“Ugh! Don’t be disgusting,” she pleaded.
“I’m not disgusting. I am only expressing my sense of the immeasurable gulf that lies between you and anything of questionable taste. But go on with your story.”
“Well, Oliver arrived that night. When I asked him what he meant by the performance, he laughed in that infectious, irresistibly disarming way he has, and said, ‘Oh, I have been reading Heywood Broun on the care and nurture of children. The young man has ideas. He thinks the way to equip youth for the battle of life is to gird upon them the sword of early experience, the buckler of knowingness, and the whole armor of sophistication. And I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf and meet my children halfway. Treat them like equals, instead of like superior beings. Dorothy will learn to smoke next fall, when she goes to college. It may be the only useful thing she will ever learn there. Qui sait? But if she waits till then, she will learn with a parcel of silly goslings who will think it is devilish. Let’s try the effect of having her begin now at the domestic fireside with her own father and mother, who don’t think it devilish.”
I could seem to see a certain reckless experimental method in Oliver’s madness—as in the serious proposal of some other reformers for “communal bathing” in the household, as an antidote to precocious sexual curiosity. It was an experiment which I should be willing to have tried on a dog. It had something in common, indeed, with an undeveloped notion of my own on the use of moral antitoxins. But I could also see that Cornelia saw nothing of the sort. So I merely asked, “And what did you say?”
“I said,” she replied, “that Dorothy’s mother did think it devilish—that Dorothy had never seen her mother smoking and never would. He laughed again and said, ‘Then she will never learn to do it like a lady.’ I inquired whether he were incapable of distinguishing between what is permissible in a man, perhaps pardonable in his typist, and what is undesirable in his seventeen-year-old daughter. He reminded me that three fourths of the ladies he knows smoke, and that Russian women, French women, and English women can’t understand why we make a moral issue of it. I said, ‘So much the worse for them. I am sick of having something obviously bad in America excused merely because something obviously worse exists elsewhere.’ He said, ‘Cornelia, you are a Little American. You are out of step.’ And I lost my temper, and exclaimed, ‘Oliver, you are a great idiot! Dorothy hasn’t smoked yet, and she wouldn’t think of smoking now, if she hadn’t a fool for a father.’”
II
FLAGS OF REVOLT
As this was the first and remains the only occasion in my life on which any married woman has ever revealed to me any serious altercation between herself and her husband,—though I have been informed by others that such revelations are not uncommon,—I was astounded.
“Why, my dear Cornelia!” I exclaimed, “that was a fighting word. Was it then that Oliver beat you?”
“No,” she answered with a partially reassuring smile, “I wish he had. Oliver sulks when he is angry. I flash out what I feel, and have it over with. Oliver sulks and plots some revenge—some ingenious, horrid little revenge that he knows will make me furious.”
I gasped inwardly—if one can do that; but I tried to play the part of the unruffled confessor. I was learning so much that was new to me about happy family life. “Well, what did he do next?” I asked.