← catalogue

Sylvia's Marriage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #5807 · 422,166 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sylvia's Marriage: A Novel
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Sylvia's Marriage: A Novel

Author: Upton Sinclair


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5807]
                Most recently updated: October 13, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5807

Credits: Text file produced by Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team
        
        HTML file produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team









SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE

A NOVEL


By Upton Sinclair

Author Of “The Jungle,” Etc., Etc.

London




SOME PRESS NOTICES

“The importance of the theme cannot be doubted, and no one hitherto
ignorant of the ravages of the evil and therefore, by implication, in
need of being convinced can refuse general agreement with Mr. Sinclair
upon the question as he argues it. The character that matters most is
very much alive and most entertaining.”--_The Times._

“Very severe and courageous. It would, indeed, be difficult to deny
or extenuate the appalling truth of Mr. Sinclair’s indictment.”-- _The
Nation._

“There is not a man nor a grown woman who would not be better for
reading Sylvia’s Marriage.”--_The Globe_

“Those who found Sylvia charming on her first appearance will find her
as beautiful and fascinating as ever.”--_The Pall Mall_.

“A novel that frankly is devoted to the illustration of the dangers
that society runs through the marriage of unsound men with unsuspecting
women. The time has gone by when any objection was likely to be taken to
a perfectly clean discussion of a nasty subject.”--_T.P.’s Weekly._



CONTENTS



BOOK I SYLVIA AS WIFE

BOOK II SYLVIA AS MOTHER

BOOK III SYLVIA AS REBEL






SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE




BOOK I. SYLVIA AS WIFE


1. I am telling the story of Sylvia Castleman. I should prefer to tell
it without mention of myself; but it was written in the book of fate
that I should be a decisive factor in her life, and so her story
pre-supposes mine. I imagine the impatience of a reader, who is promised
a heroine out of a romantic and picturesque “society” world, and
finds himself beginning with the autobiography of a farmer’s wife on a
solitary homestead in Manitoba. But then I remember that Sylvia found
me interesting. Putting myself in her place, remembering her eager
questions and her exclamations, I am able to see myself as a heroine of
fiction.

I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must
have been the first “common” person she had ever known intimately. She
had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself
with the reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy
over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a soul like herself;
and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things she
desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that
had been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott,
with her modern attitude and her common-sense.

My girlhood was spent upon a farm in Iowa. My father had eight children,
and he drank. Sometimes he struck me; and so it came about that at
the age of seventeen I ran away with a boy of twenty who worked upon
a neighbour’s farm. I wanted a home of my own, and Tom had some money
saved up. We journeyed to Manitoba, and took out a homestead, where I
spent the next twenty years of my life in a hand-to-hand struggle with
Nature which seemed simply incredible to Sylvia when I told her of it.

The man I married turned out to be a petty tyrant. In the first five
years of our life he succeeded in killing the love I had for him; but
meantime I had borne him three children, and there was nothing to do but
make the best of my bargain. I became to outward view a beaten drudge;
yet it was the truth that never for an hour did I give up. When I lost
what would have been my fourth child, and the doctor told me that I
could never have another, I took this for my charter of freedom, and
made up my mind to my course; I would raise the children I had, and grow
up with them, and move out into life when they did.

This was when I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of
it by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the
accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men, who
were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell in my
tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the men ate
supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was my life in
those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with which Sylvia
listened to the story. But these things are common in the experience
of women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the slave-woman has
toiled since civilization began.

We won out, and my husband made money. I centred my energies upon
getting school-time for my children; and because I had resolved that
they should not grow ahead of me, I sat up at night, and studied their
books. When the oldest boy was ready for high-school, we moved to a
town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that time I
had become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too painful to
describe. But I still had my craving for knowledge, and my illness was
my salvation, in a way--it got me a hired girl, and time to patronize
the free library.

I had never had any sort of superstition or prejudice, and when I got
into the world of books, I began quickly to find my way. I travelled
into by-paths, of course; I got Christian Science badly, and New Thought
in a mild attack. I still have in my mind what the sober reader would
doubtless consider queer kinks; for instance, I still practice “mental
healing,” in a form, and I don’t always tell my secret thoughts about
Theosophy and Spiritualism. But almost at once I worked myself out of
the religion I had been taught, and away from my husband’s politics,
and the drugs of my doctors. One of the first subjects I read about was
health; I came upon a book on fasting, and went away upon a visit and
tried it, and came back home a new woman, with a new life before me.

In all of these matters my husband fought me at every step. He wished
to rule, not merely my body, but my mind, and it seemed as if every new
thing that I learned was an additional affront to him. I don’t think
I was rendered disagreeable by my culture; my only obstinacy was in
maintaining the right of the children to do their own thinking. But
during this time my husband was making money, and filling his life with
that. He remained in his every idea the money-man, an active and bitter
leader of the forces of greed in our community; and when my studies took
me to the inevitable end, and I joined the local of the Socialist party
in our town, it was to him like a blow in the face. He never got over
it, and I think that if the children had not been on my side, he would
have claimed the Englishman’s privilege of beating me with a stick
not thicker than his thumb. As it was, he retired into a sullen
hypochondria, which was so pitiful that in the end I came to regard him
as not responsible.

I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were
graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything but
torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce. I had helped to lay
the foundation of his fortune, cementing it with my blood, I might say,
and I could fairly have laid claim to half what he had brought from
the farm; but my horror of the parasitic woman had come to be such that
rather than even seem to be one, I gave up everything, and went out into
the world at the age of forty-five to earn my own living. My children
soon married, and I would not be a burden to them; so I came East for
a while, and settled down quite unexpectedly into a place as a
field-worker for a child-labour committee.

You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to meet
Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, _née_ Castleman, and to be chosen for her bosom
friend; but that would only be because you do not know the modern world.
We have managed to get upon the consciences of the rich, and they invite
us to attend their tea-parties and disturb their peace of mind. And
then, too, I had a peculiar hold upon Sylvia; when I met her I possessed
the key to the great mystery of her life. How that had come about is a
story in itself, the thing I have next to tell.

2. It happened that my arrival in New York from the far West coincided
with Sylvia’s from the far South; and that both fell at a time when
there were no wars or earthquakes or football games to compete for
the front page of the newspapers. So everybody was talking about the
prospective wedding. The fact that the Southern belle had caught
the biggest prize among the city’s young millionaires was enough to
establish precedence with the city’s subservient newspapers, which had
proceeded to robe the grave and punctilious figure of the bridegroom in
the garments of King Cophetua. The fact that the bride’s father was
the richest man in his own section did not interfere with this--for how
could metropolitan editors be expected to have heard of the glories of
Castleman Hall, or to imagine that there existed a section of America so
self-absorbed that its local favourite would not feel herself exalted in
becoming Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver?

What the editors knew about Castleman Hall was that they wired for
pictures, and a man was sent from the nearest city to “snap”
 this unknown beauty; whereupon her father chased the presumptuous
photographer and smashed his camera with a cane. So, of course, when
Sylvia stepped out of the train in New York, there was a whole battery
of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image the next day.

The beginning of my interest in this “belle” from far South was when I
picked up the paper at my breakfast table, and found her gazing at me,
with the wide-open, innocent eyes of a child; a child who had come from
some fairer, more gracious world, and brought the memory of it with her,
trailing her clouds of glory. She had stepped from the train into the
confusion of the roaring city, and she stood, startled and frightened,
yet, I thought, having no more real idea of its wickedness and horror
than a babe in arms. I read her soul in that heavenly countenance, and
sat looking at it, enraptured, dumb. There must have been thousands,
even in that metropolis of Mammon, who loved her from that picture, and
whispered a prayer for her happiness.

I can hear her laugh as I write this. For she would have it that I was
only one more of her infatuated lovers, and that her clouds of glory
were purely stage illusion. She knew exactly what she was doing with
those wide-open, innocent eyes! Had not old Lady Dee, most cynical
of worldlings, taught her how to use them when she was a child in
pig-tails? To be sure she had been scared when she stepped off the
train, and strange men had shoved cameras under her nose. It was almost
as bad as being assassinated! But as to her heavenly soul--alas, for the
blindness of men, and of sentimental old women, who could believe in a
modern “society” girl!

I had supposed that I was an emancipated woman when I came to New York.
But one who has renounced the world, the flesh and the devil, knowing
them only from pictures in magazines and Sunday supplements; such a
one may find that he has still some need of fasting and praying.
The particular temptation which overcame me was this picture of the
bride-to-be. I wanted to see her, and I went and stood for hours in a
crowd of curious women, and saw the wedding party enter the great Fifth
Avenue Church, and discovered that my Sylvia’s hair was golden, and her
eyes a strange and wonderful red-brown. And this was the moment that
fate had chosen to throw Claire Lepage into my arms, and give me the key
to the future of Sylvia’s life.

3. I am uncertain how much I should tell about Claire Lepage. It is a
story which is popular in a certain sort of novel, but I have no wish
for that easy success. Towards Claire herself I had no trace of the
conventional attitude, whether of contempt or of curiosity. She was to
me the product of a social system, of the great New Nineveh which I was
investigating. And later on, when I knew her, she was a weak sister whom
I tried to help.

It happened that I knew much more about such matters than the average
woman--owing to a tragedy in my life. When I was about twenty-five years
old, my brother-in-law had moved his family to our part of the world,
and one of his boys had become very dear to me. This boy later on
had got into trouble, and rather than tell anyone about it, had shot
himself. So my eyes had been opened to things that are usually hidden
from my sex; for the sake of my own sons, I had set out to study the
underground ways of the male creature. I developed the curious custom of
digging out every man I met, and making him lay bare his inmost life to
me; so you may understand that it was no ordinary pair of woman’s arms
into which Claire Lepage was thrown.

At first I attributed her vices to her environment, but soon I realized
that this was a mistake; the women of her world do not as a rule go to
pieces. Many of them I met were free and independent women, one or two
of them intellectual and worth knowing. For the most part such women
marry well, in the worldly sense, and live as contented lives as the
average lady who secures her life-contract at the outset. If you had met
Claire at an earlier period of her career, and if she had been concerned
to impress you, you might have thought her a charming hostess. She
had come of good family, and been educated in a convent--much better
educated than many society girls in America. She spoke English as well
as she did French, and she had read some poetry, and could use the
language of idealism whenever necessary. She had even a certain
religious streak, and could voice the most generous sentiments, and
really believe that she believed them. So it might have been some time
before you discovered the springs of her weakness.

In the beginning I blamed van Tuiver; but in the end I concluded that
for most of her troubles she had herself to thank--or perhaps the
ancestors who had begotten her. She could talk more nobly and act more
abjectly than any other woman I have ever known. She wanted pleasant
sensations, and she expected life to furnish them continuously.
Instinctively she studied the psychology of the person she was dealing
with, and chose a reason which would impress that person.

At this time, you understand, I knew nothing about Sylvia Castleman
or her fiancé, except what the public knew. But now I got an inside
view--and what a view! I had read some reference to Douglas van Tuiver’s
Harvard career: how he had met the peerless Southern beauty, and had
given up college and pursued her to her home. I had pictured the
wooing in the rosy lights of romance, with all the glamour of worldly
greatness. But now, suddenly, what a glimpse into the soul of the
princely lover! “He had a good scare, let me tell you,” said Claire. “He
never knew what I was going to do from one minute to the next.”

“Did he see you in the crowd before the church door?” I inquired.

“No,” she replied, “but he thought of me, I can promise you.”

“He knew you were coming?”

She answered, “I told him I had got an admission card, just to make sure
he’d keep me in mind!”

4. I did not have to hear much more of Claire’s story before making up
my mind that the wealthiest and most fashionable of New York’s young
bachelors was a rather self-centred person. He had fallen desperately in
love with the peerless Southern beauty, and when she had refused to
have anything to do with him, he had come back to the other woman for
consolation, and had compelled her to pretend to sympathize with his
agonies of soul. And this when he knew that she loved him with the
intensity of a jealous nature.

Claire had her own view of Sylvia Castleman, a view for which I
naturally made due reservations. Sylvia was a schemer, who had known
from the first what she wanted, and had played her part with masterly
skill. As for Claire, she had striven to match her moves, plotting
in the darkness against her, and fighting desperately with such weak
weapons as she possessed. It was characteristic that she did not
blame herself for her failure; it was the baseness of van Tuiver, his
inability to appreciate sincere devotion, his unworthiness of her love.
And this, just after she had been naively telling me of her efforts to
poison his mind against Sylvia while pretending to admire her! But I
made allowances for Claire at this moment--realizing that the situation
had been one to overstrain any woman’s altruism.

She had failed in her subtleties, and there had followed scenes of
bitter strife between the two. Sylvia, the cunning huntress, having
pretended to relent, van Tuiver had gone South to his wooing again,
while Claire had stayed at home and read a book about the poisoners
of the Italian renaissance. And then had come the announcement of the
engagement, after which the royal conqueror had come back in a panic,
and sent embassies of his male friends to plead with Claire, alternately
promising her wealth and threatening her with destitution, appealing
to her fear, her cupidity, and even to her love. To all of which I
listened, thinking of the wide-open, innocent eyes of the picture, and
shedding tears within my soul. So must the gods feel as they look down
upon the affairs of mortals, seeing how they destroy themselves by
ignorance and folly, seeing how they walk into the future as a blind man
into a yawning abyss.

I gave, of course, due weight to the sneers of Claire. Perhaps the
innocent one really had set a trap--had picked van Tuiver out and
married him for his money. But even so, I could hope that she had not
known what she was doing. Surely it had never occurred to her that
through all the days of her triumph she would have to eat and sleep with
the shade of another woman at her side!

Claire said to me, not once, but a dozen times, “He’ll come back to me.
She’ll never be able to make him happy.” And so I pictured Sylvia upon
her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would
never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had
learned from Claire, the sensuality, the _ennin_, the contempt for
woman--it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her
life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which
my imagination did not go--and of which the Frenchwoman, with all
her freedom of tongue, gave me no more than a hint which I could not
comprehend.

5. Claire Lepage at this time was desperately lonely and unhappy. Having
made the discovery that my arms were sturdy, used to doing a man’s
work, she clung to them. She begged me to go home with her, to visit
her--finally to come and live with her. Until recently an elderly
companion, had posed as her aunt, and kept her respectable while she
was upon van Tuiver’s yacht, and at his castle in Scotland. But this
companion had died, and now Claire had no one with whom to discuss her
soul-states.

She occupied a beautiful house on the West Side, not far from Riverside
Drive; and in addition to the use of this she had an income of eight
thousand a year--which was not enough to make possible a chauffeur, nor
even to dress decently, but only enough to keep in debt upon. Such as
the income was, however, she was willing to share it with me. So
there opened before me a new profession--and a new insight into the
complications of parasitism.

I went to see her frequently at first, partly because I was interested
in her and her associates, and partly because I really thought I could
help her. But I soon came to realize that influencing Claire was like
moulding water; it flowed back round your hands, even while you worked.
I would argue with her about the physiological effects of alcohol, and
when I had convinced her, she would promise caution; but soon I would
discover that my arguments had gone over her head. I was at this time
feeling my way towards my work in the East. I tried to interest her in
such things as social reform, but realized that they had no meaning for
her. She was living the life of the pleasure-seeking idlers of the great
metropolis, and every time I met her it seemed to me that her character
and her appearance had deteriorated.

Meantime I picked up scraps of information concerning the van Tuivers.
There were occasional items in the papers, their yacht, the “Triton,”
 had reached the Azores; it had run into a tender in the harbour
of Gibraltar; Mr. and Mrs. van Tuiver had received the honour of
presentation at the Vatican; they were spending the season in London,
and had been presented at court; they had been royal guests at the
German army-manoeuvres. The million wage-slaves of the metropolis,
packed morning and night into the roaring subways and whirled to and
from their tasks, read items such as these and were thrilled by the
triumphs of their fellow-countrymen.

At Claire’s house I learned to be interested in “society” news. From
a weekly paper of gossip about the rich and great she would read
paragraphs, explaining subtle allusions and laying bare veiled scandals.
Some of the men she knew well, referring to them for my benefit as
Bertie and Reggie and Vivie and Algie. She also knew not a little about
the women of that super-world--information sometimes of an intimate
nature, which these ladies would have been startled to hear was going
the rounds.

This insight I got into Claire’s world I found useful, needless to say,
in my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism. I would go
from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit tenement-dens where
little children made paper-flowers twelve and fourteen hours a day for a
trifle over one cent an hour. I would spend the afternoon floating about
in the park in the automobile of one of her expensive friends, and then
take the subway and visit one of the settlements, to hear a discussion
of conditions which doomed a certain number of working-girls to be
burned alive every year in factory fires.

As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the
speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention. During
the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even towards the
lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room. While she was
being presented at St. James’s, I was studying the glass-factories
in South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten working in front of
glowing furnaces until they dropped of exhaustion and sometimes had
their eyes burned out. While she and her husband were guests of the
German Emperor, I was playing the part of a Polish working-woman,
penetrating the carefully guarded secrets of the sugar-trust’s domain in
Brooklyn, where human lives are snuffed out almost every day in noxious
fumes.

And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over.
She came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the _de luxe_
steamers; and the next morning I saw a new picture of her, and read
a few words her husband had condescended to say to a fellow traveller
about the courtesy of Europe to visiting Americans. Then for a couple
of months I heard no more of them. I was busy with my child-labour
work, and I doubt if a thought of Sylvia crossed my mind, until that
never-to-be-forgotten afternoon at Mrs. Allison’s when she came up to me
and took my hand in hers.

6. Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had
begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at
the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories;
whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me
talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home.

I don’t remember much of what I said, but if I may take the evidence of
Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told them, for
one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo was of that
indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father
without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey.
His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the
glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work along the
railroad-track. It is a peculiarity of the glass-factory that it has to
eat its children both by day and by night; and after working six hours
before midnight and six more after midnight, little Angelo was tired. He
had no eye for the birds and flowers on a beautiful spring morning, but
as he was walking home, he dropped in his tracks and fell asleep. The
driver of the first morning train on that branch-line saw what he
took to be an old coat lying on the track ahead, and did not stop to
investigate.

All this had been narrated to me by the child’s mother, who had worked
as a packer of “beers,” and who had loved little Angelo. As I repeated
her broken words about the little mangled body, I saw some of my
auditors wipe away a surreptitious tear.

After I had stopped, several women came up to talk with me at the last,
when most of the company was departing, there came one more, who had
waited her turn. The first thing I saw was her loveliness, the thing
about her that dazzled and stunned people, and then came the strange
sense of familiarity. Where had I met this girl before?

She said what everybody always says; she had been so much interested,
she had never dreamed that such conditions existed in the world. I,
applying the acid test, responded, “So many people have said that to me
that I have begun to believe it.”

“It is so in my case,” she replied, quickly. “You see, I have lived all
my life in the South, and we have no such conditions there.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Our negroes at least can steal enough to eat,” she said.

I smiled. Then--since one has but a moment or two to get in one’s work
in these social affairs, and so has to learn to thrust quickly: “You
have timber-workers in Louisiana, steel-workers in Alabama. You have
tobacco-factories, canning-factories, cotton-mills--have you been to any
of them to see how the people live?”

All this I said automatically, it being the routine of the agitator.
But meantime in my mind was an excitement, spreading like a flame. The
loveliness of this young girl; the eagerness, the intensity of feeling
written upon her countenance; and above all, the strange sense of
familiarity! Surely, if I had met her before, I should never have
forgotten her; surely it could not be--not possibly--

My hostess came, and ended my bewilderment. “You ought to get Mrs. van
Tuiver on your child-labour committee,” she said.

A kind of panic seized me. I wanted to say, “Oh, it is Sylvia
Castleman!” But then, how could I explain? I couldn’t say, “I have your
picture in my room, cut out of a newspaper.” Still less could I say, “I
know a friend of your husband.”

Fortunately Sylvia did not heed my excitement. (She had learned by this
time to pretend not to notice.) “Please don’t misunderstand me,” she
was saying. “I really _don’t_ know about these things. And I would do
something to help if I could.” As she said this she looked with the
red-brown eyes straight into mine--a gaze so clear and frank and honest,
it was as if an angel had come suddenly to earth, and learned of the
horrible tangle into which we mortals have got our affairs.

“Be careful what you’re saying,” put in our hostess, with a laugh.
“You’re in dangerous hands.”

But Sylvia would not be warned. “I want to know more about it,” she
said. “You must tell me what I can do.”

“Take her at her word,” said Mrs. Allison, to me. “Strike while the iron
is hot!” I detected a note of triumph in her voice; if she could say
that she had got Mrs. van Tuiver to take up child-labour--that indeed
would be a feather to wear!

“I will tell you all I can,” I said. “That’s my work in the world.”

“Take Mrs. Abbott away with you,” said the energetic hostess, to Sylvia;
and before I quite understood what was happening, I had received and
accepted an invitation to drive in the park with Mrs. Douglas van
Tuiver. In her role of _dea ex machina_ the hostess extricated me from
the other guests, and soon I was established in a big new motor, gliding
up Madison Avenue as swiftly and silently as a cloud-shadow over the
fields. As I write the words there lies upon my table a Socialist paper
with one of Will Dyson’s vivid cartoons, representing two ladies of the
great world at a reception. Says the first, “These social movements are
becoming _quite_ worth while!” “Yes, indeed,” says the other. “One meets
such good society!”

7. Sylvia’s part in this adventure was a nobler one than mine, Seated as
I was in a regal motor-car, and in company with one favoured of all
the gods in the world, I must have had an intense conviction of my own
saintliness not to distrust my excitement. But Sylvia, for her part, had
nothing to get from me but pain. I talked of the factory-fires and
the horrors of the sugar-refineries, and I saw shadow after shadow of
suffering cross her face. You may say it was cruel of me to tear the
veil from those lovely eyes, but in such a matter I felt myself the
angel of the Lord and His vengeance.

“I didn’t know about these things!” she cried again. And I found it was
true. It would have been hard for me to imagine anyone so ignorant
of the realities of modern life. The men and women she had met she
understood quite miraculously, but they were only two kinds, the “best
people” and their negro servants. There had been a whole regiment of
relatives on guard to keep her from knowing anybody else, or anything
else, and if by chance a dangerous fact broke into the family stockade,
they had formulas ready with which to kill it.

“But now,” Sylvia went on, “I’ve got some money, and I can help, so
I dare not be ignorant any longer. You must show me the way, and my
husband too. I’m sure he doesn’t know what can be done.”

I said that I would do anything in my power. Her help would be
invaluable, not merely because of the money she might give, but because
of the influence of her name; the attention she could draw to any
cause she chose. I explained to her the aims and the methods of our
child-labour committee. We lobbied to get new legislation; we watched
officials to compel them to enforce the laws already existing; above
all, we worked for publicity, to make people realise what it meant that
the new generation was growing up without education, and stunted by
premature toil. And that was where she could help us most--if she would
go and see the conditions with her own eyes, and then appear before the
legislative committee this winter, in favour of our new bill!

She turned her startled eyes upon me at this. Her ideas of doing good
in the world were the old-fashioned ones of visiting and almsgiving;
she had no more conception of modern remedies than she had of modern
diseases. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly make a speech!” she exclaimed.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I never thought of such a thing. I don’t know enough.”

“But you can learn.”

“I know, but that kind of work ought to be done by men.”

“We’ve given men a chance, and they have made the evils. Whose business
is it to protect the children if not the women’s?”

She hesitated a moment, and then said: “I suppose you’ll laugh at me.”

“No, no,” I promised; then as I looked at her I guessed. “Are you going
to tell me that woman’s place is the home?”

“That is what we think in Castleman County,” she said, smiling in spite
of herself.

“The children have got out of the home,” I replied. “If they are ever to
get back, we women must go and fetch them.”

Suddenly she laughed--that merry laugh that was the April sunshine of
my life for many years. “Somebody made a Suffrage speech in our State
a couple of years ago, and I wish you could have seen the horror of my
people! My Aunt Nannie--she’s Bishop Chilton’s wife--thought it was the
most dreadful thing that had happened since Jefferson Davis was put in
irons. She talked about it for days, and at last she went upstairs and
shut herself in the attic. The younger children came home from school,
and wanted to know where mamma was. Nobody knew. Bye and bye, the cook
came. ‘Marse Basil, what we gwine have fo’ dinner? I done been up to
Mis’ Nannie, an’ she say g’way an’ not pester her--she busy.’ Company
came, and there was dreadful confusion--nobody knew what to do about
anything--and still Aunt Nannie was locked in! At last came dinner-time,
and everybody else came. At last up went the butler, and came down with
the message that they were to eat whatever they had, and take care of
the company somehow, and go to prayer-meeting, and let her alone--she
was writing a letter to the Castleman County _Register_ on the subject
of ‘The Duty of Woman as a Homemaker’!”

8. This was the beginning of my introduction to Castleman County. It was
a long time before I went there, but I learned to know its inhabitants
from Sylvia’s stories of them. Funny stories, tragic stories, wild and
incredible stories out of a half-barbaric age! She would tell them and
we would laugh together; but then a wistful look would come into her
eyes, and a silence would fall. So very soon I made the discovery that
my Sylvia was homesick. In all the years that I knew her she never
ceased to speak of Castleman Hall as “home”. All her standards came from
there, her new ideas were referred there.

We talked of Suffrage for a while, and I spoke about the lives of women
on lonely farms--how they give their youth and health to their husband’s
struggle, yet have no money partnership which they can enforce in
case of necessity. “But surely,” cried Sylvia, “you don’t want to make
divorce more easy!”

“I want to make the conditions of it fair to women,” I said.

“But then more women will get it! And there are so many divorced women
now! Papa says that divorce is a greater menace than Socialism!”

She spoke of Suffrage in England, where women were just beginning to
make public disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving
their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I
suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for
example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his wife
subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit to such
a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a woman to divorce
her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by desertion or cruelty.
Surely not even her father would consider that a decent arrangement! I
mentioned a recent decision of the highest court in the land, that a man
who brought his mistress to live in his home, and compelled his wife
to wait upon her, was not committing cruelty within the meaning of the
English law. I heard Sylvia’s exclamation of horror, and met her stare
of incredulity; and then suddenly I thought of Claire, and a little
chill ran over me. It was a difficult hour, in more ways than one, that
of my first talk with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!

I soon made the discovery that, childish as her ignorance was, there was
no prejudice in it. If you brought her a fact, she did not say that it
was too terrible to be true, or that the Bible said otherwise, or that
it was indecent to know about it. Nor, when you met her next, did you
discover that she had forgotten it. On the contrary, you discovered that
she had followed it to its remote consequences, and was ready with a
score of questions as to these. I remember saying to myself, that first
automobile ride: “If this girl goes on thinking, she will get into
trouble! She will have to stop, for the sake of others!”

“You must meet my husband some time,” she said; and added, “I’ll have to
see my engagement-book. I have so much to do, I never know when I have a
moment free.”

“You must find it interesting,” I ventured.

“I did, for a while; but I’ve begun to get tired of so much going about.
For the most part I meet the same people, and I’ve found out what they
have to say.”

I laughed. “You have caught the society complaint already--_ennui_!”

“I had it years ago, at home. It’s true I never would have gone out at
all if it hadn’t been for the sake of my family. That’s why I envy a
woman like you--”

I could not help laughing. It was too funny, Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver
envying me!

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Just the irony of life. Do you know, I cut you out of the newspaper,
and put you in a little frame on my bureau. I thought, here is the
loveliest face I’ve ever seen, and here is the most-to-be-envied of
women.”

She smiled, but quickly became serious. “I learned very early in life
that I was beautiful; and I suppose if I were suddenly to cease being
beautiful, I’d miss it; yet I often think it’s a nuisance. It makes one
dependent on externals. Most of the beautiful women I’ve known make a
sort of profession of it--they live to shine and be looked at.

“And you don’t enjoy that?” I asked.

“It restricts one’s life. Men expect it of you, they resent your having
any other interest.”

“So,” I responded, gravely, “with all your beauty and wealth, you aren’t
perfectly happy?”

“Oh, yes!” she cried--not having meant to confess so much. “I told
myself I would be happy, because I would be able to do so much good in
the world. There must be some way to do good with money! But now I’m
not sure; there seem to be so many things in the way. Just when you have
your mind made up that you have a way to help, someone comes and points
out to you that you may be really doing harm.”

She hesitated again, and I said, “That means you have been looking into
the matter of charity.”

She gave me a bright glance. “How you understand things!” she exclaimed.

“It is possible,” I replied, “to know modern society so well that when
you meet certain causes you know what results to look for.”

“I wish you’d explain to me why charity doesn’t do any good!”

“It would mean a lecture on the competitive wage-system,” I laughed--
“too serious a matter for a drive!”

This may have seemed shirking on my part. But here I was, wrapped in
luxurious furs, rolling gloriously through the park at twilight on a
brilliant autumn evening; and the confiscation of property seems so much
more startling a proposition when you are in immediate contact with
it! This principle, which explains the “opportunism” of Socialist
cabinet-ministers and Labour M.P.s may be used to account for the sudden
resolve which I had taken, that for this afternoon at least Mrs. Douglas
van Tuiver should not discover that I was either a divorced woman, or a
soap-box orator of the revolution.

9. Sylvia, in that first conversation, told me much about herself that
she did not know she was telling. I became fairly certain, for instance,
that she had not married Mr. Douglas van Tuiver for love. The young girl
who has so married does not suffer from ennui in the first year, nor
does she find her happiness depending upon her ability to solve the
problem of charity in connection with her husband’s wealth.

She would have ridden and talked longer, she said, but for a dinner
engagement. She asked me to call on her, and I promised to come some
morning, as soon as she set a day. When the car drew up before the
door of her home, I thought of my first ride about the city in the
“rubber-neck wagon,” and how I had stared when the lecturer pointed out
this mansion. We, the passengers, had thrilled as one soul, imagining
the wonderful life which must go on behind those massive portals, the
treasures outshining the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, which required
those thick, bronze bars for their protection. And here was the mistress
of all the splendour, inviting me to come and see it from within!

She wanted to send me home in the car, but I would not have that, on
account of the push-cart men and the babies in my street; I got out
and walked--my heart beating fast, my blood leaping with exultation. I
reached home, and there on the bureau was the picture--but behold, how
changed! It was become a miracle of the art of colour-photography; its
hair was golden, its eyes a wonderful red-brown, its cheeks aglow with
the radiance of youth! And yet more amazing, the picture spoke! It spoke
with the most delicious of Southern drawls--referring to the “repo’t” of
my child-labour committee, shivering at the cold and bidding me pull the
“fu-uzz” up round me. And when I told funny stories about the Italians
and the Hebrews of my tenement-neighbourhood, it broke into silvery
laughter, and cried: “Oh, de-ah me! How que-ah!” Little had I dreamed,
when I left that picture in the morning, what a miracle was to be
wrought upon it.

I knew, of course, what was the matter with me; the symptoms were
unmistakable. After having made up my mind that I was an old woman, and
that there was nothing more in life for me save labour--here the little
archer had come, and with the sharpest of his golden arrows, had shot
me through. I had all the thrills, the raptures and delicious agonies of
first love; I lived no longer in myself, but in the thought of another
person. Twenty times a day I looked at my picture, and cried aloud: “Oh,
beautiful, beautiful!”

I do not know how much of her I have been able to give. I have told of
our first talk--but words are so cold and dead! I stop and ask: What
there is, in all nature, that has given me the same feeling? I remember
how I watched the dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis. It is soft and
green and tender; it clings to a branch and dries its wings in the sun,
and when the miracle is completed, there for a brief space it poises,
shimmering with a thousand hues, quivering with its new-born ecstasy.
And just so was Sylvia; a creature from some other world than ours,
as yet unsoiled by the dust and heat of reality. It came to me with
a positive shock, as a terrifying thing, that there should be in this
world of strife and wickedness any young thing that took life with
such intensity, that was so palpitating with eagerness, with hope, with
sympathy. Such was the impression that one got of her, even when her
words most denied it. She might be saying world-weary and cynical
things, out of the maxims of Lady Dee; but there was still the
eagerness, the sympathy, surging beneath and lifting her words.

The crown of her loveliness was her unconsciousness of self. Even though
she might be talking of herself, frankly admitting her beauty, she was
really thinking of other people, how she could get to them to help them.
This I must emphasize, because, apart from jesting, I would not have it
thought that I had fallen under the spell of a beautiful countenance,
combined with a motor-car and a patrician name. There were things about
Sylvia that were aristocratic, that could be nothing else; but she could
be her same lovely self in a cottage--as I shall prove to you before I
finish with the story of her life.

I was in love. At that time I was teaching myself German, and I sat one
day puzzling out two lines of Goethe:

“Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest
thou not.”

And I remember how I cried aloud in sudden delight: _“I know her!”_ For
a long time that was one of my pet names--“Freya dis Himmlische!” I only
heard of one other that I preferred--when in course of time she told me
about Frank Shirley, and how she had loved him, and how their hopes had
been wrecked. He had called her “Lady Sunshine”; he had been wont to
call it over and over in his happiness, and as Sylvia repeated it to
me--“Lady Sunshine! Lady Sunshine!” I could imagine that I caught an
echo of the very tones of Frank Shirley’s voice.

10. For several days I waited upon the postman, and when the summons
came I dodged a committee-meeting, and ascended the marble stairs with
trepidation, and underwent the doubting scrutiny of an English lackey,
sufficiently grave in deportment and habiliments to have waited upon a
bishop in his own land. I have a vague memory of an entrance-hall with
panelled paintings and a double-staircase with a snow-white carpet,
about which I had read in the newspapers that it was woven in one piece,
and had cost an incredible sum. One did not have to profane it with his
feet, as there was an elevator provided.

I was shown to Sylvia’s morning-room, which had been “done” in pink and
white and gold by some decorator who had known her colours. It was large
enough to have held half-a-dozen of my own quarters, and the sun was
allowed to flood it. Through a door at one side came Sylvia, holding out
her hands to me.

She was really glad to see me! She began to apologize at once for the
time she had taken to write. It was because she had so much to do. She
had married into a world that took itself seriously: the “idle rich,”
 who worked like slaves. “You know,” she said, while we sat on a pink
satin couch, and a footman brought us coffee: “you read that Mrs.
So-and-so is a ‘social queen,’ and you think it’s a newspaper phrase,
but it isn’t; she really feels that she’s a queen, and other people
feel it, and she goes through her ceremonies as solemnly as the Lord’s
anointed.”

She went on to tell me some of her adventures. She had a keen sense of
fun, and was evidently suffering for an outlet for it. She saw through
the follies and pretences of people in a flash, but they were all such
august and important people that, out of regard for her husband, she
dared not let them suspect her clairvoyant power.

She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe--being
quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was
a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under
suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met
under her husband’s charge had been socially indubitable, but still,
they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they
meant.

There was, for instance, the young son of a German steel-king, a person
of amazing savoir faire, who had made bold to write books and exhibit
pictures, and had travelled so widely that he had even heard of
Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of Berlin,
and had rolled her down the “Sieges Allée,” making outrageous fun of his
Kaiser’s taste in art, and coming at last to a great marble column, with
a female figure representing Victory upon the top. “You will observe,”
 said the cultured young plutocrat, “that the Grecian lady stands a
hundred meters in the air, and has no stairway. There is a popular
saying about her which is delightful--that she is the only chaste woman
in Berlin!”

I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry James;
so I could read between the lines of Sylvia’s experiences. I figured
her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her peril, but
vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And once in a while
a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke of Something in
Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted,
as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met. Being married,
she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose;
but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered
words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew
to her husband and told him the story--begging him incidentally not to
horse-whip the fellow. In reply it had to be explained to her she had
laid herself liable to the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian
aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an
ardent young duke to understand her native wildness.

11. Something of that sort was always happening--something in each
country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her husband
to remind her of the proprieties. In France, a cousin of van Tuiver’s
had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau. The family was
Catholic, of the very oldest and strictest, and the brother-in-law, a
prelate of high degree, had invited the guests to be shown through his
cathedral. “Imagine my bewilderment!” said Sylvia. “I thought I was
going to meet a church dignitary, grave and reverent; but here was a
wit, a man of the world. Such speeches you never heard! I was ravished
by the grandeur of the building, and I said: ‘If I had seen this, I
would have come to you to be married.’ ‘Madame is an American,’
he replied. ‘Come the next time!’ When I objected that I was not a
Catholic, he said: ‘Your beauty is its own religion!’ When I protested
that he would be doing me too great an honour, ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘the
_honneur_ would be all to the church!’ And because I was shocked at all
this, I was considered to be a provincial person!”

Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you “never saw
the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg”; where
you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you
might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your
stomach. They went for a week-end to “Hazelhurst,” the home of the
Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in
America, and who, in the son’s absence, claimed the right to repay the
debt. The old lady sat at table with two fat poodle dogs in infants’
chairs, one on each side of her, feeding out of golden trays. There
was a visiting curate, a frightened little man at the other side of one
poodle; in an effort to be at ease he offered the wheezing creature a
bit of bread. “Don’t feed my dogs!” snapped the old lady. “I don’t allow
anybody to feed my dogs!”

And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son
of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable Reginald was
twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished. (“They feed them
badly,” his mother had explained, “an’ the teachin’s no good either,
but it’s a school for gentlemen.”) “Honestly,” said Sylvia, “he was the
queerest little mannikin--like the tiny waiter’s assistants you see in
hotels on the Continent. He wore his Eton suit, you understand--grown-up
evening clothes minus the coat-tails, and a top hat. He sat at tea and
chatted with the mincing graces of a cotillion-leader; you expected to
find some of his hair gone when he took off his hat! He spoke of his
brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. ‘The jolly
rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have
to work like dogs when we grow up!’ I asked what he’d do, and he said ‘I
suppose there’s nothin’ but the church. It’s a beastly bore, but you do
get a livin’ out of it.’

“That was too much for me,” said Sylvia. “I proceeded to tell the poor,
blasé infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I had caught
half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them, when we were
so small that our little fat legs stuck out horizontally; how we had
given ourselves convulsions in the green apple orchard, and had to be
spanked every day before we had our hair combed. I told how we heard
a war-story about a ‘train of gunpowder,’ and proceeded to lay such a
train about the attic of Castleman Hall, and set fire to it. I might
have spent the afternoon teaching the future churchman how to be a boy,
if I hadn’t suddenly caught a glimpse of my husband’s face!”

12. I did not hear these stories all at once. I have put them together
here because they make a little picture of her honeymoon, and also
because they show how, without meaning it, she was giving me an account
of her husband.

There had been even fewer adventures in the life of young Douglas van
Tuiver than in the life of the Honourable Reginald Annersley. When one
heard the details of the up-bringing of this “millionaire baby,” one was
able to forgive him for being self-centred. He had grown into a man who
lived to fulfil his social duties, and he had taken to wife a girl who
was reckless, high-spirited, with a streak of almost savage pride in
her.

Sylvia’s was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the
world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere
upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of
Castleman County. If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an
idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver; you
would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and transfixed with
a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she had done in her
husband-hunt. The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough
to realise this, and to trust her prowess against other beasts in the
social jungle.

Strange to me were such inside glimpses into the life of these two
favourites of the gods! I never grew weary of speculating about them,
and the mystery of their alliance. How had Sylvia come to make this
marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that she was,
she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with him. Had she
deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good she imagined she
could do to her family?

I was beginning to believe this. Irritated as she was by the solemn
snobberies of van Tuiver’s world, it was none the less true that she
believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me as
I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social graces,
the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it. The rich needed
it--even the poor needed it! Could it be that the proud Castlemans of
Castleman County had needed it also?

If that guess at her inmost soul was correct, then what a drama was her
meeting with me! A person who despised money, who had proven it by grim
deeds--and this a person of her own money-worshipping sex! What was the
meaning of this phenomenon--this new religion that was challenging the
priesthood of Mammon? So some Roman consul’s daughter might have sat in
her father’s palace, and questioned in wonder a Christian slave woman,
destined ere long to face the lions in the arena.

The exactness of this simile was not altered by the fact that in this
case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had
been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to
question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose
existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As
we sat and talked, she knew this one thing quite definitely--that I had
a religion, and she had none. That was the reason for the excitement
which possessed her.

Nor was that fact ever out of my own mind for a moment. As she sat there
in her sun-flooded morning-room, clad in an exquisite embroidered robe
of pink Japanese silk, she was such a lovely thing that I was ready to
cry out for joy of her; and yet there was something within me, grim and
relentless, that sat on guard, warning me that she was of a different
faith from mine, and that between those two faiths there could be no
compromise. Some day she must find out what I thought of her husband’s
wealth, and the work it was doing in the world! Some day she must hear
my real opinion of the religion of motor-cars and hand-woven carpets!

13. Nor was the day so very far off. She sat opposite me, leaning
forward in her eagerness, declaring: “You must help to educate me. I
shall never rest until I’m of some real use in the world.”

“What have you thought of doing?” I inquired.

“I don’t know yet. My husband has an aunt who’s interested in a
day-nursery for the children of working-women. I thought I might help
this, but my husband says it does no good whatever--it only makes
paupers of the poor. Do you think so?”

“I think more than that,” I replied. “It sets women free to compete with
men, and beat down men’s wages.”

“Oh, what a puzzle!” she exclaimed, and then: “Is there any way of
helping the poor that wouldn’t be open to the same objection?”

That brought us once more to the subject I had put aside at our last
meeting. She had not forgotten it, and asked again for an explanation.
What did I mean by the competitive wage system?

My purpose in this writing is to tell the story of Sylvia Castleman’s
life, to show, not merely what she was, but what she became. I have to
make real to you a process of growth in her soul, and at this moment the
important event is her discovery of the class-struggle and her reaction
to it. You may say, perhaps, that you are not interested in the
class-struggle, but you cannot alter the fact that you live in an age
when millions of people are having the course of their lives changed by
the discovery of it. Here, for instance, is a girl who has been taught
to keep her promises, and has promised to love, honour and obey a man;
she is to find the task more difficult, because she comes to understand
the competitive wage-system while he does not understand it and does not
wish to. If that seems to you strange material out of which to make a
domestic drama, I can only tell you that you have missed some of the
vital facts of your own time.

I gave her a little lesson in elementary economics. I showed her how,
when a capitalist needed labour, he bought it in the open market, like
any other commodity. He did not think about the human side of it, he
paid the market-price, which came to be what the labourer had to have
in order to live. No labourer could get more, because others would take
less.

“If that be true,” I continued, “one of the things that follows is the
futility of charity. Whatever you do for the wage-worker on a general
scale comes sooner or later out of his wages. If you take care of his
children all day or part of the day, he can work for less; if he doesn’t
discover that someone else does, and underbids him and takes his place.
If you feed his children at school, if you bury him free, if you insure
his life, or even give him a dinner on Christmas Day, you simply enable
his landlord to charge him more, or his employer to pay him less.”

Sylvia sat for a while in thought, and then asked: “What can be done
about such a fact?”

“The first thing to be done is to make sure that you understand it.
Nine-tenths of the people who concern themselves with social questions
don’t, and so they waste their time in futilities. For instance, I read
the other day an article by a benevolent old gentleman who believed that
the social problem could be solved by teaching the poor to chew their
food better, so that they would eat less. You may laugh at that, but
it’s not a bit more absurd than the idea of our men of affairs, that the
thing to do is to increase the efficiency of the workers, and so produce
more goods.”

“You mean the working-man doesn’t get more, even when he produces more?”

“Take the case of the glass factories. Men used to get eight dollars a
day there, but someone invented a machine that did the work of a dozen
men, and that machine is run by a boy for fifty cents a day.”

A little pucker of thought came between her eyes. “Might there not be a
law forbidding the employer to reduce wages?”

“A minimum wage law. But that would raise the cost of the product, and
drive the trade to another state.”

She suggested a national law, and when I pointed out that the trade
would go to other countries, she fell back on the tariff. I felt like an
embryologist--watching the individual repeating the history of the race!

“Protection and prosperity!” I said, with a smile. “Don’t you see the
increase in the cost of living? The working-man gets more money in his
pay envelope, but he can’t buy more with it because prices go up. And
even supposing you could pass a minimum wage law, and stop competition
in wages, you’d only change it to competition in efficiency--you’d throw
the old and the feeble and the untrained into pauperism.”

“You make the world seem a hard place to live in,” protested Sylvia.

“I’m simply telling you the elementary facts of business. You can forbid
the employer to pay less than a standard wage, but you can’t compel him
to employ people who aren’t able to earn that wage. The business-man
doesn’t employ for fun, he does it for the profit there is in it.”

“If that is true,” said Sylvia, quickly, “then the way of employing
people is cruel.”

“But what other way could you have?”

She considered. “They could be employed so that no one would make a
profit. Then surely they could be paid enough to live decently!”

“But whose interest would it be to employ them without profit?”

“The State should do it, if no one else will.”

I had been playing a game with Sylvia, as no doubt you have perceived.
“Surely,” I said, “you wouldn’t approve anything like that!”

“But why not?”

“Because, it would be Socialism.”

She looked at me startled. “Is that Socialism?”

“Of course it is. It’s the essence of Socialism.”

“But then--what’s the harm in it?”

I laughed. “I thought you said that Socialism was a menace, like
divorce!”

I had my moment of triumph, but then I discovered how fond was the
person who imagined that he could play with Sylvia. “I suspect you are
something of a Socialist yourself,” she remarked.

She told me a long time afterwards what had been her emotions during
these early talks. It was the first time in her life that she had ever
listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did so with
tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an impulse to flee
to the shelter of conventionality. She was more shocked by my last
revelation than she let me suspect. It counted for little that I
had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for herself the economic
programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her class is not our economic
programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion. I had been brought up
in a part of the world where democracy is a tradition, a word to conjure
with, and I supposed that this would be the case with any American--that
I would only have to prove that Socialism was democracy applied to
industry. How could I have imagined the kind of “democracy” which had
been taught to Sylvia by her Uncle Mandeville, the politician of the
family, who believed that America was soon to have a king, to keep the
“foreign riff-raff” in its place!

14. At this time I was living in a three-roomed apartment in one of the
new “model tenements” on the East Side. I had a saying about the place,
that it was “built for the proletariat and occupied by cranks.” What an
example for Sylvia of the futility of charity--the effort on the part
of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by putting bath-tubs in
their homes, and the discovery that the graceless creatures were using
them for the storage of coals!

Having heard these strange stories, Sylvia was anxious to visit me, and
I was, of course, glad to invite her. I purchased a fancy brand of tea,
and some implements for the serving of it, and she came, and went into
raptures over my three rooms and bath, no one of which would have made
more than a closet in her own apartments. I suspected that this was her
Southern _noblesse oblige_, but I knew also that in my living room
there were some rows of books, which would have meant more to Sylvia van
Tuiver just then than the contents of several clothes-closets.

I was pleased to discover that my efforts had not been wasted. She
had been thinking, and she had even found time, in the midst of her
distractions, to read part of a book. In the course of our talks I had
mentioned Veblen, and she had been reading snatches of his work on the
Leisure Class, and I was surprised, and not a little amused, to observe
her reaction to it.

When I talked about wages and hours of labour, I was dealing with things
that were remote from her, and difficult to make real; but Veblen’s
theme, the idle rich, and the arts and graces whereby they demonstrate
their power, was the stuff of which her life was made. The subtleties of
social ostentation, the minute distinctions between the newly-rich
and the anciently-rich, the solemn certainties of the latter and the
quivering anxieties of the former--all those were things which Sylvia
knew as a bird knows the way of the wind. To see the details of them
analysed in learned, scientific fashion, explained with great mouthfuls
of words which one had to look up in the dictionary--that was surely
a new discovery in the book-world! “Conspicuous leisure!” “Vicarious
consumption of goods!” “Oh, de-ah me, how que-ah!” exclaimed Sylvia.

And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose! A flood that bore us
straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young
ladyhood! If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen’s, how
many points she could have given to him! No details had been too minute
for the technique of Sylvia’s great-aunt--the difference between the
swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong kind; and yet
her technique had been broad enough to take in a landscape. “Every girl
should have a background,” had been one of her maxims, and Sylvia had to
have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses
which no one else was allowed to wear.

“Conspicuous expenditure of time,” wrote Veblen. It was curious, said
Sylvia, but nobody was free from this kind of vanity. There was dear old
Uncle Basil, a more godly bishop never lived, and yet he had a foible
for carving! In his opinion the one certain test of a gentleman was the
ease with which he found the joints of all kinds of meat, and he was in
arms against the modern tendency to turn such accomplishments over to
butlers. He would hold forth on the subject, illustrating his theories
with an elegant knife, and Sylvia remembered how her father and the
Chilton boys had wired up the joints of a duck for the bishop to work
on. In the struggle the bishop had preserved his dignity, but lost the
duck, and the bishop’s wife, being also high-born, and with a long line
of traditions behind her, had calmly continued the conversation, while
the butler removed the smoking duck from her lap!

Such was the way of things at Castleman Hall! The wild, care-free
people--like half-grown children, romping their way through life! There
was really nothing too crazy for them to do, if the whim struck them.
Once a visiting cousin had ventured the remark that she saw no reason
why people should not eat rats; a barn-rat was clean in its person,
and far choicer in its food than a pig. Thereupon “Miss Margaret” had
secretly ordered the yard-man to secure a barn-rat; she had had it
broiled, and served in a dish of squirrels, and had sat by and watched
the young lady enjoy it! And this, mind you, was Mrs. Castleman of
Castleman Hall, mother of five children, and as stately a dame as ever
led the grand march at the Governor’s inaugural ball! “Major Castleman,”
 she would say to her husband, “you may take me into my bedroom, and when
you have locked the door securely, you may spit upon me, if you wish;
but don’t you dare even to _imagine_ anything undignified about me in
public!”

15. In course of time Sylvia and I became very good friends. Proud as
she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her eager mind
to. Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western woman, who
lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the great world of
fashion?

Before we parted she considered it necessary to mention my relationship
to this world. She had a most acute social conscience. She knew exactly
what formalities she owed to everyone, just when she ought to call, and
how long she ought to stay, and what she ought to ask the other person
to do in return; she assumed that the other knew it all exactly as well,
and would suffer if she failed in the slightest degree.

So now she had to throw herself upon my mercy. “You see,” she explained,
“my husband wouldn’t understand. I may be able to change him gradually,
but if I shock him all at once--”

“My dear Mrs. van Tuiver--” I smiled.

“You can’t really imagine!” she persisted. “You see, he takes his social
position so seriously! And when you are conspicuous--when everybody’s
talking about what you do--when everything that’s the least bit unusual
is magnified--”

“My dear girl!” I broke in again. “Stop a moment and let me talk!”

“But I hate to have to think--”

“Don’t worry about my thoughts! They are most happy ones! You must
understand that a Socialist cannot feel about such things as you do; we
work out our economic interpretation of them, and after that they are
simply so much data to us. I might meet one of your great friends, and
she might snub me, but I would never think she had snubbed _me_--it
would be my Western accent, and my forty-cent hat, and things like
that which had put me in a class in her mind. My real self nobody can
snub--certainly not until they’ve got at it.”

“Ah!” said Sylvia, with shining eyes. “You have your own kind of
aristocracy, I see!”

“What I want,” I said, “is you. I’m an old hen whose chickens have grown
up and left her, and I want something to mother. Your wonderful social
world is just a bother to me, because it keeps me from gathering you
into my arms as I’d like to. So what you do is to think of some role for
me to play, so that I can come to see you; let me be advising you about
your proposed day-nursery, or let me be a tutor of something, or a nice,
respectable sewing-woman who darns the toes of your silk stockings!”

She laughed. “If you suppose that I’m allowed to wear my stockings until
they have holes in them, you don’t understand the perquisites of maids.”
 She thought a moment, and then added: “You might come to trim hats for
me.”

By that I knew that we were really friends. If it does not seem to you
a bold thing for Sylvia to have made a joke about my hat, it is
only because you do not yet know her. I have referred to her
money-consciousness and her social-consciousness; I would be idealizing
her if I did not refer to another aspect of her which appalled me when I
came to realise it--her clothes-consciousness. She knew every variety of
fabric and every shade of colour and every style of design that ever
had been delivered of the frenzied sartorial imagination. She had been
trained in all the infinite minutiae which distinguished the right from
the almost right; she would sweep a human being at one glance, and stick
him in a pigeon hole of her mind for ever--because of his clothes. When
later on she had come to be conscious of this clothes-consciousness,
she told me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred she had found this
method of appraisal adequate for the purposes of society life. What a
curious comment upon our civilization--that all that people had to
ask of one another, all they had to give to one another, should be
expressible in terms of clothes!

16. I had set out to educate Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver in the things I
thought she needed to know. A part of my programme was to find some
people of modern sympathies whom she might meet without offence to
her old prejudices. The first person I thought of was Mrs. Jessie
Frothingham, who was the head of a fashionable girls’ school, just
around the corner from Miss Abercrombie’s where Sylvia herself had
received the finishing touch. Mrs. Frothingham’s was as exclusive and
expensive a school as the most proper person could demand, and great was
Sylvia’s consternation when I told her that its principal was a member
of the Socialist party, and made no bones about speaking in public for
us.

How in the world did she manage it? For one thing, I answered, she ran
a good school--nobody had ever been heard to deny that. For another, she
was an irresistibly serene and healthy person, who would look one of her
millionaire “papas” in the eye and tell him what was what with so much
decision; it would suddenly occur to the great man that if his daughter
could be made into so capable a woman, he would not care what ticket she
might vote.

Then too, it was testimony to the headway we are making that we are
ceasing to be dangerous, and getting to be picturesque. In these days of
strenuous social competition, when mammas are almost at their wits’ end
for some new device, when it costs incredible sums to make no impression
at all--here was offered a new and inexpensive way of being unique.
There could be no question that men were getting to like serious women;
the most amazing subjects were coming up at dinner-parties, and you
might hear the best people speak disrespectfully of their own money,
which means that the new Revolution will have not merely its “Egalité
Orleans,” but also some of the ladies of his family!

I telephoned from Sylvia’s house to Mrs. Frothingham, who answered:
“Wouldn’t you like Mrs. van Tuiver to hear a speech? I am to speak next
week at the noon-day Wall Street meeting.” I passed the question on, and
Sylvia answered with an exclamation of delight: “Would a small boy like
to attend a circus?”

It was arranged that Sylvia was to take us in her car. You may picture
me with my grand friends--an old speckled hen in the company of two
golden pheasants. I kept very quiet and let them get acquainted, knowing
that my cause was safe in the hands of one so perfectly tailored as Mrs.
Frothingham.

Sylvia expressed her delight at the idea of hearing a Socialist speech,
and her amazement that the head of Mrs. Frothingham’s should be so
courageous, and meantime we threaded our way through the tangle of
trucks and surface-cars on Broadway, and came to the corner of Wall
Street. Here Mrs. Frothingham said she would get out and walk; it was
quite likely that someone might recognise Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, and
she ought not to be seen arriving with the speaker. Sylvia, who
would not willingly have committed a breach of etiquette towards a
bomb-throwing anarchist, protested at this, but Mrs. Frothingham laughed
good-naturedly, saying that it would be time enough for Mrs. van Tuiver
to commit herself when she knew what she believed.

The speaking was to be from the steps of the Sub-treasury. We made
a _détour,_ and came up Broad Street, stopping a little way from the
corner. These meetings had been held all through the summer and fall, so
that people had learned to expect them; although it lacked some minutes
of noon, there was already a crowd gathered. A group of men stood upon
the broad steps, one with a red banner and several others with armfuls
of pamphlets and books. With them was our friend, who looked at us and
smiled, but gave no other sign of recognition.

Sylvia pushed back the collar of her sable coat, and sat erect in her
shining blue velvet, her eyes and her golden hair shining beneath
the small brim of a soft velvet hat. As she gazed eagerly at the busy
throngs of men hurrying about this busy corner, she whispered to me: “I
haven’t been so excited since my _début_ party!”

The crowd increased until it was difficult to get through Wall Street.
The bell of Old Trinity was tolling the hour of noon, and the meeting
was about to begin, when suddenly I heard an exclamation from Sylvia,
and turning, saw a well-dressed man pushing his way from the office of
Morgan and Company towards us. Sylvia clutched my hand where it lay on
the seat of the car, and half gasped: “My husband!”

17. Of course I had been anxious to see Douglas van Tuiver. I had heard
Claire Lepage’s account of him, and Sylvia’s, also I had seen pictures
of him in the newspapers, and had studied them with some care, trying
to imagine what sort of personage he might be. I knew that he was
twenty-four, but the man who came towards us I would have taken to be
forty. His face was sombre, with large features and strongly marked
lines about the mouth; he was tall and thin, and moved with decision,
betraying no emotion even in this moment of surprise. “What are you
doing here?” were his first words.

For my part, I was badly “rattled”; I knew by the clutch of Sylvia’s
hand that she was too. But here I got a lesson in the nature of “social
training.” Some of the bright colour had faded from her face, but she
spoke with the utmost coolness, the words coming naturally and simply:
“We can’t get through the crowd.” And at the same time she looked about
her, as much as to say: “You can see for yourself.” (One of the maxims
of Lady Dee had set forth that a lady never told a lie if she could
avoid it.)

Sylvia’s husband looked about, saying: “Why don’t you call an officer?”
 He started to follow his own suggestion, and I thought then that my
friend would miss her meeting. But she had more nerve than I imagined.

“No,” she said. “Please don’t.”

“Why not?” Still there was no emotion in the cold, grey eyes.

“Because--I think there’s something going on.”

“What of that?”

“I’m not in a hurry, and I’d like to see.”

He stood for a moment looking at the crowd. Mrs. Frothingham had come
forward, evidently intending to speak. “What is this, Ferris?” he
demanded of the chauffeur.

“I’m not sure, sir,” said the man. “I think it’s a Socialist meeting.”
 (He was, of course, not missing the little comedy. I wondered what he
thought!)

“A Socialist meeting?” said van Tuiver; then, to his wife: “You don’t
want to stay for that!”

Again Sylvia astonished me. “I’d like to very much,” she answered
simply.

He made no reply. I saw him stare at her, and then I saw his glance
take me in. I sat in a corner as inconspicuous as I could make myself.
I wondered whether I was a sempstress or a tutor, and whether either
of these functionaries were introduced, and whether they shook hands or
not.

Mrs. Frothingham had taken her stand at the base of Washington’s statue.
Had she by any chance identified the tall and immaculate gentleman who
stood beside the automobile? Before she had said three sentences I made
sure that she had done so, and I was appalled at her audacity.

“Fellow citizens,” she began--“fellow-buccaneers of Wall Street.” And
when the mild laughter had subsided: “What I have to say is going to
be addressed to one individual among you--the American millionaire.
I assume there is one present--if no actual millionaire, then surely
several who are destined to be, and not less than a thousand who aspire
to be. So hear me, Mr. Millionaire,” this with a smile, which gave you
a sense of a reserve fund of energy and good humour. She had the
crowd with her from the start--all but one. I stole a glance at the
millionaire, and saw that he was not smiling.

“Won’t you get in?” asked his wife, and he answered coldly: “No, I’ll
wait till you’ve had enough.”

“Last summer I had a curious experience,” said the speaker. “I was
a guest at a tennis match, played upon the grounds of a State
insane-asylum, the players being the doctors of the institution. Here,
on a beautiful sunshiny afternoon, were ladies and gentlemen clad in
festive white, enjoying a holiday, while in the background stood a
frowning building with iron-barred gates and windows, from which
one heard now and then the howlings of the maniacs. Some of the less
fortunate of these victims of fate had been let loose, and while we
played tennis, they chased the balls. All afternoon, while I sipped tea
and chatted and watched the games, I said to myself: ‘Here is the most
perfect simile of our civilization that has ever come to me. Some people
wear white and play tennis all day, while other people chase the balls,
or howl in dungeons in the background!’ And that is the problem I wish
to put before my American millionaire--the problem of what I will call
our lunatic-asylum stage of civilization. Mind you, this condition
is all very well so long as we can say that the lunatics are
incurable--that there is nothing we can do but shut our ears to their
howling, and go ahead with our tennis. But suppose the idea were to
dawn upon us that it is only because we played tennis all day that the
lunatic-asylum is crowded, then might not the howls grow unendurable to
us, and the game lose its charm?”

Stealing glances about me, I saw that several people were watching the
forty-or-fifty-times-over millionaire; they had evidently recognised
him, and were enjoying the joke. “Haven’t you had enough of this?” he
suddenly demanded of his wife, and she answered, guilelessly: “No, let’s
wait. I’m interested.”

“Now, listen to me, Mr. American Millionaire,” the speaker was
continuing. “You are the one who plays tennis, and we, who chase the
balls for you--we are the lunatics. And my purpose to-day is to prove
to you that it is only because you play tennis all day that we have
to chase balls all the day, and to tell you that some time soon we are
going to cease to be lunatics, and that then you will have to chase your
own balls! And don’t, in your amusement over this illustration, lose
sight of the serious nature of what I am talking about--the horrible
economic lunacy which is known as poverty, and which is responsible
for most of the evils we have in this world to-day--for crime and
prostitution, suicide, insanity and war. My purpose is to show you, not
by any guess of mine, or any appeals to your faith, but by cold business
facts which can be understood in Wall Street, that this economic lunacy
is one which can be cured; that we have the remedy in our hands, and
lack nothing but the intelligence to apply it.”

18. I do not want to bore you with a Socialist speech. I only want to
give you an idea of the trap into which Mr. Douglas van Tuiver had
been drawn. He stood there, rigidly aloof while the speaker went on
to explain the basic facts of wealth-production in modern society. She
quoted from Kropotkin: “‘Fields, Factories and Work-shops,’ on sale
at this meeting for a quarter!”--showing how by modern intensive
farming--no matter of theory, but methods which were in commercial
use in hundreds of places--it would be possible to feed the entire
population of the globe from the soil of the British Isles alone. She
showed by the bulletins of the United States Government how the machine
process had increased the productive power of the individual labourer
ten, twenty, a hundred fold. So vast was man’s power of producing wealth
today, and yet the labourer lived in dire want just as in the days of
crude hand-industry!

So she came back to her millionaire, upon whom this evil rested. He was
the master of the machine for whose profit the labourer had to produce.
He could only employ the labourer to produce what could be sold at a
profit; and so the stream of prosperity was choked at its source. “It
is you, Mr. Millionaire, who are to blame for poverty; it is because
so many millions of dollars must be paid to you in profits that so
many millions of men must live in want. In other words, precisely as I
declared at the outset, it is your playing tennis which is responsible
for the lunatics chasing the balls!”

I wish that I might give some sense of the speaker’s mastery of this
situation, the extent to which she had communicated her good-humour to
the crowd. You heard ripple after ripple of laughter, you saw everywhere
about you eager faces, following every turn of the argument. No
one could resist the contagion of interest--save only the American
millionaire! He stood impassive, never once smiling, never once
betraying a trace of feeling. Venturing to watch him more closely,
however, I could see the stern lines deepening about his mouth, and his
long, lean face growing more set.

The speaker had outlined the remedy--a change from the system of
production for profit to one of production for use. She went on to
explain how the change was coming; the lunatic classes were beginning
to doubt the divine nature of the rules of the asylum, and they were
preparing to mutiny, and take possession of the place. And here I saw
that Sylvia’s husband had reached his limit. He turned to her: “Haven’t
you had enough of this?”

“Why, no,” she began. “If you don’t mind--”

“I do mind very much,” he said, abruptly. “I think you are committing
a breach of taste to stay here, and I would be greatly obliged if you
would leave.”

And without really waiting for Sylvia’s reply, he directed, “Back out of
here, Ferris.”

The chauffeur cranked up, and sounded his horn--which naturally had the
effect of disturbing the meeting. People supposed we were going to try
to get through the crowd ahead--and there was no place where anyone
could move. But van Tuiver went to the rear of the car, saying, in a
voice of quiet authority: “A little room here, please.” And so, foot by
foot, we backed away from the meeting, and when we had got clear of the
throng, the master of the car stepped in, and we turned and made our way
down Broad Street.

And now I was to get a lesson in the aristocratic ideal. Of course van
Tuiver was angry; I believe he even suspected his wife of having known
of the meeting. I supposed he would ask some questions; I supposed that
at least he would express his opinion of the speech, his disgust that
a woman of education should make such a spectacle of herself. Such
husbands as I had been familiar with had never hesitated to vent their
feelings under such circumstances. But from Douglas van Tuiver there
came--not a word! He sat, perfectly straight, staring before him, like
a sphinx; and Sylvia, after one or two swift glances at him, began to
gossip cheerfully about her plans for the day-nursery for working-women!

So for a few blocks, until suddenly she leaned forward. “Stop here,
Ferris.” And then, turning to me, “Here is the American Trust Company.”

“The American Trust Company?” I echoed, in my dumb stupidity.

“Yes--that is where the check is payable,” said Sylvia, and gave me a
pinch.

And so I comprehended, and gathered up my belongings and got out. She
shook my hand warmly, and her husband raised his hat in a very formal
salute, after which the car sped on up the street. I stood staring after
it, in somewhat the state of mind of any humble rustic who may have been
present when Elijah was borne into the heavens by the chariot of fire!

19. Sylvia had been something less than polite to me; and so I had not
been home more than an hour before there came a messenger-boy with a
note. By way of reassuring her, I promised to come to see her the next
morning; and when I did, and saw her lovely face so full of concern, I
forgot entirely her worldly greatness, and did what I had longed to do
from the beginning--put my arms about her and kissed her.

“My dear girl,” I protested, “I don’t want to be a burden in your
life--I want to help you!’”

“But,” she exclaimed, “what must you have thought--”

“I thought I had made a lucky escape!” I laughed.

She was proud--proud as an Indian; it was hard for her to make
admissions about her husband. But then--we were like two errant
school-girls, who had been caught m an escapade! “I don’t know what I’m
going to do about him,” she said, with a wry smile. “He really won’t
listen--I can’t make any impression on him.”

“Did he guess that you’d come there on purpose?” I asked.

“I told him,” she answered.

“You _told_ him!”

“I’d meant to keep it secret--I wouldn’t have minded telling him a fib
about a little thing. But he made it so very serious!”

I could understand that it must have been serious after the telling. I
waited for her to add what news she chose.

“It seems,” she said, “that my husband has a cousin, a pupil of Mrs.
Frothingham’s. You can imagine!”

“I can imagine Mrs. Frothingham may lose a pupil.”

“No; my husband says his Uncle Archibald always was a fool. But how can
anyone be so narrow! He seemed to take Mrs. Frothingham as a personal
affront.”

This was the most definite bit of vexation against her husband that she
had ever let me see. I decided to turn it into a jest. “Mrs. Frothingham
will be glad to know she was understood,” I said.

“But seriously, why can’t men have open minds about politics and money?”
 She went on in a worried voice: “I knew he was like this when I met
him at Harvard. He was living in his own house, aloof from the poorer
men--the men who were most worth while, it seemed to me. And when I
told him of the bad effect he was having on these men and on his own
character as well, he said he would do whatever I asked--he even gave
up his house and went to live in a dormitory. So I thought I had some
influence on him. But now, here is the same thing again, only I find
that one can’t take a stand against one’s husband. At least, he doesn’t
admit the right.” She hesitated. “It doesn’t seem loyal to talk about
it.”

“My dear girl,” I said with an impulse of candour, “there isn’t much you
can tell me about that problem. My own marriage went to pieces on that
rock.”

I saw a look of surprise upon her face. “I haven’t told you my story
yet,” I said. “Some day I will--when you feel you know me well enough
for us to exchange confidences.”

There was more than a hint of invitation in this. After a silence, she
said: “One’s instinct is to hide one’s troubles.”

“Sylvia,” I answered, “let me tell you about us. You must realise that
you’ve been a wonderful person to me; you belong to a world I never had
anything to do with, and never expected to get a glimpse of. It’s the
wickedness of our class-civilization that human beings can’t be just
human beings to each other--a king can hardly have a friend. Even after
I’ve overcome the impulse I have to be awed by your luxury and your
grandness; I’m conscious of the fact that everybody else is awed by
them. If I so much as mention that I’ve met you, I see people start and
stare at me--instantly I become a personage. It makes me angry, because
I want to know _you_.”

She was gazing at me, not saying a word. I went on: “I’d never have
thought it possible for anyone to be in your position and be real and
straight and human, but I realise that you have managed to work that
miracle. So I want to love you and help you, in every way I know how.
But you must understand, I can’t ask for your confidence, as I could for
any other woman’s. There is too much vulgar curiosity about the rich and
great, and I can’t pretend to be unaware of that hatefulness; I can’t
help shrinking from it. So all I can say is--if you need me, if you ever
need a real friend, why, here I am; you may be sure I understand, and
won’t tell your secrets to anyone else.”

With a little mist of tears in her eyes, Sylvia put out her hand and
touched mine. And so we went into a chamber alone together, and shut the
cold and suspicious world outside.

20. We knew each other well enough now to discuss the topic which has
been the favourite of women since we sat in the doorways of caves and
pounded wild grain in stone mortars--the question of our lords, who had
gone hunting, and who might be pleased to beat us on their return.
I learned all that Sylvia had been taught on the subject of the male
animal; I opened that amazing unwritten volume of woman traditions, the
maxims of Lady Dee Lysle.

Sylvia’s maternal great-aunt had been a great lady out of a great
age, and incidentally a grim and grizzled veteran of the sex-war. Her
philosophy started from a recognition of the physical and economic
inferiority of woman, as complete as any window-smashing suffragette
could have formulated, but her remedy for it was a purely individualist
one, the leisure-class woman’s skill in trading upon her sex. Lady Dee
did not use that word, of course--she would as soon have talked of her
esophagus. Her formula was “charm,” and she had taught Sylvia that the
preservation of “charm” was the end of woman’s existence, the thing by
which she remained a lady, and without which she was more contemptible
than the beasts.

She had taught this, not merely by example and casual anecdote, but by
precepts as solemnly expounded as bible-texts. “Remember, my dear, a
woman with a husband is like a lion-tamer with a whip!” And the old lady
would explain what a hard and dangerous life was lived by lion-tamers,
how their safety depended upon life-long distrustfulness of the
creatures over whom they ruled. She would tell stories of the rending
and maiming of luckless ones, who had forgotten for a brief moment the
nature of the male animal! “Yes, my dear,” she would say, “believe
in love; but let the man believe first!” Her maxims never sinned by
verbosity.

The end of all this was not merely food and shelter, a home and
children, it was the supremacy of a sex, its ability to shape life to
its whim. By means of this magic “charm”--a sort of perpetual individual
sex-strike--a woman turned her handicaps into advantages and her chains
into ornaments; she made herself a rare and wonderful creature, up to
whom men gazed in awe. It was “romantic love,” but preserved throughout
life, instead of ceasing with courtship.

All the Castleman women understood these arts, and employed them. There
was Aunt Nannie, when she cracked her whip the dear old bishop-lion
would jump as if he had been shot! Did not the whole State know the
story of how once he had been called upon at a banquet and had risen and
remarked: “Ladies and gentlemen, I had intended to make a speech to you
this evening, but I see that my wife is present, so I must beg you to
excuse me.” The audience roared, and Aunt Nannie was furious, but poor
dear Bishop Chilton had spoken but the literal truth, that he could not
spread the wings of his eloquence in the presence of his “better half.”

And with Major Castleman, though it seemed different, it was really
the same. Sylvia’s mother had let herself get stout--which seemed a
dangerous mark of confidence in the male animal. But the major was
fifteen years older than his wife, and she had a weak heart with which
to intimidate him. Now and then the wilfulness of Castleman Lysle would
become unendurable in the house, and his father would seize him and turn
him over his knee. His screams would bring “Miss Margaret” flying to the
rescue: “Major Castleman, how dare you spank one of _my_ children?” And
she would seize the boy and march off in terrible haughtiness, and lock
herself and her child in her room, and for hours afterwards the poor
major would wander about the house, suffering the lonelines of the
guilty soul. You would hear him tapping gently at his lady’s door.
“Honey! Honey! Are you mad with me?” “Major Castleman,” the stately
answer would come, “will you oblige me by leaving one room in this house
to which I may retire?”

21. I would give you a wrong idea of Sylvia if I did not make clear that
along with this sophistication as to the play-aspects of sex, there
went the most incredible ignorance as to its practical realities. In my
arguments I had thought to appeal to her by referring to that feature of
wage-slavery which more than even child-labour stirs the moral sense of
women, but to my utter consternation I discovered that here was a
woman nearly a year married who did not know what prostitution was. A
suspicion had begun to dawn upon her, and she asked me, timidly: Could
it be possible that that intimacy which was given in marriage could
become a thing of barter in the market-place? When I told her the truth,
I found her horror so great that it was impossible to go on talking
economics. How could I say that women were driven to such things by
poverty? Surely a woman who was not bad at heart would starve, before
she would sell her body to a man!

Perhaps I should have been more patient with her, but I am bitter on
these subjects. “My dear Mrs. van Tuiver,” I said, “there is a lot of
nonsense talked about this matter. There is very little sex-life for
women without a money-price made clear in advance.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I don’t know about your case,” I replied, “but when I married, it was
because I was unhappy and wanted a home of my own. And if the truth were
told, that is why most women marry.”

“But what has THAT to do with it?” she cried. She really did not see!

“What is the difference--except that such women stand out for a
maintenance, while the prostitute takes cash?” I saw that I had shocked
her, and I said: “You must be humble about these things, because you
have never been poor, and you cannot judge those who have been. But
surely you must have known worldly women who married rich men for their
money. And surely you admit that that is prostitution?”

She fell suddenly silent, and I saw what I had done, and, no doubt, you
will say I should have been ashamed of myself. But when one has seen as
much of misery and injustice as I have, one cannot be so patient with
the fine artificial delicacies and sentimentalities of the idle rich. I
went ahead to tell her some stories, showing her what poverty actually
meant to women.

Then, as she remained silent, I asked her how she had managed to remain
so ignorant. Surely she must have met with the word “prostitution” in
books; she must have heard allusions to the “demi-monde.”

“Of course,” she said, “I used to see conspicuous-looking women at the
race-track in New Orleans; I’ve sat near them in restaurants, I’ve known
by my mother’s looks and her agitation that they must be bad women. But
you see, I didn’t know what it meant--I had nothing but a vague feeling
of something dreadful.”

I smiled. “Then Lady Dee did not tell you everything about the
possibilities of her system of ‘charm.’”

“No,” said Sylvia. “Evidently she didn’t!” She sat staring at me, trying
to get up the courage to go on with this plain speaking.

And at last the courage came. “I think it is wrong,” she exclaimed.
“Girls ought not to be kept so ignorant! They ought to know what such
things mean. Why, I didn’t even know what marriage meant!”

“Can that be true?” I asked.

“All my life I had thought of marriage, in a way; I had been trained to
think of it with every eligible man I met--but to me it meant a home, a
place of my own to entertain people in. I pictured myself going driving
with my husband, giving dinner-parties to his friends. I knew I’d have
to let him kiss me, but beyond that--I had a vague idea of something,
but I didn’t think. I had been deliberately trained not to let myself
think--to run away from every image that came to me. And I went on
dreaming of what I’d wear, and how I’d greet my husband when he came
home in the evening.”

“Didn’t you think about children?”

“Yes--but I thought of the CHILDREN. I thought what they’d look like,
and how they’d talk, and how I’d love them. I don’t know if many young
girls shut their minds up like that.”

She was speaking with agitation, and I was gazing into her eyes, reading
more than she knew I was reading. I was nearer to solving the problem
that had been baffling me. And I wanted to take her hands in mine, and
say: “You would never have married him if you’d understood!”

22. Sylvia thought she ought to have been taught, but when she came to
think of it she was unable to suggest who could have done the
teaching. “Your mother?” I asked, and she had to laugh, in spite of the
seriousness of her mood. “Poor dear mamma! When they sent me up here to
boarding school, she took me off and tried to tell me not to listen to
vulgar talk from the girls. She managed to make it clear that I mustn’t
listen to something, and I managed not to listen. I’m sure that even
now she would rather have her tongue cut out than talk to me about such
things.”

“I talked to my children,” I assured her.

“And you didn’t feel embarrassed?”

“I did in the beginning--I had the same shrinkings to overcome. But I
had a tragedy behind me to push me on.”

I told her the story of my nephew, a shy and sensitive lad, who used to
come to me for consolation, and became as dear to me as my own children.
When he was seventeen he grew moody and despondent; he ran away from
home for six months and more, and then returned and was forgiven--but
that seemed to make no difference. One night he came to see me, and I
tried hard to get him to tell me what was wrong. He wouldn’t, but went
away, and several hours later I found a letter he had shoved under the
table-cloth. I read it, and rushed out and hitched up a horse and drove
like mad to my brother-in-law’s, but I got there too late, the poor boy
had taken a shot-gun to his room, and put the muzzle into his mouth, and
set off the trigger with his foot. In the letter he told me what was the
matter--he had got into trouble with a woman of the town, and had caught
syphilis. He had gone away and tried to get cured, but had fallen into
the hands of a quack, who had taken all his money and left his health
worse than ever, so in despair and shame the poor boy had shot his head
off.

I paused, uncertain if Sylvia would understand the story. “Do you know
what syphilis is?” I asked.

“I suppose--I have heard of what we call a ‘bad disease’” she said.

“It’s a very bad disease. But if the words convey to you that it’s a
disease that bad people get, I should tell you that most men take the
chance of getting it; yet they are cruel enough to despise those upon
whom the ill-luck falls. My poor nephew had been utterly ignorant--I
found out that from his father, too late. An instinct had awakened in
him of which he knew absolutely nothing; his companions had taught him
what it meant, and he had followed their lead. And then had come the
horror and the shame--and some vile, ignorant wretch to trade upon it,
and cast the boy off when he was penniless. So he had come home again,
with his gnawing secret; I pictured him wandering about, trying to make
up his mind to confide in me, wavering between that and the horrible
deed he did.”

I stopped, because even to this day I cannot tell the story without
tears. I cannot keep a picture of the boy in my room, because of the
self-reproaches that haunt me. “You can understand,” I said to Sylvia,
“I never could forget such a lesson. I swore a vow over the poor lad’s
body, that I would never let a boy or girl that I could reach go out in
ignorance into the world. I read up on the subject, and for a while I
was a sort of fanatic--I made people talk, young people and old people.
I broke down the taboos wherever I went, and while I shocked a good
many, I knew that I helped a good many more.”

All that was, of course, inconceivable to Sylvia. How curious was the
contrast of her one experience in the matter of venereal disease. She
told me how she had been instrumental in making a match between her
friend, Harriet Atkinson and a young scion of an ancient and haughty
family of Charleston, and how after the marriage her friend’s health had
begun to give way, until now she was an utter wreck, living alone in a
dilapidated antebellum mansion, seeing no one but negro servants, and
praying for death to relieve her of her misery.

“Of course, I don’t really know,” said Sylvia. “Perhaps it was
this--this disease that you speak of. None of my people would tell me--I
doubt if they really know themselves. It was just before my own wedding,
so you can understand it had a painful effect upon me. It happened that
I read something in a magazine, and I thought that--that possibly my
fiancée--that someone ought to ask him, you understand--”

She stopped, and the blood was crimson in her cheeks, with the memory
of her old excitement, and some fresh excitement added to it. There are
diseases of the mind as well as of the body, and one of them is called
prudery.

“I can understand,” I said. “It was certainly your right to be reassured
on such a point.”

“Well, I tried to talk to my Aunt Varina about it; then I wrote to Uncle
Basil, and asked him to write to Douglas. At first he refused--he only
consented to do it when I threatened to go to my father.”

“What came of it in the end?”

“Why, my uncle wrote, and Douglas answered very kindly that he
understood, and that it was all right--I had nothing to fear. I never
expected to mention the incident to anyone again.”

“Lots of people have mentioned such things to me,” I responded, to
reassure her. Then after a pause: “Tell me, how was it, if you didn’t
know the meaning of marriage, how could you connect the disease with
it?”

She answered, gazing with the wide-open, innocent eyes: “I had no
idea how people gave it to each other. I thought maybe they got it by
kissing.”

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!’”

As she spoke the rapture was in her voice, and I looked at her--and yes,
she was beautiful! The supreme crown was hers!

“I see other beautiful women,” she went on--and swift anger came into
her voice. “I see what they are doing with this power! Gratifying their
vanity--turning men into slaves of their whim! Squandering money upon
empty pleasures--and with the dreadful plague of poverty spreading in
the world! I used to go to my father, ‘Oh, papa, why must there be so
many poor people? Why should we have servants--why should they have to
wait on me, and I do nothing for them?’ He would try to explain to me
that it was the way of Nature. Mamma would tell me it was the will
of the Lord--‘The poor ye have always with you’--‘Servants, obey your
masters’--and so on. But in spite of the Bible texts, I felt guilty. And
now I come to Douglas with the same plea--and it only makes him angry!
He has been to college and has a lot of scientific phrases--he tells me
it’s ‘the struggle for existence,’ ‘the elimination of the unfit’--and
so on. I say to him, ‘First we make people unfit, and then we have to
eliminate them.’ He cannot see why I do not accept what learned people
tell me--why I persist in questioning and suffering.”

She paused, and then added, “It’s as if he were afraid I might find out
something he doesn’t want me to! He’s made me give him a promise that I
won’t see Mrs. Frothingham again!” And she laughed. “I haven’t told him
about you!”

I answered, needless to say, that I hoped she would keep the secret!

24. All this time I was busy with my child-labour work. We had an
important bill before the legislature that session, and I was doing what
I could to work up sentiment for it. I talked at every gathering where I
could get a hearing; I wrote letters to newspapers; I sent literature to
lists of names. I racked my mind for new schemes, and naturally, at such
times, I could not help thinking of Sylvia. How much she could do, if
only she would!

I spared no one, least of all myself, and so it was not easy to spare
her. The fact that I had met her was the gossip of the office, and
everybody was waiting for something to happen. “How about Mrs. van
Tuiver?” my “chief” would ask, at intervals. “If she would _only_ go on
our press committee” my stenographer would sigh.

The time came when our bill was in committee, a place of peril for
bills. I went to Albany to see what could be done. I met half a hundred
legislators, of whom perhaps half-a-dozen had some human interest in my
subject; the rest, well, it was discouraging. Where was the force that
would stir them, make them forget their own particular little grafts,
and serve the public welfare in defiance to hostile interests?

Where was it? I came back to New York to look for it, and after a blue
luncheon with the members of our committee, I came away with my mind
made up--I would sacrifice my Sylvia to this desperate emergency.

I knew just what I had to do. So far she had heard speeches about social
wrongs, or read books about them; she had never been face to face with
the reality of them. Now I persuaded her to take a morning off, and see
some of the sights of the underworld of toil. We foreswore the royal
car, and likewise the royal furs and velvets; she garbed herself in
plain appearing dark blue and went down town in the Subway like common
mortals, visiting paper-box factories and flower factories, tenement
homes where whole families sat pasting toys and gimcracks for fourteen
or sixteen hours a day, and still could not buy enough food to make
full-sized men and women of them.

She was Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession
of tortured faces--faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little
children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped
to talk with these people--one little Jewess girl I knew whose three
tiny sisters had been roasted alive in a sweatshop fire. This child had
jumped from a fourth-story window, and been miraculously caught by a
fireman. She said that some man had started the fire, and been caught,
but the police had let him get away. So I had to explain to Sylvia
that curious bye-product (sic) of the profit system known as the “Arson
Trust.” Authorities estimated that incendiarism was responsible for
the destruction of a quarter of a billion dollars worth of property in
America every year. So, of course, the business of starting fires was
a paying one, and the “fire-bug,” like the “cadet” and the dive-keeper,
was a part of the “system.” So it was quite a possible thing that the
man who had burned up this little girl’s three sisters might have been
allowed to escape.

I happened to say this in the little girl’s hearing, and I saw
her pitiful strained eyes fixed upon Sylvia. Perhaps this lovely,
soft-voiced lady was a fairy god-mother, come to free her sisters from
an evil spell and to punish the wicked criminal! I saw Sylvia turn her
head away, and search for her handkerchief; as we groped our way down
the dark stairs, she caught my hand, whispering: “Oh, my God! my God!”

It had even more effect than I had intended; not only did she say that
she would do something--anything that would be of use--but she told me
as we rode back home that her mind was made up to stop the squandering
of her husband’s money. He had been planning a costume ball for a
couple of months later, an event which would keep the van Tuiver name
in condition, and would mean that he and other people would spend many
hundreds of thousands of dollars. As we rode home in the roaring Subway,
Sylvia sat beside me, erect and tense, saying that if the ball were
given, it would be without the presence of the hostess.

I struck while the iron was hot, and got her permission to put her name
upon our committee list. She said, moreover, that she would get some
free time, and be more than a mere name to us. What were the duties of a
member of our committee?

“First,” I said, “to know the facts about child-labour, as you have seen
them to-day, and second, to help other people to know.”

“And how is that to be done?”

“Well, for instance, there is that hearing before the legislative
committee. You remember I suggested that you appear.”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. I could almost hear the words that were
in her mind: “What would _he_ say?”

25. Sylvia’s name went upon our letter-heads and other literature, and
almost at once things began to happen. In a day or two there came a
reporter, saying he had noticed her name. Was it true that she had
become interested in our work? Would I please give him some particulars,
as the public would naturally want to know.

I admitted that Mrs. van Tuiver had joined the committee; she approved
of our work and desired to further it. That was all. He asked: Would she
give an interview? And I answered that I was sure she would not. Then
would I tell something about how she had come to be interested in the
work? It was a chance to assist our propaganda, added the reporter,
diplomatically.

I retired to another room, and got Sylvia upon the ‘phone, “The time has
come for you to take the plunge,” I said.

“Oh, but I don’t want to be in the papers!” she cried “Surely, you
wouldn’t advise it!”

“I don’t see how you can avoid having something appear. Your name
is given out, and if the man can’t get anything else, he’ll take our
literature, and write up your doings out of his imagination.”

“And they’ll print my picture with it!” she exclaimed. I could not help
laughing. “It’s quite possible.”

“Oh, what will my husband do? He’ll say ‘I told you so!’”

It is a hard thing to have one’s husband say that, as I knew by bitter
experience. But I did not think that reason enough for giving up.

“Let me have time to think it over,” said Sylvia. “Get him to wait till
to-morrow, and meantime I can see you.”

So it was arranged. I think I told Sylvia the truth when I said that I
had never before heard of a committee member who was unwilling to have
his purposes discussed in the newspapers. To influence newspapers was
one of the main purposes of committees, and I did not see how she could
expect either editors or readers to take any other view.

“Let me tell the man about your trip down town,” I suggested, “then I
can go on to discuss the bill and how it bears on the evils you saw.
Such a statement can’t possibly do you harm.”

She consented, but with the understanding that she was not to be quoted
directly. “And don’t let them make me picturesque!” she exclaimed.
“That’s what my husband seems most to dread.”

I wondered if he didn’t think she was picturesque, when she sat in
a splendid, shining coach, and took part in a public parade through
Central Park. But I did not say this. I went off, and swore my reporter
to abstain from the “human touch,” and he promised and kept his word.
There appeared next morning a dignified “write-up” of Mrs. Douglas van
Tuiver’s interest in child-labour reform. Quoting me, it described some
of the places she had visited, and some of the sights which had shocked
her; it went on to tell about our committee and its work, the status
of our bill in the legislature, the need of activity on the part of our
friends if the measure was to be forced through at this session. It
was a splendid “boost” for our work, and everyone in the office was in
raptures over it. The social revolution was at hand! thought my young
stenographer.

But the trouble with this business of publicity is that, however
carefully you control your interviewer, you cannot control the others
who use his material. The “afternoon men” came round for more details,
and they made it clear that it was personal details they wanted. And
when I side-stepped their questions, they went off and made up answers
to suit themselves, and printed Sylvia’s pictures, together with
photographs of child-workers taken from our pamphlets.

I called Sylvia up while she was dressing for dinner, to explain that I
was not responsible for any of this picturesqueness. “Oh, perhaps I am
to blame myself!” she exclaimed. “I think I interviewed a reporter.”

“How do you mean?”

“A woman sent up her card--she told the footman she was a friend of
mine. And I thought--I couldn’t be sure if I’d met her--so I went and
saw her. She said she’d met me at Mrs. Harold Cliveden’s, and she began
to talk to me about child-labour, and this and that plan she had, and
what did I think of them, and suddenly it flashed over me: ‘Maybe this
is a reporter playing a trick on me!’”

I hurried out before breakfast next morning and got all the papers,
to see what this enterprising lady had done. There was nothing, so I
reflected that probably she had been a “Sunday” lady.

But then, when I reached my office, the ‘phone rang, and I heard the
voice of Sylvia: “Mary, something perfectly dreadful has happened!”

“What?” I cried.

“I can’t tell you over the ‘phone, but a certain person is furiously
angry. Can I see you if I come down right away?”

26. Such terrors as these were unguessed by me in the days of my
obscurity. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, uneasy also, lies
the wife of that head, and the best friend of the wife. I dismissed my
stenographer, and spent ten or fifteen restless minutes until Sylvia
appeared.

Her story was quickly told. A couple of hours ago the acting-manager of
Mr. van Tuiver’s office had telephoned to ask if he might call upon a
matter of importance. He had come. Naturally, he had the most extreme
reluctance to say anything which might seem to criticise the activities
of Mr. van Tuiver’s wife, but there was something in the account in
the newspapers which should be brought to her husband’s attention. The
articles gave the names and locations of a number of firms in whose
factories it was alleged that Mrs. van Tuiver had found unsatisfactory
conditions, and it happened that two of these firms were located in
premises which belonged to the van Tuiver estates!

A story coming very close to melodrama, I perceived. I sat dismayed
at what I had done. “Of course, dear girl,” I said, at last, “you
understand that I had no idea who owned these buildings.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” exclaimed Sylvia. “I am the one who should have
known!”

Then for a long time I sat still and let her suffer. “Tenement
sweat-shops! Little children in factories!” I heard her whisper.

At last I put my hand on hers. “I tried to put it off for a while,” I
said. “But I knew it would have to come.”

“Think of me!” she exclaimed, “going about scolding other people for the
way they make their money! When I thought of my own, I had visions of
palatial hotels and office-buildings--everything splendid and clean!”

“Well, my dear, you’ve learned now, and you will be able to do
something--”

She turned upon me suddenly, and for the first time I saw in her face
the passions of tragedy. “Do you believe I will be able to do anything?
No! Don’t have any such idea!”

I was struck dumb. She got up and began to pace the room. “Oh, don’t
make any mistake, I’ve paid for my great marriage in the last hour or
two. To think that he cares about nothing save the possibility of being
found out and made ridiculous! All his friends have been ‘muckraked,’ as
he calls it, and he has sat aloft and smiled over their plight; he was
the landed gentleman, the true aristrocrat, whom the worries of traders
and money-changers didn’t concern. Now perhaps he’s caught, and his
name is to be dragged in the mire, and it’s my flightiness, my lack of
commonsense that has done it!”

“I shouldn’t let that trouble me,” I said. “You could not know--”

“Oh, it’s not that! It’s that I hadn’t a single courageous word to say
to him--not a hint that he ought to refuse to wring blood-money from
sweat-shops! I came away without having done it, because I couldn’t face
his anger, because it would have meant a quarrel!”

“My dear,” I said gently, “it is possible to survive a quarrel.”

“No, you don’t understand! We should never make it up again, I know--I
saw it in his words, in his face. He will never change to please me,
no, not even a simple thing like the business-methods of the van Tuiver
estates.”

I could not help smiling. “My dear Sylvia! A simple thing!”

She came and sat beside me. “That’s what I want to talk about. It is
time I was growing up. It it time that I knew about these things. Tell
me about them.”

“What, my dear?”

“About the methods of the van Tuiver estates, that can’t be changed to
please me. I made out one thing, we had recently paid a fine for some
infraction of the law in one of those buildings, and my husband said
it was because we had refused to pay more money to a tenement-house
inspector. I asked him: ‘Why should we pay any money at all to a
tenement-house inspector? Isn’t it bribery?’ He answered: ‘It’s a
custom--the same as you give a tip to a hotel waiter.’ Is that true?”

I could not help smiling. “Your husband ought to know, my dear,” I said.

I saw her compress her lips. “What is the tip for?”

“I suppose it is to keep out of trouble with him.”

“But why can’t we keep out of trouble by obeying the law?”

“My dear, sometimes the law is inconvenient, and sometimes it is
complicated and obscure. It might be that you are violating it without
knowing the fact. It might be uncertain whether you are violating it
or not, so that to settle the question would mean a lot of expense and
publicity. It might even be that the law is impossible to obey--that it
was not intended to be obeyed.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, maybe it was passed to put you at the mercy of the
politicians.”

“But,” she protested, “that would be blackmail.”

“The phrase,” I replied, “is ‘strike-legislation.’”

“But at least, that wouldn’t be our fault!”

“No, not unless you had begun it. It generally happens that the landlord
discovers it’s a good thing to have politicians who will work with him.
Maybe he wants his assessments lowered; maybe he wants to know where new
car lines are to go, so that he can buy intelligently; maybe he wants
the city to improve his neighbourhood; maybe he wants influence at court
when he has some heavy damage suit.”

“So we bribe everyone!”

“Not necessarily. You may simply wait until campaign-time, and then make
your contribution to the machine. That is the basis of the ‘System.’.”

“The ‘System ‘?”

“A semi-criminal police-force, and everything that pays tribute to it;
the saloon and the dive, the gambling hell the white-slave market, and
the Arson trust.”

I saw a wild look in her eyes. “Tell me, do you _know_ that all these
things are true? Or are you only guessing about them?”

“My dear Sylvia,” I answered, “you said it was time you grew up. For the
present I will tell you this: Several months before I met you, I made
a speech in which I named some of the organised forces of evil in the
city. One was Tammany Hall, and another was the Traction Trust, and
another was the Trinity Church Corporation, and yet another was the van
Tuiver estates.”

27. The following Sunday there appeared a “magazine story” of an
interview with the infinitely beautiful young wife of the infinitely
rich Mr. Douglas van Tuiver, in which the views of the wife on the
subject of child-labour were liberally interlarded with descriptions
of her reception-room and her morning-gown. But mere picturesqueness by
that time had been pretty well discounted in our minds. So long as
the article did not say anything about the ownership of child-labour
tenements!

I did not see Sylvia for several weeks after that. I took it for granted
that she would want some time to get herself together and make up her
mind about the future. I did not feel anxious; the seed had sprouted,
and I felt sure it would continue to grow.

Then one day she called me up, asking if I could come to see her. I
suggested that afternoon, and she said she was having tea with some
people at the Palace Hotel, and could I come there just after tea-time?
I remember the place and the hour, because of the curious adventure into
which I got myself. One hears the saying, when unexpected encounters
take place, “How small the world is!” But I thought the world was
growing really too small when I went into a hotel tea-room to wait for
Sylvia, and found myself face to face with Claire Lepage!

The place appointed had been the “orange-room”; I stood in the door-way,
sweeping the place with my eyes, and I saw Mrs. van Tuiver at the same
moment that she saw me. She was sitting at a table with several other
people and she nodded, and I took a seat to wait. From my position I
could watch her, in animated conversation; and she could send me a smile
now and then. So I was decidedly startled when I heard a voice, “Why,
how do you do?” and looked up and saw Claire holding out her hand to me.

“Well, for heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed.

“You don’t come to see me any more,” she said.

“Why, no--no, I’ve been busy of late.” So much I managed to ejaculate,
in spite of my confusion.

“You seem surprised to see me,” she remarked--observant as usual, and
sensitive to other people’s attitude to her.

“Why, naturally,” I said. And then, recollecting that it was not in the
least natural--since she spent a good deal of her time in such places--I
added, “I was looking for someone else.”

“May I do in the meantime?” she inquired, taking a seat beside me. “What
are you so busy about?”

“My child-labour work,” I answered. Then, in an instant, I was sorry for
the words, thinking she must have read about Sylvia’s activities. I did
not want her to know that I had met Sylvia, for it would mean a flood of
questions, which I did not want to answer--nor yet to refuse to answer.

But my fear was needless. “I’ve been out of town,” she said.

“Whereabouts?” I asked, making conversation.

“A little trip to Bermuda.”

My mind was busy with the problem of getting rid of her. It would be
intolerable to have Sylvia come up to us; it was intolerable to know
that they were in sight of each other.

Even as the thought came to me, however, I saw Claire start. “Look!” she
exclaimed.

“What is it?”

“That woman there--in the green velvet! The fourth table.”

“I see her.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“Who?” (I remembered Lady Dee’s maxim about lying!)

“Sylvia Castleman!” whispered Claire. (She always referred to her
thus--seeming to say, “I’m as much van Tuiver as she is!”)

“Are you sure?” I asked--in order to say something.

“I’ve seen her a score of times. I seem to be always running into her.
That’s Freddie Atkins she’s talking to.”

“Indeed!” said I.

“I know most of the men I see her with. But I have to walk by as if I’d
never seen them. A queer world we live in, isn’t it?”

I could assent cordially to that proposition. “Listen,” I broke in,
quickly. “Have you got anything to do? If not, come down to the Royalty
and have tea with me.”

“Why not have it here?”

“I’ve been waiting for someone from there, and I have to leave a
message. Then I’ll be free.”

She rose, to my vast relief, and we walked out. I could feel Sylvia’s
eyes following me; but I dared not try to send her a message--I would
have to make up some explanation afterwards. “Who was your well-dressed
friend?” I could imagine her asking; but my mind was more concerned with
the vision of what would happen if, in full sight of her companion, Mr.
Freddie Atkins, she were to rise and walk over to Claire and myself!

28. Seated in the palm-room of the other hotel, I sipped a cup of
tea which I felt I had earned, while Claire had a little glass of the
fancy-coloured liquids which the ladies in these places affect. The room
was an aviary, with tropical plants and splashing fountains--and birds
of many gorgeous hues; I gazed from one to another of the splendid
creatures, wondering how many of them were paying for their plumage
in the same way as my present companion. It would have taken a more
practiced eye than mine to say which, for if I had been asked, I
would have taken Claire for a diplomat’s wife. She had not less than a
thousand dollars’ worth of raiment upon her, and its style made clear to
all the world the fact that it had not been saved over from a previous
season of prosperity. She was a fine creature, who could carry any
amount of sail; with her bold, black eyes she looked thoroughly
competent, and it was hard to believe in the fundamental softness of her
character.

I sat, looking about me, annoyed at having missed Sylvia, and only half
listening to Claire. But suddenly she brought me to attention. “Well,”
 she said, “I’ve met him.”

“Met whom?”

“Douglas.”

I stared at her. “Douglas van Tuiver?”

She nodded; and I suppressed a cry.

“I told you he’d come back,” she added, with a laugh.

“You mean he came to see you?”

I could not hide my concern. But there was no need to, for it
flattered Claire’s vanity. “No--not yet, but he will. I met him at Jack
Taylor’s--at a supper-party.”

“Did he know you were to be there?”

“No. But he didn’t leave when he saw me.”

There was a pause. I could not trust myself to say anything. But Claire
had no intention of leaving me curious. “I don’t think he’s happy with
her,” she remarked.

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, several things. I know him, you know. He wouldn’t say he was.”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to discuss it with you.”

“Oh, no--not that. He isn’t reserved with me.”

“I should think it was dangerous to discuss one’s wife under such
circumstances,” I laughed.

Claire laughed also. “You should have heard what Jack had to say about
his wife! She’s down at Palm Beach.”

“She’d better come home,” I ventured.

“He was telling what a dance she leads him; she raises Cain if a woman
looks at him--and she damns every woman he meets before the woman has a
chance to look. Jack said marriage was hell--just hell. Reggie Channing
thought it was like a pair of old slippers that you got used to.” Jack
laughed and answered, “You’re at the stage where you think you can solve
the marriage problem by deceiving your wife!”

I made no comment. Claire sat for a while, busy with her thoughts; then
she repeated, “He wouldn’t say he was happy! And he misses me, too. When
he was going, I held his hand, and said: ‘Well, Douglas, how goes it?’”

“And then?” I asked; but she would not say any more.

I waited a while, and then began, “Claire, let him alone. Give them a
chance to be happy.”

“Why should I?” she demanded, in a voice of hostility.

“She never harmed you,” I said. I knew I was being foolish, but I would
do what I could.

“She took him away from me, didn’t she?” And Claire’s eyes were suddenly
alight with the hatred of her outcast class. “Why did she get him?
Why is she Mrs. van Tuiver, and I nobody? Because her father was rich,
because she had power and position, while I had to scratch for myself in
the world. Is that true, or isn’t it?”

I could not deny that it might be part of the truth. “But they’re
married now,” I said, “and he loves her.”

“He loves me, too. And I love him still, in spite of the way he’s
treated me. He’s the only man I ever really loved. Do you think I’m
going off and hide in a hole, while she spends his money and plays the
princess up and down the Avenue? Not much!”

I fell silent. Should I set out upon another effort at “moulding water”?
Should I give Claire one more scolding--tell her, perhaps, how her very
features were becoming hard and ugly, as a result of the feelings she
was harbouring? Should I recall the pretences of generosity and dignity
she had made when we first met? I might have attempted this--but
something held me back. After all, the one person who could decide this
issue was Douglas van Tuiver.

I rose. “Well, I have to be going. But I’ll drop round now and then, and
see what success you have.”

She became suddenly important. “Maybe I won’t tell!”

To which I answered, indifferently, “All right, it’s your secret.” But I
went off without much worry over that part of it. Claire must have some
one to whom to recount her troubles--or her triumphs, as the case might
be.

29. I had my talk with Sylvia a day or two later, and made my excuse--a
friend from the West who had been going out of town in a few hours
later.

The seed had been growing, I found. Ever since we had last met, her life
had consisted of arguments over the costume-ball on which her husband
had set his heart, and at which she had refused to play the hostess.

“Of course, he’s right about one thing,” she remarked. “We can’t stay in
New York unless we give some big affair. Everyone expects it, and there
is no explanation except one he could not offer.”

“I’ve made a big breach in your life, Sylvia,” I said.

“It wasn’t all you. This unhappiness has been in me--it’s been like a
boil, and you’ve been the poultice.” (She had four younger brothers and
sisters, so these domestic similes came naturally.)

“Boils,” I remarked, “are disfiguring, when they come to a head.”

There was a pause. “How is your child-labour bill?” she asked, abruptly.

“Why, it’s all right.”

“Didn’t I see a letter in the paper saying it had been referred to a
sub-committee, some trick to suppress it for this session?”

I could not answer. I had been hoping she had not seen that letter.

“If I were to come forward now,” she said, “I could possibly block that
move, couldn’t I?”

Still I said nothing.

“If I were to take a bold stand--I mean if I were to speak at a public
meeting, and denounce the move.”

“I suppose you could,” I had to admit.

For a long time she sat with her head bowed. “The children will have to
wait,” she said, at last, half to herself.

“My dear,” I answered (What else was there to answer?) “the children
have waited a long time.”

“I hate to turn back--to have you say I’m a coward--”

“I won’t say that, Sylvia.”

“You will be too kind, no doubt, but that will be the truth.”

I tried to reassure her. But the acids I had used--intended for tougher
skins than hers--had burned into the very bone, and now it was not
possible to stop their action. “I must make you understand,” she said,
“how serious a thing it seems to me for a wife to stand out against
her husband. I’ve been brought up to feel that it was the most terrible
thing a woman could do.”

She stopped, and when she went on again her face was set like one
enduring pain. “So this is the decision to which I have come. If I do
anything of a public nature now, I drive my husband from me; on
the other hand, if I take a little time, I may be able to save the
situation. I need to educate myself, and I’m hoping I may be able to
educate him at the same time. If I can get him to read something--if
it’s only a few paragraphs everyday--I may gradually change his point of
view, so that he will tolerate what I believe. At any rate, I ought to
try; I am sure that is the wise and kind and fair thing to do.”

“What will you do about the ball?” I asked.

“I am going to take him away, out of this rush and distraction, this
dressing and undressing, hurrying about meeting people and chattering
about nothing.”

“He is willing?”

“Yes; in fact, he suggested it himself. He thinks my mind is turned,
with all the things I’ve been reading, and with Mrs. Frothingham, and
Mrs. Allison, and the rest. He hopes that if I go away, I may quiet
down and come to my senses. We have a good excuse. I have to think of my
health just now---”

She stopped, and looked away from my eyes. I saw the colour spreading in
a slow wave over her cheeks; it was like those tints of early dawn that
are so ravishing to the souls of poets. “In four or five months from
now---” And she stopped again.

I put my big hand gently over her small one. “I have three children of
my own,” I said.

“So,” she went on, “it won’t seem so unreasonable. Some people know, and
the rest will guess, and there won’t be any talk--I mean, such as
there would be if it was rumoured that Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver had got
interested in Socialism, and refused to spend her husband’s money.”

“I understand,” I replied. “It’s quite the most sensible thing, and I’m
glad you’ve found a way out. I shall miss you, of course, but we can
write each other long letters. Where are you going?”

“I’m not absolutely sure. Douglas suggests a cruise in the West Indies,
but I think I should rather be settled in one place. He has a lovely
house in the mountains of North Carolina, and wants me to go there; but
it’s a show-place, with rich homes all round, and I know I’d soon be in
a social whirl. I thought of the camp in the Adirondacks. It would be
glorious to see the real woods in winter; but I lose my nerve when I
think of the cold--I was brought up in a warm place.”

“A ‘camp’ sounds rather primitive for one in your condition,” I
suggested.

“That’s because you haven’t been there. In reality it’s a big house,
with twenty-five rooms, and steam-heat and electric lights, and half a
dozen men to take care of it when it’s empty--as it has been for several
years.”

I smiled--for I could read her thought. “Are you going to be unhappy
because you can’t occupy all your husband’s homes?”

“There’s one other I prefer,” she continued, unwilling to be made to
smile. “They call it a ‘fishing lodge,’ and it’s down in the Florida
Keys. They’re putting a railroad through there, but meantime you can
only get to it by a launch. From the pictures, it’s the most heavenly
spot imaginable. Fancy running about those wonderful green waters in a
motor-boat!”

“It sounds quite alluring,” I replied. “But isn’t it remote for you?”

“We’re not so very far from Key West; and my husband means to have a
physician with us in any case. The advantage of being in a small place
is that we couldn’t entertain if we wanted to. I can have my Aunt Varina
come to stay with me, a dear, sweet soul who loves me devotedly; and
then if I find I have to have some new ideas, perhaps you can come---”

“I don’t think your husband would favour that,” I said.

She put her hand out to me in a quick gesture. “I don’t mean to give up
our friendship! I want you to understand, I intend to go on studying and
growing. I am doing what he asked me--it’s right that I should think of
his wishes, and of the health of my child. But the child will be growing
up, and sooner or later my husband must grant me the right to think,
to have a life of my own. You must stand by me and help me, whatever
happens.”

I gave her my hand on that, and so we parted--for some time, as it
proved. I went up to Albany once more, in a last futile effort to save
our precious bill; and while I was there I got a note from her, saying
that she was leaving for the Florida Keys.





BOOK II. SYLVIA AS MOTHER


For three months after this I had nothing but letters from Sylvia. She
proved to be an excellent letter-writer, full of verve and colour.
I would not say that she poured out her soul to me, but she gave me
glimpses of her states of mind, and the progress of her domestic drama.

First, she described the place to which she had come; a ravishing spot,
where any woman ought to be happy. It was a little island, fringed with
a border of cocoanut-palms, which rustled and whispered day and night in
the breeze. It was covered with tropical foliage, and there was a long,
rambling bungalow, with screened “galleries,” and a beach of hard white
sand in front. The water was blue, dazzling with sunshine, and dotted
with distant green islands; all of it, air, water, and islands, were
warm. “I don’t realize till I get here,” she said, “I am never really
happy in the North. I wrap myself against the assaults of a cruel enemy.
But here I am at home; I cast off my furs, I stretch out my arms, I
bloom. I believe I shall quite cease to think for a while--I shall
forget all storms and troubles, and bask on the sand like a lizard.

“And the water! Mary, you cannot imagine such water; why should it be
blue on top, and green when you look down into it? I have a little skiff
of my own in which I drift, and I have been happy for hours, studying
the bottom; you see every colour of the rainbow, and all as clear as in
an aquarium. I have been fishing, too, and have caught a tarpon. That
is supposed to be a great adventure, and it really is quite thrilling to
feel the monstrous creature struggling with you--though, of course, my
arms soon gave out, and I had to turn him over to my husband. This is
one of the famous fishing-grounds of the world, and I am glad of that,
because it will keep the men happy while I enjoy the sunshine.

“I have discovered a fascinating diversion,” she wrote, in a second
letter. “I make them take me in the launch to one of the loneliest of
the keys; they go off to fish, and I have the whole day to myself, and
am as happy as a child on a picnic! I roam the beach, I take off my
shoes and stockings--there are no newspaper reporters snapping pictures.
I dare not go far in, for there are huge black creatures with dangerous
stinging tails; they rush away in a cloud of sand when I approach, but
the thought of stepping upon one by accident is terrifying. However,
I let the little wavelets wash round my toes, and I try to grab little
fish, and I pick up lovely shells; and then I go on, and I see a huge
turtle waddling to the water, and I dash up, and would stop him if I
dared, and then I find his eggs--such an adventure!

“I am the prey of strange appetites and cravings. I have a delicious
luncheon with me, but suddenly the one thing in the world I want to
eat is turtle-eggs. I have no matches with me, and I do not know how to
build a fire like the Indians, so I have to hide the eggs back in the
sand until to-morrow. I hope the turtle does not move them--and that I
have not lost my craving in the meantime!

“Then I go exploring inland. These islands were once the haunts of
pirates, so I may imagine all sorts of romantic things. What I find
are lemon-trees. I do not know if they are wild, or if the key was once
cultivated; the lemons are huge in size, and nearly all skin, but the
flavour is delicious. Turtle-eggs with wild lemon-juice! And then I go
on and come to a mangrove-swamp--dark and forbidding, a grisly place;
you imagine the trees are in torment, with limbs and roots tangled like
writhing serpents. I tiptoe in a little way, and then get frightened,
and run back to the beach.

“I see on the sand a mysterious little yellow creature, running like the
wind; I make a dash, and get between him and his hole; and so he stands,
crouching on guard, staring at me, and I at him. He is some sort of
crab, but he stands on two legs like a caricature of a man; he has two
big weapons upraised for battle, and staring black eyes stuck out on
long tubes. He is an uncanny thing to look at; but then suddenly the
idea comes, How do I seem to him? I realize that he is alive; a tiny
mite of hunger for life, of fear and resolution. I think, How lonely he
must be! And I want to tell him that I love him, and would not hurt him
for the world; but I have no way to make him understand me, and all I
can do is to go away and leave him. I go, thinking what a strange
place the world is, with so many living things, each shut away apart by
himself, unable to understand the others or make the others understand
him. This is what is called philosophy, is it not? Tell me some books
where these things are explained....

“I am reading all you sent me. When I grew tired of exploring the key, I
lay down in the shade of a palm-tree, and read--guess what? ‘Number Five
John Street’! So all this loveliness vanished, and I was back in the
world’s nightmare. An extraordinary book! I decided that it would be
good for my husband, so I read him a few paragraphs; but I found that it
only irritated him. He wants me to rest, he says--he can’t see why I’ve
come away to the Florida Keys to read about the slums of London.

“My hope of gradually influencing his mind has led to a rather appalling
discovery--that he has the same intention as regards me! He too has
brought a selection of books, and reads to me a few pages every day, and
explains what they mean. He calls _this_ resting! I am no match for
him, of course--I never realized more keenly the worthlessness of my
education. But I see in a general way where his arguments tend--that
life is something that has grown, and is not in the power of men to
change; but even if he could convince me of this, I should not find it a
source of joy. I have a feeling always that if you were here, you would
know something to answer.

“The truth is that I am so pained by the conflict between us that I
cannot argue at all. I find myself wondering what our marriage would
have been like if we had discovered that we had the same ideas and
interests. There are days and nights at a time when I tell myself that
I ought to believe what my husband believes, that I ought never have
allowed myself to think of anything else. But that really won’t do as a
life-programme; I tried it years ago with my dear mother and father. Did
I ever tell you that my mother is firmly convinced in her heart that I
am to suffer eternally in a real hell of fire because I do not believe
certain things about the Bible? She still has visions of it--though not
so bad since she turned me over to a husband!

“Now it is my husband who is worried about my ideas. He is reading a
book by Burke, a well-known old writer. The book deals with English
history, which I don’t know much about, but I see that it resents modern
changes, and the whole spirit of change. And Mary, why can’t I feel that
way? I really ought to love those old and stately things, I ought to
be reverent to the past; I was brought up that way. Sometimes I tremble
when I realize how very flippant and cynical I am. I seem to see the
wrong side of everything, so that I couldn’t believe in it if I wanted
to!”

2. Her letters were full of the wonders of Nature about her. There was
a snow-white egret who made his home upon her island; she watched his
fishing operations, and meant to find his nest, so as to watch his
young. The men made a trip into the Everglades, and brought back
wonder-tales of flocks of flamingoes making scarlet clouds in the sky,
huge colonies of birds’ nests crowded like a city. They had brought home
a young one, which screamed all day to be stuffed with fish.

A cousin of Sylvia’s, Harley Chilton, had come to visit her. He had
taken van Tuiver on hunting-trips during the latter’s courtship days,
and now was a good fishing-companion. He was not allowed to discover the
state of affairs between Sylvia and her husband, but he saw his cousin
reading serious books, and his contribution to the problem was to tell
her that she would get wrinkles in her face, and that even her feet
would grow big, like those of the ladies in New England.

Also, there was the young physician who kept watch over Sylvia’s
health; a dapper little man with pink and white complexion, and a brown
moustache from which he could not keep his fingers. He had a bungalow
to himself, but sometimes he went along on the launch-trips, and Sylvia
thought she observed wrinkles of amusement round his eyes whenever she
differed from her husband on the subject of Burke. She suspected
this young man of not telling all his ideas to his multi-millionaire
patients, and she was entertained by the prospect of probing him.

Then came Mrs. Varina Tuis; who since the tragic cutting of her own
domestic knot, had given her life to the service of the happier members
of the Castleman line. She was now to be companion and counsellor to
Sylvia; and on the very day of her arrival she discovered the chasm that
was yawning in her niece’s life.

“It’s wonderful,” wrote Sylvia, “the intuition of the Castleman women.
We were in the launch, passing one of the viaducts of the new railroad,
and Aunt Varina exclaimed, ‘What a wonderful piece of work!’ ‘Yes,’ put
in my husband, ‘but don’t let Sylvia hear you say it.’ ‘Why not?’ she
asked; and he replied, ‘She’ll tell you how many hours a day the poor
Dagoes have to work.’ That was all; but I saw Aunt Varina give a quick
glance at me, and I saw that she was not fooled by my efforts to make
conversation. It was rather horrid of Douglas, for he knows that I love
these old people, and do not want them to know about my trouble. But it
is characteristic of him--when he is annoyed he seldom tries to spare
others.

“As soon as we were alone, Aunt Varina began, ‘Sylvia, my dear, what
does it mean? What have you done to worry your husband?’

“You would be entertained if I could remember the conversation. I tried
to dodge the trouble by answering off-hand, ‘Douglas had eaten too many
turtle-eggs for luncheon ‘--this being a man-like thing, that any dear
old lady would understand. But she was too shrewd. I had to explain
to her that I was learning to think, and this sent her into a perfect
panic.

“‘You actually mean, my child, that you are thinking about subjects to
which your husband objects, and you refuse to stop when he asks you to?
Surely you must know that he has some good reason for objecting.’

“‘I suppose so,’ I said, ‘but he has not made that reason clear to me;
and certainly I have a right--’

“She would not hear any more than that. ‘Right, Sylvia? Right? Are you
claiming the right to drive your husband from you?’

“‘But surely I can’t regulate all my thinking by the fear of driving my
husband from me!’

“‘Sylvia, you take my breath away. Where did you get such ideas?’

“‘But answer me, Aunt Varina--can I?’

“‘What thinking is as important to a woman as thinking how to please
a good, kind husband? What would become of her family if she no longer
tried to do this?’

“So you see, we opened up a large subject. I know you consider me a
backward person, and you may be interested to learn that there are some
to whom I seem a terrifying rebel. Picture poor Aunt Varina, her old
face full of concern, repeating over and over, ‘My child, my child, I
hope I have come in time! Don’t scorn the advice of a woman who has paid
bitterly for her mistakes. You have a good husband, a man who loves you
devotedly; you are one of the most fortunate of women--now do not throw
your happiness away!’

“‘Aunt Varina,’ I said (I forget if I ever told you that her husband
gambled and drank, and finally committed suicide) ‘Aunt Varina, do you
really believe that every man is so anxious to get away from his wife
that it must take her whole stock of energy, her skill in diplomacy, to
keep him?’

“‘Sylvia,’ she answered, ‘you put things so strangely, you use such
horribly crude language, I don’t know how to talk to you!’ (That must be
your fault, Mary. I never heard such a charge before.) ‘I can only tell
you this--that the wife who permits herself to think about other things
than her duty to her husband and her children is taking a frightful
risk. She is playing with fire, Sylvia--she will realize too late what
it means to set aside the wisdom of her sex, the experience of other
women for ages and ages!’

“So there you are, Mary! I am studying another unwritten book, the
Maxims of Aunt Varina!

“She has found the remedy for my troubles, the cure for my disease of
thought--I am to sew! I tell her that I have more clothes than I can
wear in a dozen seasons, and she answers, in an awesome voice, ‘There is
the little stranger!’ When I point out that the little stranger will
be expected to have a ‘layette’ costing many thousands of dollars, she
replies, ‘They will surely permit him to wear some of the things
his mother’s hands have made.’ So, behold me, seated on the gallery,
learning fancy stitches--and with Kautsky on the Social Revolution
hidden away in the bottom of my sewing-bag!”

3. The weeks passed. The legislature at Albany adjourned, without regard
to our wishes; and so, like the patient spider whose web is destroyed,
we set to work upon a new one. So much money must be raised, so many
articles must be written, so many speeches delivered, so many people
seized upon and harried and wrought to a state of mind where they were
dangerous to the future career of legislators. Such is the process of
social reform under the private property régime; a process which the
pure and simple reformers imagine we shall tolerate for ever--God save
us!

Sylvia asked me for the news, and I told it to her--how we had failed,
and what we had to do next. So pretty soon there came by registered mail
a little box, in which I found a diamond ring. “I cannot ask him for
money just now,” she explained, “but here is something that has been
mine from girlhood. It cost about four hundred dollars--this for your
guidance in selling it. Not a day passes that I do not see many times
that much wasted; so take it for the cause.” Queen Isabella and her
jewels!

In this letter she told me of a talk she had had with her husband on the
“woman-problem.” She had thought at first that it was going to prove a
helpful talk--he had been in a fairer mood than she was usually able to
induce. “He evaded some of my questions,” she explained, “but I don’t
think it was deliberate; it is simply the evasive attitude of mind which
the whole world takes. He says he does not think that women are inferior
to men, only that they are different; the mistake is for them to try to
become _like_ men. It is the old proposition of ‘charm,’ you see. I put
that to him, and he admitted that he did like to be ‘charmed.’

“I said, ‘You wouldn’t, if you knew as much about the process as I do.’

“‘Why not?’ he asked.

“‘Because, it’s not an honest process. It’s not a straight way for one
sex to deal with the other.’

“He asked what I meant by that; but then, remembering the cautions of
my great-aunt, I laughed. ‘If you are going to compel me to use the
process, you can hardly expect me to tell you the secret of it.’

“‘Then there’s no use trying to talk,’ he said.

“‘Ah, but there is!’ I exclaimed. ‘You admit that I have ‘charm’--dozens
of other men admitted it. And so it ought to count for something if
I declare that I know it’s not an honest thing--that it depends upon
trickery, and appeals to the worst qualities in a man. For instance, his
vanity. “Flatter him,” Lady Dee used to say. “He’ll swallow it.” And he
will--I never knew a man to refuse a compliment in my life. His love of
domination. “If you want anything, make him think that _he_ wants it!”
 His egotism. She had a bitter saying--I can hear the very tones of her
voice: “When in doubt, talk about HIM.” That is what is called “charm”!’

“‘I don’t seem to feel it,’ he said.

“’ No, because now you are behind the scenes. But when you were in
front, you felt it, you can’t deny. And you would feel it again, any
time I chose to use it. But I want to know if there is not some honest
way a woman can interest a man. The question really comes to this--Can a
man love a woman for what she really is?’

“‘I should say,’ he said, ‘that it depends upon the woman.’

“I admitted this was a plausible answer. ‘But you loved me, when I made
myself a mystery to you. But now that I am honest with you, you have
made it clear that you don’t like it, that you won’t have it. And that
is the problem that women have to face. It is a fact that the women
of our family have always ruled the men; but they’ve done it by
indirection--nobody ever thought seriously of “women’s rights” in
Castleman County. But you see, women _have_ rights; and somehow or other
they will fool the men, or else the men must give up the idea that
they are the superior sex, and have the right, or the ability, to rule
women.’

“Then I saw how little he had followed me. ‘There has to be a head to
the family,’ he said.

“I answered, ‘There have been cases in history of a king and queen
ruling together, and getting along very well. Why not the same thing in
a family?’

“‘That’s all right, so far as the things of the family are concerned.
But such affairs as business and politics are in the sphere of men;
and women cannot meddle in them without losing their best qualities as
women.’

“And so there we were. I won’t repeat his arguments, for doubtless you
have read enough anti-suffrage literature. The thing I noticed was that
if I was very tactful and patient, I could apparently carry him along
with me; but when the matter came up again, I would discover that he
was back where he had been before. A woman must accept the guidance of
a man; she must take the man’s word for the things that he understands.
‘But suppose the man is _wrong?_’ I said; and there we stopped--there we
shall stop always, I begin to fear. I agree with him that woman should
obey man--so long as man is right!”

4. Her letters did not all deal with this problem. In spite of the
sewing, she found time to read a number of books, and we argued about
these. Then, too, she had been probing her young doctor, and had made
interesting discoveries about him. For one thing, he was full of awe
and admiration for her; and her awakening mind found material for
speculation in this.

“Here is this young man; he thinks he is a scientist, he rather prides
himself upon being cold-blooded; yet a cunning woman could twist him
round her finger. He had an unhappy love-affair when he was young, so he
confided to me; and now, in his need and loneliness, a beautiful woman
is transformed into something supernatural in his imagination--she is
like a shimmering soap-bubble, that he blows with his own breath. I know
that I could never get him to see the real truth about me; I might tell
him that I have let myself be tied up in a golden net--but he would only
marvel at my spirituality. Oh, the women I have seen trading upon the
credulity of men! And when I think how I did this myself! If men
were wise, they would give us the vote, and a share in the world’s
work--anything that would bring us out into the light of day, and break
the spell of mystery that hangs round us!

“By the way,” she wrote in another letter, “there will be trouble if you
come down here. I was telling Dr. Perrin about you, and your ideas about
fasting, and mental healing, and the rest of your fads. He got very
much excited. It seems that he takes his diploma seriously, and he’s not
willing to be taught by amateur experiments. He wanted me to take some
pills, and I refused, and I think now he blames you for it. He has found
a bond of sympathy with my husband, who proves his respect for authority
by taking whatever he is told to take. Dr. Perrin got his medical
training here in the South, and I imagine he’s ten or twenty years
behind the rest of the medical world. Douglas picked him out because
he’d met him socially. It makes no difference to me--because I don’t
mean to have any doctoring done to me!”

Then, on top of these things, would come a cry from her soul. “Mary,
what will you do if some day you get a letter from me confessing that I
am not happy? I dare not say a word to my own people. I am supposed to
be at the apex of human triumph, and I have to play that role to keep
from hurting them. I know that if my dear old father got an inkling of
the truth, it would kill him. My one real solid consolation is that I
have helped him, that I have lifted a money-burden from his life; I have
done that, I tell myself, over and over; but then I wonder, have I done
anything but put the reckoning off? I have given all his other children
a new excuse for extravagance, an impulse towards worldliness which they
did not need.

“There is my sister Celeste, for example. I don’t think I have told you
about her. She made her _début_ last fall, and was coming up to New York
to stay with me this winter. She had it all arranged in her mind to make
a rich marriage; I was to give her the _entrée_--and now I have been
selfish, and thought of my own desires, and gone away. Can I say to her,
Be warned by me, I have made a great match, and it has not brought me
happiness? She would not understand, she would say I was foolish. She
would say, ‘If I had your luck, _I_ would be happy.’ And the worst of it
is, it would be true.

“You see the position I am in with the rest of the children. I cannot
say, ‘You are spending too much of papa’s money, it is wrong for you to
sign cheques and trust to his carelessness.’ I have had my share of the
money, I have lined my own nest. All I can do is to buy dresses and hats
for Celeste; and know that she will use these to fill her girl-friends
with envy, and make scores of other families live beyond their means.”

5. Sylvia’s pregnancy was moving to its appointed end. She wrote me
beautifully about it, much more frankly and simply than she could have
brought herself to talk. She recalled to me my own raptures, and
also, my own heartbreak. “Mary! Mary! I felt the child to-day! Such a
sensation, I could not have credited it if anyone had told me. I almost
fainted. There is something in me that wants to turn back, that is
afraid to go on with such experiences. I do not wish to be seized in
spite of myself, and made to feel things beyond my control. I wander off
down the beach, and hide myself, and cry and cry. I think I could almost
pray again.”

And then again, “I am in ecstasy, because I am to bear a child, a child
of my own! Oh, wonderful, wonderful! But suddenly my ecstasy is shot
through with terror, because the father of this child is a man I do not
love. There is no use trying to deceive myself--nor you! I must have one
human soul with whom I can talk about it as it really is. I do not love
him, I never did love him, I never shall love him!

“Oh, how could they have all been so mistaken? Here is Aunt Varina--one
of those who helped to persuade me into this marriage. She told me that
love would come; it seemed to be her idea--my mother had it too--that
you had only to submit yourself to a man, to follow and obey him, and
love would take possession of your heart. I tried credulously, and it
did not happen as they promised. And now, I am to bear him a child; and
that will bind us together for ever!

“Oh, the despair of it--I do not love the father of my child! I say, The
child will be partly his, perhaps more his than mine. It will be like
him--it will have this quality and that, the very qualities, perhaps,
that are a source of distress to me in the father. So I shall have these
things before me day and night, all the rest of my life; I shall have to
see them growing and hardening; it will be a perpetual crucifixion of
my mother-love. I seek to comfort myself by saying, The child can be
trained differently, so that he will not have these qualities. But then
I think, No, you cannot train him as you wish. Your husband will have
rights to the child, rights superior to your own. Then I foresee the
most dreadful strife between us.

“A shrewd girl-friend once told me that I ought to be better or worse; I
ought not to see people’s faults as I do, or else I ought to love people
less. And I can see that I ought to have been too good to make this
marriage, or else not too good to make the best of it. I know that
I might be happy as Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, if I could think of the
worldly advantages, and the fact that my child will inherit them. But
instead, I see them as a trap, in which not only ourselves but the child
is caught, and from which I cannot save us. Oh, what a mistake a woman
makes when she marries a man with the idea that she is going to change
him! He will not change, he will not have the need of change suggested
to him. He wants _peace_ in his home--which means that he wants to be
what he is.

“Sometimes I can study the situation quite coolly, and as if it didn’t
concern me at all. He has required me to subject my mind to his. But
he will not be content with a general capitulation; he must have a
surrender from each individual soldier, from every rebel hidden in the
hills. He tracks them out (my poor, straggling, feeble ideas) and either
they take the oath of allegiance, or they are buried where they lie. The
process is like the spoiling of a child, I find; the more you give him,
the more he wants. And if any little thing is refused, then you see him
set out upon a regular campaign to break you down and get it.”

A month or more later she wrote: “Poor Douglas is getting restless. He
has caught every kind of fish there is to catch, and hunted every kind
of animal and bird, in and out of season. Harley has gone home, and so
have our other guests; it would be embarrassing to me to have company
now. So Douglas has no one but the doctor and myself and my poor aunt.
He has spoken several times of our going away; but I do not want to go,
and I think I ought to consider my own health at this critical time. It
is hot here, but I simply thrive in it--I never felt in better health.
So I asked him to go up to New York, or visit somewhere for a while,
and let me stay here until my baby is born. Does that seem so very
unreasonable? It does not to me, but poor Aunt Varina is in agony about
it--I am letting my husband drift away from me!

“I speculate about my lot as a woman; I see the bitterness and the
sorrow of my sex through the ages. I have become physically misshapen,
so that I am no longer attractive to him. I am no longer active and
free, I can no longer go about with him; on the contrary, I am a burden,
and he is a man who never tolerated a burden before. What this means is
that I have lost the magic hold of sex.

“As a woman it was my business to exert all my energies to maintain it.
And I know how I could restore it now; there is young Dr. Perrin! _He_
does not find me a burden, _he_ would tolerate any deficiencies! And
I can see my husband on the alert in an instant, if I become too much
absorbed in discussing your health-theories with my handsome young
guardian!

“This is one of the recognized methods of keeping your husband; I
learned from Lady Dee all there is to know about it. But I would find
the method impossible now, even if my happiness were dependent upon
retaining my husband’s love. I should think of the rights of my friend,
the little doctor. That is one point to note for the ‘new’ woman, is it
not? You may mention it in your next suffrage-speech!

“There are other methods, of course. I have a mind, and I might turn its
powers to entertaining him, instead of trying to solve the problems of
the universe. But to do this, I should have to believe that it was the
one thing in the world for me to do; and I have permitted a doubt of
that to gain entrance to my brain! My poor aunt’s exhortations inspire
me to efforts to regain the faith of my mothers, but I simply cannot--I
cannot! She sits by me with the terror of all the women of all the ages
in her eyes. I am losing a man!

“I don’t know if you have ever set out to hold a man--deliberately,
I mean. Probably you haven’t. That bitter maxim of Lady Dee’s is the
literal truth of it--‘When in doubt, talk about HIM!’ If you will
tactfully and shrewdly keep a man talking about himself, his tastes,
his ideas, his work and the importance of it, there is never the least
possibility of your boring him. You must not just tamely agree with him,
of course; if you hint a difference now and then, and make him convince
you, he will find that stimulating; or if you can manage not to be quite
convinced, but sweetly open to conviction, he will surely call again.
‘Keep him busy every minute,’ Lady Dee used to say. ‘Run away with him
now and then--like a spirited horse!’ And she would add, ‘But don’t let
him drop the reins!’

“You can have no idea how many women there are in the world deliberately
playing such parts. Some of them admit it; others just do the thing that
is easiest, and would die of horror if they were told what it is. It
is the whole of the life of a successful society woman, young or old.
Pleasing a man! Waiting upon his moods, piquing him, flattering him,
feeding his vanity--‘charming’ him! That is what Aunt Varina wants me to
do now; if I am not too crude in my description of the process, she has
no hesitation in admitting the truth. It is what she tried to do, it is
what almost every woman has done who has held a family together and made
a home. I was reading _Jane Eyre_ the other day. _There_ is your woman’s
ideal of an imperious and impetuous lover! Listen to him, when his mood
is on him!--

“I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night; and that
is why I sent for you; the fire and the chandelier were not sufficient
company for me; nor would Pilot have been, for none of these can talk.
To-night I am resolved to be at ease; to dismiss what importunes, and
recall what pleases. It would please me now to draw you out--to learn
more of you--therefore speak!”

6. It was now May, and Sylvia’s time was little more than a month off.
She had been urging me to come and visit her, but I had refused, knowing
that my presence must necessarily be disturbing to both her husband and
her aunt. But now she wrote that her husband was going back to New
York. “He was staying out of a sense of duty to me,” she said. “But his
discontent was so apparent that I had to point out to him that he was
doing harm to me as well as to himself.

“I doubt if you will want to come here now. The last of the winter
visitors have left. It is really hot, so hot that you cannot get cool by
going into the water. Yet I am revelling in it; I wear almost nothing,
and that white; and even the suspicious Dr. Perrin cannot but admit that
I am thriving; his references to pills are purely formal.

“Lately I have not permitted myself to think much about the situation
between my husband and myself. I cannot blame him, and I cannot blame
myself, and I am trying to keep my peace of mind till my baby is born. I
have found myself following half-instinctively the procedure you told
me about; I talk to my own subconscious mind, and to the baby--I command
them to be well. I whisper to them things that are not so very far from
praying; but I don’t think my poor dear mamma would recognize it in its
new scientific dress!

“But sometimes I can’t help thinking of the child and its future,
and then all of a sudden my heart is ready to break with pity for the
child’s father! I have the consciousness that I do not love him, and
that he has always known it--and that makes me remorseful. But I told
him the truth before we married--he promised to be patient with me till
I had learned to love him! Now I want to burst into tears and cry aloud,
‘Oh, why did you do it? Why did I let myself be persuaded into this
marriage?’

“I tried to have a talk with him last night, after he had decided to go
away. I was full of pity, and a desire to help. I said I wanted him
to know that no matter how much we might disagree about some things,
I meant to learn to live happily with him. We must find some sort of
compromise, for the sake of the child, if not for ourselves; we must not
let the child suffer. He answered coldly that there would be no need
for the child to suffer, the child would have the best the world could
afford. I suggested that there might arise some question as to just
what the best was; but to that he said nothing. He went on to rebuke my
discontent; had he not given me everything a woman could want? he asked.
He was too polite to mention money; but he said that I had leisure and
entire freedom from care. I was persisting in assuming cares, while he
was doing all in his power to prevent it.

“And that was as far as we got. I gave up the discussion, for we should
only have gone the old round over again.

“Douglas has taken up a saying that my cousin brought with him: ‘What
you don’t know won’t hurt you!’ I think that before he left, Harley had
begun to suspect that all was not well between my husband and myself,
and he felt it necessary to give me a little friendly counsel. He was
tactful, and politely vague, but I understood him--my worldly-wise young
cousin. I think that saying of his sums up the philosophy that he would
teach to all women--‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you!’”

7. A week or so later Sylvia wrote me that her husband was in New
York. And I waited another week, for good measure, and then one morning
dropped in for a call upon Claire Lepage.

Why did I do it? you ask. I had no definite purpose--only a general
opposition to the philosophy of Cousin Harley.

I was ushered into Claire’s boudoir, which was still littered with last
evening’s apparel. She sat in a dressing-gown with resplendent red roses
on it, and brushed the hair out of her eyes, and apologized for not
being ready for callers.

“I’ve just had a talking to from Larry,” she explained.

“Larry?” said I, inquiringly; for Claire had always informed me
elaborately that van Tuiver had been her one departure from propriety,
and always would be.

Apparently she had now reached a stage in her career where pretences
were too much trouble. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know
how to manage men,” she said. “I never can get along with one for any
time.”

I remarked that I had had the same experience; though of course I had
only tried it once. “Tell me,” I said, “who’s Larry?”

“There’s his picture.” She reached into a drawer of her dresser.

I saw a handsome blonde gentleman, who looked old enough to know better.
“He doesn’t seem especially forbidding,” I said.

“That’s just the trouble--you can never tell about men!”

I noted a date on the picture. “He seems to be an old friend. You never
told me about him.”

“He doesn’t like being told about. He has a troublesome wife.”

I winced inwardly, but all I said was, “I see.”

“He’s a stock-broker; and he got ‘squeezed,’ so he says, and it’s
made him cross--and careful with his money, too. That’s trying, in a
stock-broker, you must admit.” She laughed. “And still he’s just as
particular--wants to have his own way in everything, wants to say whom I
shall know and where I shall go. I said, ‘I have all the inconveniences
of matrimony, and none of the advantages.’”

I made some remark upon the subject of the emancipation of woman; and
Claire, who was now leaning back in her chair, combing out her long
black tresses, smiled at me out of half-closed eyelids. “Guess whom he’s
objecting to!” she said. And when I pronounced it impossible, she looked
portentous. “There are bigger fish in the sea than Larry Edgewater!”

“And you’ve hooked one?” I asked, innocently.

“Well, I don’t mean to give up all my friends.”

I went on casually to talk about my plans for the summer; and a few
minutes later, after a lull--“By the way,” remarked Claire, “Douglas van
Tuiver is in town.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen him.”

“Indeed! Where?”

“I got Jack Taylor to invite me again. You see, when Douglas fell in
love with his peerless southern beauty, Jack predicted he’d get over it
even more quickly. Now he’s interested in proving he was right.”

I waited a moment, and then asked, carelessly, “Is he having any
success?”

“I said, ‘Douglas, why don’t you come to see me?’ He was in a playful
mood. ‘What do you want? A new automobile?’ I answered, ‘I haven’t any
automobile, new or old, and you know it. What I want is you. I always
loved you--surely I proved that to you.’ ‘What you proved to me was that
you were a sort of wild-cat. I’m afraid of you. And anyway, I’m tired of
women. I’ll never trust another one.’”

“About the same conclusion as you’ve come to regarding men,” I remarked.

“‘Douglas,’ I said, ‘come and see me, and we’ll talk over old times.
You may trust me, I swear I’ll not tell a living soul.’ ‘You’ve been
consoling yourself with someone else,’ he said. But I knew he was only
guessing. He was seeking for something that would worry me, and he said,
‘You’re drinking too much. People that drink can’t be trusted.’ ‘You
know,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t drink too much when I was with you. I’m not
drinking as much as you are, right now.’ He answered, ‘I’ve been off on
a desert island for God knows how many months, and I’m celebrating my
escape.’ ‘Well,’ I answered, ‘let me help celebrate!’”

“What did he say to that?”

Claire resumed the combing of her silken hair, and smiled a slow smile
at me. “‘You may trust me, Douglas,’ I said. ‘I swear I’ll not tell a
living soul!’”

“Of course,” I remarked, appreciatively, “that means he said he’d come!”

“_I_ haven’t told you!” was the reply.

8. I knew that I had only to wait for Claire to tell me the rest of the
story. But her mind went off on another tack. “Sylvia’s going to have a
baby,” she remarked, suddenly.

“That ought to please her husband,” I said.

“You can see him beginning to swell with paternal pride!--so Jack said.
He sent for a bottle of some famous kind of champagne that he has, to
celebrate the new ‘millionaire baby.’ (They used to call Douglas that,
once upon a time.) Before they got through, they had made it triplets.
Jack says Douglas is the one man in New York who can afford them.”

“Your friend Jack seems to be what they call a wag,” I commented.

“It isn’t everybody that Douglas will let carry on with him like that.
He takes himself seriously, as a rule. And he expects to take the new
baby seriously.”

“It generally binds a man tighter to his wife, don’t you think?”

I watched her closely, and saw her smile at my naiveté. “No,” she said,
“I don’t. It leaves them restless. It’s a bore all round.”

I did not dispute her authority; she ought to know her husbands, I
thought.

She was facing the mirror, putting up her hair; and in the midst of the
operation she laughed. “All that evening, while we were having a jolly
time at Jack Taylor’s, Larry was here waiting.”

“Then no wonder you had a row!” I said.

“He hadn’t told me he was coming. And was I to sit here all night alone?
It’s always the same--I never knew a man who really in his heart was
willing for you to have any friends, or any sort of good time without
him.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “he’s afraid you mightn’t be true to him.” I
meant this for a jest, of the sort that Claire and her friends would
appreciate. Little did I foresee where it was to lead us!

I remember how once on the farm my husband had a lot of dynamite,
blasting out stumps; and my emotions when I discovered the children
innocently playing with a stick of it. Something like these children I
seem now to myself, looking back on this visit to Claire, and our talk.

“You know,” she observed, without smiling, “Larry’s got a bee in his
hat. I’ve seen men who were jealous, and kept watch over women, but
never one that was obsessed like him.”

“What’s it about?”

“He’s been reading a book about diseases, and he tells me tales about
what may happen to me, and what may happen to him. When you’ve listened
a while, you can see microbes crawling all over the walls of the room.”

“Well----” I began.

“I was sick of his lecturing, so I said, ‘Larry, you’ll have to do like
me--have everything there is, and get over it, and then you won’t need
to worry.’”

I sat still, staring at her; I think I must have stopped breathing.
At the end of an eternity, I said, “You’ve not really had any of these
diseases, Claire?”

“Who hasn’t?” she countered.

Again there was a pause. “You know,” I observed, “some of them are
dangerous----”

“Oh, of course,” she answered, lightly. “There’s one that makes your
nose fall in and your hair fall out--but you haven’t seen anything like
that happening to me!”

“But there’s another,” I hinted--“one that’s much more common.” And when
she did not take the hint, I continued, “Also it’s more serious than
people generally realize.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “What of it? Men bring you these things, and
it’s part of the game. So what’s the use of bothering?”

9. There was a long silence; I had to have time to decide what course to
take. There was so much that I wanted to get from her, and so much that
I wanted to hide from her!

“I don’t want to bore you, Claire,” I began, finally, “but really this
is a matter of importance to you. You see, I’ve been reading up on the
subject as well as Larry. The doctors have been making new discoveries.
They used to think this was just a local infection, like a cold, but now
they find it’s a blood disease, and has the gravest consequences. For
one thing, it causes most of the surgical operations that have to be
performed on women.”

“Maybe so,” she said, still indifferent. “I’ve had two operations. But
it’s ancient history now.”

“You mayn’t have reached the end yet,” I persisted. “People suppose they
are cured of gonorrhea, when really it’s only suppressed, and is liable
to break out again at any time.”

“Yes, I knew. That’s some of the information Larry had been making love
to me with.”

“It may get into the joints and cause rheumatism; it may cause
neuralgia; it’s been known to affect the heart. Also it causes
two-thirds of all the blindness in infants----”

And suddenly Claire laughed. “That’s Sylvia Castleman’s lookout it seems
to me!”

“Oh! OH!” I whispered, losing my self-control.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, and I noticed that her voice had become
sharp.

“Do you really mean what you’ve just implied?”

“That Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver may have to pay something for what she has
done to me? Well, what of it?” And suddenly Claire flew into a passion,
as she always did when our talk came to her rival. “Why shouldn’t she
take chances the same as the rest of us? Why should I have it and she
get off?”

I fought for my composure. After a pause, I said: “It’s not a thing
we want anybody to have, Claire. We don’t want anybody to take such a
chance. The girl ought to have been told.”

“Told? Do you imagine she would have given up her great catch?”

“She might have, how can you be sure? Anyhow, she should have had the
chance.”

There was a long silence. I was so shaken that it was hard for me to
find words. “As a matter of fact,” said Claire, grimly, “I thought of
warning her myself. There’d have been some excitement at least! You
remember--when they came out of church. You helped to stop me!”

“It would have been too late then,” I heard myself saying.

“Well,” she exclaimed, with fresh excitement, “it’s Miss Sylvia’s
turn now! We’ll see if she’s such a grand lady that she can’t get my
diseases!”

I could no longer contain myself. “Claire,” I cried, “you are talking
like a devil!”

She picked up a powder-puff, and began to use it diligently. “I know,”
 she said--and I saw her burning eyes in the glass--“you can’t fool me.
You’ve tried to be kind, but you despise me in your heart. You think I’m
as bad as any woman of the street. Very well then, I speak for my class,
and I tell you, this is where we prove our humanity. They throw us out,
but you see we get back in!”

“My dear woman,” I said, “you don’t understand. You’d not feel as you
do, If you knew that the person to pay the penalty might be an innocent
little child.”

“_Their_ child! Yes, it’s too bad if there has to be anything the matter
with the little prince! But I might as well tell you the truth--I’ve had
that in mind all along. I didn’t know just what would happen, or how--I
don’t believe anybody does, the doctors who pretend to are just faking
you. But I knew Douglas was rotten, and maybe his children would be
rotten, and they’d all of them suffer. That was one of the things that
kept me from interfering and smashing him up.”

I was speechless now, and Claire, watching me, laughed. “You look as if
you’d had no idea of it. Don’t you know that I told you at the time?”

“You told me at the time!”

“I suppose, you didn’t understand. I’m apt to talk French when I’m
excited. We have a saying: ‘The wedding present which the mistress
leaves in the basket of the bride.’ That was pretty near telling, wasn’t
it?”

“Yes,” I said, in a low voice.

And the other, after watching me for a moment more, went on: “You think
I’m revengeful, don’t you? Well, I used to reproach myself with this,
and I tried to fight it down; but the time comes when you want people to
pay for what they take from you. Let me tell you something that I never
told to anyone, that I never expected to tell. You see me drinking and
going to the devil; you hear me talking the care-free talk of my world,
but in the beginning I was really in love with Douglas van Tuiver, and
I wanted his child. I wanted it so that it was an ache to me. And yet,
what chance did I have? I’d have been the joke of his set for ever if
I’d breathed it; I’d have been laughed out of the town. I even tried at
one time to trap him--to get his child in spite of him, but I found that
the surgeons had cut me up, and I could never have a child. So I have
to make the best of it--I have to agree with my friends that it’s a good
thing, it saves me trouble! But _she_ comes along, and she has what
I wanted, and all the world thinks it wonderful and sublime. She’s a
beautiful young mother! What’s she ever done in her life that she has
everything, and I go without? You may spend your time shedding tears
over her and what may happen to her but for my part, I say this--let her
take her chances! Let her take her chances with the other women in the
world--the women she’s too good and too pure to know anything about!”

10. I came out of Claire’s house, sick with horror. Not since the time
when I had read my poor nephew’s letter had I been so shaken. Why had
I not thought long ago of questioning Claire about these matters. How
could I have left Sylvia all this time exposed to peril?

The greatest danger was to her child at the time of birth. I figured up,
according to the last letter I had received; there was about ten days
yet, and so I felt some relief. I thought first of sending a telegram,
but reflected that it would be difficult, not merely to tell her what to
do in a telegram, but to explain to her afterwards why I had chosen
this extraordinary method. I recollected that in her last letter she had
mentioned the name of the surgeon who was coming from New York to attend
her during her confinement. Obviously the thing for me to do was to see
this surgeon.

“Well, madame?” he said, when I was seated in his inner office.

He was a tall, elderly man, immaculately groomed, and formal and precise
in his manner. “Dr. Overton,” I began, “my friend, Mrs. Douglas van
Tuiver writes me that you are going to Florida shortly.”

“That is correct,” he said.

“I have come to see you about a delicate matter. I presume I need hardly
say that I am relying upon the seal of professional secrecy.”

I saw his gaze become suddenly fixed. “Certainly, madame,” he said.

“I am taking this course because Mrs. van Tuiver is a very dear friend
of mine, and I am concerned about her welfare. It has recently come
to my knowledge that she has become exposed to infection by a venereal
disease.”

He would hardly have started more if I had struck him. “HEY?” he cried,
forgetting his manners.

“It would not help you any,” I said, “if I were to go into details
about this unfortunate matter. Suffice it to say that my information is
positive and precise--that it could hardly be more so.”

There was a long silence. He sat with eyes rivetted upon me. “What is
this disease?” he demanded, at last.

I named it, and then again there was a pause. “How long has this--this
possibility of infection existed?”

“Ever since her marriage, nearly eighteen months ago.”

That told him a good part of the story. I felt his look boring me
through. Was I a mad woman? Or some new kind of blackmailer? Or, was
I, possibly, a Claire? I was grateful for my forty-cent bonnet and my
forty-seven years.

“Naturally,” he said at length, “this information startles me.”

“When you have thought it over,” I responded, “you will realise that no
possible motive could bring me here but concern for the welfare of my
friend.”

He took a few moments to consider. “That may be true, madame, but let me
add that when you say you KNOW this----”

He stopped. “I MEAN that I know it,” I said, and stopped in turn.

“Has Mrs. van Tuiver herself any idea of this situation?”

“None whatever. On the contrary, she was assured before her marriage
that no such possibility existed.”

Again I felt him looking through me, but I left him to make what he
could of my information. “Doctor,” I continued, “I presume there is
no need to point out to a man in your position the seriousness of this
matter, both to the mother and to the child.”

“Certainly there is not.”

“I assume that you are familiar with the precautions that have to be
taken with regard to the eyes of the child?”

“Certainly, madame.” This with just a touch of HAUTEUR, and then,
suddenly: “Are you by any chance a nurse?”

“No,” I replied, “but many years ago I was forced by tragedy in my
own family to realise the seriousness of the venereal peril. So when I
learned this fact about my friend, my first thought was that you should
be informed of it. I trust that you will appreciate my position.”

“Certainly, madame, certainly,” he made haste to say. “You are quite
right, and you may rest assured that everything will be done that our
best knowledge directs. I only regret that the information did not come
to me sooner.”

“It only came to me about an hour ago,” I said, as I rose to leave. “The
blame, therefore, must rest upon another person.”

I needed to say no more. He bowed me politely out, and I walked down
the street, and realised that I was restless and wretched. I wandered
at random for a while, trying to think what else I could do, for my own
peace of mind, if not for Sylvia’s welfare. I found myself inventing one
worry after another. Dr. Overton had not said just when he was going,
and suppose she were to need someone at once? Or suppose something were
to happen to him--if he were to be killed upon the long train-journey? I
was like a mother who has had a terrible dream about her child--she must
rush and fling her arms about the child. I realised that I wanted to see
Sylvia!

She had begged me to come; and I was worn out and had been urged by the
office to take a rest. Suddenly I bolted into a store, and telephoned
the railroad station about trains to Southern Florida. I hailed a
taxi-cab, rode to my home post-haste, and flung a few of my belongings
into a bag and the waiting cab sped with me to the ferry. In little
more than two hours after Claire had told me the dreadful tidings, I was
speeding on my way to Sylvia.

11. From a train-window I had once beheld a cross-section of America
from West to East; now I beheld another from North to South. In the
afternoon were the farms and country-homes of New Jersey; and then in
the morning endless wastes of wilderness, and straggling fields of
young corn and tobacco; turpentine forests, with half-stripped negroes
working, and a procession of “depots,” with lanky men chewing tobacco,
and negroes basking in the blazing sun. Then another night, and there
was the pageant of Florida: palmettos, and other trees of which one had
seen pictures in the geography books; stretches of vine-tangled swamps,
where one looked for alligators; orange-groves in blossom, and gardens
full of flowers beyond imagining. Every hour, of course, it got hotter;
I was not, like Sylvia, used to it, and whenever the train stopped I sat
by the open window, mopping the perspiration from my face.

We were due at Miami in the afternoon; but there was a freight-train
off the track ahead of us, and so for three hours I sat chafing with
impatience, worrying the conductor with futile questions. I had to make
connections at Miami with a train which ran to the last point on the
mainland, where the construction-work over the keys was going forward.
And if I missed that last train, I would have to wait in Miami till
morning. I had better wait there, anyhow, the conductor argued; but I
insisted that my friends, to whom I had telegraphed two days before,
would meet me with a launch and take me to their place that night.

We got in half an hour late for the other train; but this was the South,
I discovered, and they had waited for us. I shifted my bag and myself
across the platform, and we moved on. But then another problem arose; we
were running into a storm. It came with great suddenness; one minute
all was still, with a golden sunset, and the next it was so dark that I
could barely see the palm-trees, bent over, swaying madly--like people
with arms stretched out, crying in distress. I could hear the roaring
of the wind above that of the train, and I asked the conductor in
consternation if this could be a hurricane. It was not the season for
hurricanes, he replied; but it was “some storm, all right,” and I would
not find any boat to take me to the keys until it was over.

It was absurd of me to be nervous, I kept telling myself; but there was
something in me that cried out to be there, to be there! I got out
of the train, facing what I refrain from calling a hurricane out of
deference to local authority. It was all I could do to keep from being
blown across the station-platform, and I was drenched with the spray
and bewildered by the roaring of the waves that beat against the pier
beyond. Inside the station, I questioned the agent. The launch of the
van Tuivers had not been in that day; if it had been on the way, it must
have sought shelter somewhere. My telegram to Mrs. van Tuiver had been
received two days before, and delivered by a boatman whom they employed
for that purpose. Presumably, therefore, I would be met. I asked how
long this gale was apt to last; the answer was from one to three days.

Then I asked about shelter for the night. This was a “jumping-off”
 place, said the agent, with barracks and shanties for a
construction-gang; there were saloons, and what was called a hotel, but
it wouldn’t do for a lady. I pleaded that I was not fastidious--being
anxious to nullify the effect which the name van Tuiver had produced.
But the agent would have it that the place was unfit for even a Western
farmer’s wife; and as I was not anxious to take the chance of being
blown overboard in the darkness, I spent the night on one of the benches
in the station. I lay, listening to the incredible clamour of wind and
waves, feeling the building quiver, and wondering if each gust might not
blow it away.

I was out at dawn, the force of the wind having abated somewhat by that
time. I saw before me a waste of angry foam-strewn water, with no sign
of any craft upon it. Late in the morning came the big steamer which
ran to Key West, in connection with the railroad; it made a difficult
landing, and I interviewed the captain, with the idea of bribing him to
take me to my destination. But he had his schedule, which neither storms
nor the name of van Tuiver could alter. Besides, he pointed out, he
could not land me at their place, as his vessel drew too much water to
get anywhere near; and if he landed me elsewhere, I should be no better
off, “If your friends are expecting you, they’ll come here,” he said,
“and their launch can travel when nothing else can.”

To pass the time I went to inspect the viaduct of the railway-to-be. The
first stretch was completed, a long series of concrete arches, running
out, apparently, into the open sea. It was one of the engineering
wonders of the world, but I fear I did not appreciate it. Towards
mid-afternoon I made out a speck of a boat over the water, and my
friend, the station-agent, remarked, “There’s your launch.”

I expressed my amazement that they should have ventured out in such
weather. I had had in mind the kind of tiny open craft that one hears
making day and night hideous at summer-resorts; but when the “Merman”
 drew near, I realized afresh what it was to be the guest of a
multi-millionaire. She was about fifty feet long, a vision of polished
brass and shining, new-varnished cedar. She rammed her shoulder into the
waves and flung them contemptuously to one side; her cabin was tight,
dry as the saloon of a liner.

Three men emerged on deck to assist in the difficult process of making a
landing. One of them sprang to the dock, and confronting me, inquired
if I was Mrs. Abbott. He explained that they had set out to meet me the
previous afternoon, but had had to take refuge behind one of the keys.

“How is Mrs. van Tuiver?” I asked, quickly.

“She is well.”

“I don’t suppose--the baby--

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/5807