He was about to light a cigarette when she began her question. He lit it and blew out the first few puffs of smoke before he replied. They were sitting in Norma's favourite nook on the terrace, where he, solitary male who had not gone forth with a gun that morning, had been gratuitously told by an obliging hostess that he would find her.
“The American woman makes a good decorative duchess,” he said in his incisive tone, “because she has to sweep herself clean of every tradition she was born with and accept bodily the very much bigger and more dazzling tradition of your old aristocracy. She can do it, because she is infinitely sensitive and intelligent. But she is a changed creature. She has to live up to her duke.”
He puffed for a moment or two at his cigarette.
“Do you see what I am coming to?” he continued. “I am not an English duke. I am a plain American citizen. No woman in America would make it her ideal in life to live up to me.”
“I don't mean to be rude,” interrupted Norma, with a laugh, “but do you think any Englishwoman would?”
“I do,” he replied. “Not to this insignificant, baldheaded thing that is I, but to what in the way of position and power I represent. An American woman would bring her traditions along with her—her superior culture, her natural right to be enthroned as queen, her expectation that I would take a back seat in my own house. It is I that would become a sort of grotesque decoration in the place. Now, I may be grotesque, but I will not consent to be decorative. I fully intend to be master. I am not going to be Mrs. Theodore Weever's husband. I want an Englishwoman to bring along her traditions. She will be naturally grande dame; she will come to my house, my social world, frankly the wife of Theodore Weever, and ready to support the dignity, whatever it may be, of Theodore Weever, just as she would have supported the dignity of Lord So and So, had she been married to him in England.”
“You will find thousands of English girls who can do that,” said Norma. “I don't see your difficulty.”
“She must be decorative,” said Weever.
“And that means?”
“She must be a queenly woman, but one content to be queen consort. Your queenly woman—with brains—is not so easy to find. I have met only one in my life who is beyond all my dreams of the ideal. Of course the inherent malice of things screws her down like one blade of a pair of scissors to another fellow.”