“John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, uptown. I feel different, but it isn’t an improvement. And you, Pidge, you’re taller. And John Higgins says you’re doing so well.”
“I’m thanking you every day for that——”
She kept thinking about the change in him. If this were selflessness, she liked him better before. He had been quite unselfish enough, she thought. She didn’t see the fight in him, because it was so subtly identified with herself. She only knew that he seemed without fight.
“Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out somewhere——”
That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. They played at the old game of Comrades. Often they lunched together, occasionally with John Higgins for a third. At such times it seemed that they took The Public Square with them, subscribers, advertisers, contributors, policies. It was that curious time in America when the personal and national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness.
Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New York interiors in 1870—respectable, established, grim. The gradual speeding up of the world for a half century to the explosive point of 1914 ended with the click of the key in this hall door, and you were in the world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed mother, an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegrating grandfather, and Dicky himself, not in a different guise at all—the same courteous, sincere Dicky, but now to Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly comprehensible. This was the place that had made him. This was his reason for being.
Here life was life. Here was the family unit, the family a globe, all human society moving outside like the water around a bubble; a closed globe reflecting all else in curious unreality. Here three-score-and-ten was life, and a very long time. Life wasn’t a spiritual experiment, in matter; not an extension in matter of souls that had made innumerable such experiments, but straight work-a-day three-score-and-ten with oblivion at the birth end, and heaven or hell at the other. Here was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love one another and hang together—for the rest was with God. Here senility was dear. The heavy-bodied, dim-minded grandfather was still grandfather, not the vanishing spirit of him. They would weep when the body passed. They would look to his place in the cemetery and say, “Here he lies.”
Pidge Musser wanted to scream, not at the limitations, but at the kindness which was showered upon her. They were ready to perform the great transaction of taking her in, opening their hearts and house to a maiden, who would bring respectable additions to the Cobden line—sharing wealth, well-being, gentleness, the Cobden name which had been kept clean and useable and virile, and the Cobden God, who stood on the other side of death with angelic associates and rewards in His hands.
Pidge continually felt that her next word would ruin everything; yet they unswervingly regarded her as becoming one with themselves; the process of assimilation already begun. They were patient, knowing of old that a new maiden would have incrustations of the world to check off, inequalities to be planed down. They set about not adjusting to her, but as she fancied, assimilating her, as the changeless Chinese assimilate a weaker race, breaking down the foreigner in themselves. She would become theirs to them with the years.