* * * * *
The interview has left me quite in the dark. Why had she done it? Is she in love with Ben? Is there any change in the inner woman? Can she be held wholly and loyally by a man with whom she cannot trifle, before whom she is genuinely afraid? Was it the dramatic revenge that tempted her? Or was it just the instinct of social self-preservation, the fetich of that great god, Respectability, which dominates all such women? For, protest as they may, no matter how they rage against conventionalities, flout them openly or secretly, in the heart of each lawless woman, whether her situation be sheltered or ruthlessly exposed, is the slumbering veneration of the thing called respectability. Once passed the thirties, it becomes an obsession. Perhaps, after all, it was the safe haven of respectability that Letty sought, at the end of a few adventurous years. Perhaps, it was a combination of all these motives. But, of one thing I am certain,—Letty is afraid of her husband.
V
December
My first Sunday has come and gone. All day I have been looking at myself and at my home with a new revelation of values. Strangely enough, I never before perceived its significance. France and another civilization have suddenly thrown it into a clearer relief, and all the while the words of Bernoline return to my memory. What a contrast!
At eleven o’clock we departed to Sunday worship: Ben and my mother to the Unitarian Church; Aunt Janie to the Congregational, with father; and Molly and myself to a Presbyterian service, accompanied by the servants. No scene is more typical of what we are: a group of individualists bound together by mutual tolerance. Are we a home, I wonder, or simply a shelter over a group of lodgers for this night or for many nights? Of course, it is not fair to take us as typical of America. Yet we are typical of one thing,—a developed type of traditional New England. This morning, as I sat in the old pew, with Molly by my side, I thought with a little tightening of my heart that even in the coming days of suspense when I go back to the front my family will not be even united in its sorrow.
* * * * *
The whole contrast between our two civilizations, French and American, is here,—in the family. Thinking on this to-night, I understand Bernoline better. The sense of duty that dominates her life and makes sacrifice so easily possible is the sense of family solidarity. Love of the mother, respect for the authority of the father, companionship with the children,—it is a France in miniature, and that greater love of country is but a tradition of family pride.
I do not think we have this strongly disciplined sense of duty nor this unquestioning acceptance of sacrifice. How often children are but accidents and sometimes strangers under the same roof. In my own case, what is my father to me? Do I know him as well as I know the boy I roomed with at school, I wonder? There is hardly an opinion we share or an outlook on life which we could understand together. He has never really discussed anything with me, as though instinctively he divined I would take an opposite view.
I don’t say what should be. Yet to-night, perhaps because the sense of loss of a dear and necessary presence accents my own loneliness, I can visualize another type of home—the home of Bernoline—and wonder.... After all, there is something that touches the heart strings in the thought of the generations succeeding each other, standing for the same ideal of conduct, the same loyalty to a conception of state and faith, passing down the same standard from father and son and guarding it in reverence! Governments change as I change my hat; waves of paganism, materialism and doubt come and pass; but so long as the family faith is untouched, France will be found equal to its past. Order, stability, discipline,—the sunken cornerstone of the national consciousness are all in this conception, and I think to understand this is to understand why there was no miracle in France’s answer in the month of August, 1914.