But if the idea of having a child was an adventure, they both had to admit that the conditions it called for were somewhat depressing. For one thing, they had to have more space. The first work she did after leaving Barcroft’s establishment was to move to a flat in the eighties on the west side. In every particular this place lacked the charm of her studio, nor could anything they did to it or put into it make it seem the same. The little kennel-like separations called rooms were diabolically invented for people who had to have children, and so constructed as to make them hate the fact that they had them.
At the earliest hint of the baby’s coming she noticed changes in Miles. He had never been very regular or responsible about office hours. Now it worried him if he was a half minute late in getting started. He talked less, he exaggerated less. He seemed to be unwilling to discuss books, or any of the old subjects that had enthralled him. He spoke much of there being a future “in the firm,” for a chap who “really buckled down and dug up results.” She realized that he was beginning to regard his job as a permanent support.
He came home sometimes with bundles of papers filled with figures and sat in the little study at night, writing what he called “plans” and “copy” and making “market analyses.” It was the same sort of jargon that Barcroft talked incessantly—“sales and distribution,” “consumer demand,” and “dealer helps.” It had sounded all right from Barcroft; but from Miles.... She found among his papers rough drafts in his own hand of advertisements extolling the value of hog foods, lice powder, piston rings—and one long story about “How I raised my salary from fifty to two hundred dollars a week in six months.” When she read these she went into her room and cried. They had meant nothing to her so long as he took them lightly; now that he applied his whole mind to them and sat absently dreaming of them, they seemed blasphemous. But she dared not complain; she had no remedy to offer.
In a little while—after the baby was a few months old—he began to bring home news of certain results from all this energy and absorption. His salary took a sudden jump. He was “meeting clients” continually, doing executive work. Soon, he told her, he would have a small office to himself. She simulated pleasure at these announcements, but she felt none. Every triumph of that sort meant a surrender of himself. She even resented the care he had begun to take in his clothes and his hair-cuts, the change in his style of dress.
The ugliness of the little apartment in a building which held perhaps fifty tiresome families, the dreary parade of bourgeois virtues, and fourth or fifth rate finery, the strident female voices in the street and halls, the newness of everything one touched and looked at, the lack of shadows and mystery and ease, the pervasive, obvious travail for money—all these things were to Moira an education in American life which her youth had escaped. She disliked them, but she regarded them, because they were strange to her, with a detached, half-amused curiosity.
To Miles, however, they were a return to the hated past—from just such a street in Cincinnati he had fled in horror years before. She saw that it really involved him; that daily, as it were, he had to brush its overwhelming effect from his clothes and from his mind. It was she who was putting him through all this.... And it was only an added irony that Miles, junior, turned out such a satisfactory child, normal and vigorous and good-tempered. It did not improve matters any that he deserved this sacrifice, for with every new fascination he exerted, every delightful characteristic he exhibited, the subjection of all their hopes to his demands became more complete....
Three years passed this way, and though the affairs of the Harlindew family went on quite as ever in outward appearance, much had happened underneath to both.
In the first place she had learned that a child was not a temporary encumbrance, one that she could throw off in a year or two for outside work. If certain of its wants diminished with its growth, others increased, and the habit of being an attendant mother became fixed. She had had to abandon her plan of returning to offices. Cheap servant girls and the risk run in trusting them worried her too much as it was. She became as helpless a house-person as the scores of other young mothers in her teeming block.
With the relinquishment of this notion came the gradual realization that they might never be able to take up again that shoulder to shoulder independence which had seemed so fine while it lasted. Miles from now on was the provider—she and her child the dependents. She discovered that he had seen this more clearly than she from the beginning.