Before his marriage Beatrice had always been terribly rushed and he had had more time in which to work and glow with pride at the nearing of his goal. She kept him at arm’s length very cleverly anchored with the two-carat engagement ring and Steve had to fight for time and plead for an audience. It fired his imagination, making him twice as keen for the final capture.
But when two persons live in the same apartment, notwithstanding the eleven rooms and so on, a monotony of existence pervades even the grandeur of velvet-panelled walls. There are the inevitable three meals a day to be gone through with––five meals if tea and a supper party are counted. There are the same ever-rising questions as to the cook’s honesty and the chauffeur’s graft in the matter of buying, new tires. There are just so many persons who have to be wined and dined and who revenge themselves by doing likewise to their former host; the everlasting exchanging of courtesies and pleasantries––all the dull, decent habits of ultra living.
Steve found his small store of possessions huddled into a corner, his pet slippers and gown graciously bestowed upon a passing panhandler, and he was obliged to don a very correct gray “shroud,” as he named it in thankless terms, and to put his cigar and cigar ashes into something having the earmarks of an Etruscan coal scuttle, though Beatrice said it was a priceless antique Gay had bought for a song! There were many times when Steve would have 94 liked to roam about his house in plebeian shirt sleeves, eat a plain steak and French-fried potatoes with a hunk of homemade pie as a finish, and spend the evening in that harmless, disorderly fashion known to men of doing nothing but stroll about smoking, playing semi-popular records, reading the papers, and very likely having another hunk of pie at bedtime.
Besides all this there were the topics of the day to discuss. During his courtship love was an all-absorbing topic. There were many questions that Beatrice asked that required intricate and tiring answers. During the first six weeks of living at the apartment Steve realized a telling difference between men and women is that a woman demands a specific case––you must rush special incidents to back up any theory you may advance––whereas men, for the most part, are content with abstract reasoning and supply their own incidents if they feel inclined. Also that a finely bred fragile type of woman such as Beatrice inspires both fear and a maudlin sort of sympathy, and that man is prevented from crossing such a one to any great extent since men are as easily conquered by maudlin sympathy as by fear.
When a yellow-haired child with dove-coloured eyes manages to squeeze out a tear and at the same moment depart in wrath to her room and lock the doors, refusing to answer––the trouble being why in heaven’s name must a pound-and-a-half spaniel called Monster, nothing but a flea-bearing dust mop, do nothing but sit and yap for chocolates?––what man is going to dare do otherwise than suppress a little profanity and then go and whisper apologies at the keyhole?
After several uncomfortable weeks of this sort of 95 mental chaos Steve determined to do what many business men do––particularly the sort starting life in an orphan asylum and ending by having residence pipe organs and Russian wolfhounds frolicking at their heels––to bury himself in his work and defend his seclusion by never refusing to write a check for his wife. When he finally reached this decision he was conscious of a strange joy.
Everything was a trifle too perfect to suit Steve. The entire effect was that of the well-set stage of a society drama. Beatrice was too correctly gowned and coiffured, always upstage if any one was about, her high-pitched, thin voice saying superlative nothings upon the slightest provocation; or else she was dissolving into tears and tantrums if no one was about.
Steve could not grasp the wherefore of having such stress laid upon the exact position of a floor cushion or the colour scheme for a bridge luncheon––he would have so rejoiced in really mediocre table service, in less precision as to the various angles of the shades or the unrumpled condition of the rugs. He had not the oasis Mark Constantine had provided for himself when he kept his room of old-fashioned trappings apart from the rest of the mansion.
Steve needed such a room. He planned almost guiltily upon building a shack in the woods whither he could run when things became too impossible for his peace of mind. If he could convince his wife that a thing was smart or different from everything else its success and welcome in their house were assured. But an apple pie, a smelly pipe, a maidless dinner table, or a disorderly den had never been considered smart in Beatrice’s estimation, and Steve never attempted trying to change her point of view.