"It's the prettiest house I know," Isabelle said warmly, and Bessie felt repaid.
She was very tired, and to-day looked worn. The new toy was dragging her out. As the long St. Louis summer drew to an end, she was always tired. Some obscure woman's trouble, something in the delicate organism that had never been quite right, was becoming acutely wrong. She lived in fear of having another child,—the last baby had died. By the new year she was in care of Isabelle's specialist, who advised an operation. When that was over, it was nearly spring, and though she was still delicate, she wished to give some dinners "to return their obligations." Falkner objected for many reasons, and she thought him very hard.
"It is always sickness and babies for me," she pouted; "and when I want a little fun, you think we can't afford it or something."
Her hospitable heart was so bent on this project, it seemed so natural that she should desire to show off her toy, after her struggle for it, so innocent "to have our friends about us," that he yielded in part. A good deal might be told about that dinner, from an economic, a social, a domestic point of view. But we must lose it and hasten on. Imagine merely, what a charming woman like Bessie Falkner, whose scheme of the universe was founded on the giving of "pleasant little dinners," would do,—a woman who was making her life, building her wigwam, filling it with those she wished to have as friends, and you will see it all. It was, of course, a great success. Mrs. Anstruthers Leason said of the hostess (reported by Nan Lawton through Isabelle), "Little Mrs. Falkner has the real social gift,—a very rare thing among our women!" And when an invitation came from Mrs. Anstruthers Leason to dinner and her box at the French opera, Bessie was sure that she had found her sphere.
* * * * *
Falkner seemed to Bessie these days to be growing harder,—he was "exacting," "unsympathetic," "tyrannical." "He won't go places, and he won't have people,—isn't nice to them, even in his own house," Bessie said sadly to Isabelle. "I suppose that marriage usually comes to that: the wife stands for bills and trouble, and the husband scolds. Most people squabble, don't they?"
"Of course he loves you, dear," Isabelle consoled her. "American husbands always take their wives for granted, as Nannie says. A foreigner pays attentions to his wife after marriage that our husbands don't think are necessary once they have us. Our husbands take us too much as a matter of course,—and pay the bills!"
Bessie felt and said that Rob took life too hard, worried too much. After all, when a man married a woman and had children, he must expect a certain amount of trouble and anxiety. She wasn't sure but that wives were needed to keep men spurred to their highest pitch of working efficiency. She had an obscure idea that the male was by nature lazy and self-indulgent, and required the steel prod of necessity to do his best work. As she looked about her among the struggling households, it seemed such was the rule,—that if it weren't for the fact of wife and children and bills, the men would deteriorate…. Naturally there were differences,—"squabbles," as she called them; but she would have been horrified if any one had suggested that these petty squabbles, the state of mind they produced or indicated, were infinitely more degrading, more deteriorating to them both, than adultery. It never entered her mind that either she or her husband could be unfaithful, that Falkner could ever care for any other woman than her. "Why, we married for love!"
* * * * *
Love! That divine unreason of the gods, which lures man as a universal solvent of his sorrow, the great solution to the great enigma! Where was it? Bessie asked when Rob passed her door in the morning on his way to his solitary breakfast without a word of greeting or a kiss, and finally left the house without remembering to go upstairs again. And Falkner asked himself much the same thing, when Bessie persisted in doing certain things "because everybody does," or when he realized that after two years in his new position, with a five hundred dollars' increase in his salary the second year, he was nearly a thousand dollars in debt, and losing steadily each quarter. Something must be done—and by him!—for in marriage, he perceived with a certain bitterness, Man was the Forager, the Provider. And in America if he didn't bring in enough from the day's hunt to satisfy the charming squaw that he had made his consort, why,—he must trudge forth again and get it! A poor hunter does not deserve the embellishment of a Bessie and two pretty children.