“Well, well, here’s Dora now, as usual. I suppose she’ll try to butt in.”
But she doesn’t. She just hesitates beside the table long enough to say: “Got to sweep right along, girlies. Going to buzz out to the Inland Inn for dinner with Ned. Yep. What’s the matter? You know Ned. Our old friend Ned. The same. He’s waiting for me now. G’bye.”
Talk of nerve! You have to hand it to that Dora girl!
Exit Dora. Enter Jim and five or six other men, mostly husbands to the women already present.
Jim begins by asking if anybody has seen Dora. The ensemble tells him not only that but 161 everything else about Dora. Harry orders a round of drinks. So does Charlie. Somebody praises the drawn-butter sauce at the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La Fontaine. Jim orders a round of drinks. Jim is willing to eat his hat if Dora’s divorce wasn’t her husband’s fault. Must have been. Never saw the husband. But Dora’s character! Jim drinks off one of the cocktails standing in front of his right-hand neighbor Frank, and returns to Dora’s character. No straighter little girl ever came to this town. On hearing this from her husband, Margaret gets up and leaves the Tea Room and goes to the Purple Parlor and cries. Fannie takes her opportunity and begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned has been lately to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim drinks off another of Frank’s cocktails and runs to the Purple Parlor to find Margaret. She’s still crying. He thinks she’s crying because Ned is away with Dora. He rebukes her. In King Arthur’s vein. Is he not her husband? Woman, tell him that. But dignity soon tapers off with him into the “Now I warn you to cut it out” of the tyrannical manikin 162 with a cinder in the eye of his self-conceit. Their friends hear them quarreling and follow them into the Purple Parlor. There’s a terrible row in the Purple Parlor. The Purple Parlor is full of persons explaining. Fannie explains. Charlie explains. Each person explains, individually, to each other person, individually. Each couple reaches a satisfactory explanation. But, somehow, when they start to explain that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen’l’man to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the only member of the party who hasn’t been drinking, can’t help seeing what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appetites. Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out from the curb to the street-center everybody’s head is out of window and everybody’s voice is saying “The Suddington,” “The Grünewurst,” “Max’s,” “The Royal Gorge,” “Perinique’s.”
The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.
Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world’s mental life. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of service which produce power and character.
With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort—to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery 164 of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world’s worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!