I thought to myself again: The horror of this superstition of prudery! Can one think of anything more destructive to life than the placing of a taboo upon such matters? Here is the whole of the future at stake—the health, the sanity, the very existence of the race. And what fiend has been able to contrive it that we feel like criminals when we mention the subject?
23. Our intimacy progressed, and the time came when Sylvia told me about her marriage. She had accepted Douglas van Tuiver because she had lost Frank Shirley, and her heart was broken. She could never imagine herself loving any other man; and not knowing exactly what marriage meant, it had been easier for her to think of her family, and to follow their guidance. They had told her that love would come; Douglas had implored her to give him a chance to teach her to love him. She had considered what she could do with his money—both for her home-people and for those she spoke of vaguely as “the poor.” But now she was making the discovery that she could not do very much for these “poor.”
“It isn’t that my husband is mean,” she said. “On the contrary, the slightest hint will bring me any worldly thing I want. I have homes in half a dozen parts of America—I have carte blanche to open accounts in two hemispheres. If any of my people need money I can get it; but if I want it for myself, he asks me what I’m doing with it—and so I run into the stone-wall of his ideas.”
At first the colliding with this wall had merely pained and bewildered her. But now the combination of Veblen and myself had helped her to realize what it meant. Douglas van Tuiver spent his money upon a definite system: whatever went to the maintaining of his social position, whatever added to the glory, prestige and power of the van Tuiver name—that money was well-spent; while money spent to any other end was money wasted—and this included all ideas and “causes.” And when the master of the house knew that his money was being wasted, it troubled him.
“It wasn’t until after I married him that I realized how idle his life is,” she remarked. “At home all the men have something to do, running their plantations, or getting elected to some office. But Douglas never does anything that I can possibly think is useful.”
His fortune was invested in New York City real-estate, she went on to explain. There was an office, with a small army of clerks and agents to attend to it—a machine which had been built up and handed on to him by his ancestors. It sufficed if he dropped in for an hour or two once a week when he was in the city, and signed a batch of documents now and then when he was away. His life was spent in the company of people whom the social system had similarly deprived of duties; and they had, by generations of experiment, built up for themselves a new set of duties, a life which was wholly without relationship to reality. Into this unreal existence Sylvia had married, and it was like a current sweeping her in its course. So long as she went with it, all was well; but let her try to catch hold of something and stop, and it would tear her loose and almost strangle her.
As time went on, she gave me strange glimpses into this world. Her husband did not seem really to enjoy its life. As Sylvia put it, “He takes it for granted that he has to do all the proper things that the proper people do. He hates to be conspicuous, he says. I point out to him that the proper things are nearly always conspicuous, but he replies that to fail to do them would be even more conspicuous.”
It took me a long time to get really acquainted with Sylvia, because of the extent to which this world was clamouring for her. I used to drop in when she ‘phoned me she had half an hour. I would find her dressing for something, and she would send her maid away, and we would talk until she would be late for some function; and that might be a serious matter, because somebody would feel slighted. She was always “on pins and needles” over such questions of precedent; it seemed as if everybody in her world must be watching everybody else. There was a whole elaborate science of how to treat the people you met, so that they would not feel slighted—or so that they would feel slighted, according to circumstances.
To the enjoyment of such a life it was essential that the person should believe in it. Douglas van Tuiver did believe in it; it was his religion, the only one he had. (Churchman as he was, his church was a part of the social routine.) He was proud of Sylvia, and apparently satisfied when he could take her at his side; and Sylvia went, because she was his wife, and that was what wives were for. She had tried her best to be happy; she had told herself that she was happy yet all the time realizing that a woman who is really happy does not have to tell herself.
Earlier in life she had quaffed and enjoyed the wine of applause. I recollect vividly her telling me of the lure her beauty had been to her—the most terrible temptation that could come to a woman. “I walk into a brilliant room, and I feel the thrill of admiration that goes through the crowd. I have a sudden sense of my own physical perfection—a glow all over me! I draw a deep breath—I feel a surge of exaltation. I say, ‘I am victorious—I can command! I have this supreme crown of womanly grace—I am all-powerful with it—the world is mine!’”