Young People's Pride: A Novel

by Stephen Vincent Benét

“Then the partnership with Jessup came and I took it. And after a year I was made. I wasn't the last of one of the penniless old families that give each other dinners once a month and pretend they're the real society because they haven't money enough to trail in the present society game—even by then I was—what did that last newspaper story say? 'a figure of nation-wide importance.' Then it must be just about time, I thought, that this figure of nation-wide importance began to look around a little and married the wife he'd been waiting for and started to pick up all the things he hadn't had for twelve years.

“Well—Mary. And I was so careful about Mary,” his lips twisted, half whimsically, half painfully. “I was so damn sure. I was so damn sure I knew everything about women.

“She had the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted—beauty, position, breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but there I thought I could help her—the way she ran things for her father on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in love with each other—oh dear no—but that I considered on the whole an advantage—she attracted me and it's fair enough to say that beside most of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York and being one of the young big coming men from the West dazzled her rather. And anyhow I didn't want—passion—exactly. I thought it would take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be—public—and yet somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And I thought I had them all in Mary—I thought I was being about the most sensible man in the world.

“Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty hard. I gave her all I could think of—materially at least. And then I found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman—even bearably—and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I never got beyond the social acquaintance stage.

“It wasn't all Mary's fault either—I can see that now. A good deal was in the way she'd been brought up—they weren't modern about the blisses of ignorance in the nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to a servant or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted something done.

“She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative—that was one thing. But that wasn't the main trouble—the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly—she's always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance—it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without meaning to—the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt her was herself.

“As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house—something you must never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and be publicly amiable to because you must be just—but something you never never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without feeling that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained inside.

“Then the children came—she did and does love them. She lives for them. But they're part of herself too, you see, an essential part, and as she can't give herself to anybody but herself, she can't give them to me even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf—and she's the kind of woman whose children are always six to her. And she's their mother—and so she has her way.

“That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago.

“I'd done my job—I was President of the Commercial. And I'd made my money, and the money still kept coming in as if it didn't make any difference what I did with it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it for me?