He stopped to mop his brow, looking perfectly dignified.
"And yet," he added, egged on by my laughter, for I always loved his quiet irony—it was never directed at individuals, but at the ideas and traditions they blandly and blindly followed—
"And yet carping critics of the greatest nation on earth try to make out that art and intellectuality are not properly recognized in the States. Pessimists! Look at our picture galleries, filled with old masters from abroad! Think how that helps American artists! Look at our colleges, crowded with buildings more costly than Oxford's! Think how that encourages American teachers! Simply because an occasional foreign professor gets higher pay—bah! There are better things than money. For example, this!"
And he bent to his mower again, with much the same derisively dignified strut as on that memorable day long ago when I came and saw and was conquered by it—only then he wore black silk sleeves and now white shirtsleeves.
And so much for dignity.
I soon saw that if I were to be a help and not a hindrance to the man I loved I should have to depart from what I had been carefully trained to regard as woman's only true sphere. Do not be alarmed! I had no thought of leaving home or husband. It is simply that the home, in the industrial sense, is leaving the house—seventy-five per cent of it social scientists say, has gone already—so that nowadays a wife must go out after it or else find some new-fashioned productive substitute if she really intends to be an old-fashioned helpmate to her husband.
It was not a feminist theory but a financial condition that confronted us. My done-over trousseau would not last forever, nor would Carl's present intellectual wardrobe, which was becoming threadbare. Travel abroad and foreign study are just as necessary for an American scholar as foreign buying is for an American dealer in trousseaus.
I thought of many plans; but in a college town a woman's opportunities are so limited. We are not paid enough to be ladies, though we are required to dress and act like them—do not forget that point. And yet, when willing to stop being a lady, what could one do?
Finally I thought of dropping entirely out of the social, religious and charitable activities of the town, investing in a typewriter and subscribing to a correspondence-school course in stenography. I could at least help Carl prepare his lectures and relieve him of the burden of letter writing, thus giving him more time for book reviewing and other potboiling jobs, which were not only delaying his own book but making him burn the candle at both ends in the strenuous effort to make both ends meet.
I knew Carl would object, but I had not expected such an outburst of profane rage as followed my announcement. The poor boy was dreadfully tired, and for months, like the thoroughbred he was, he had repressed his true feelings under a quiet, quizzical smile.