get away from the whole tinsel show. And yet it was what I wanted, was willing to play modern Faust to any Wall Street Mephistopheles–––”
“And you are sure it wasn’t a Mephistopheles?”