"And what do you think of it by this time?"
Marian asked the question in the pause after a twenty minutes" canter over a straightaway stretch through the pines.
"Of what?" Howard inquired. "I mean of what phase of it. Of you?"
"Well,--yes, of me--after a week."
"As I expected, only more so--more than I could have imagined. And you, what do you think?"
"It"s very different from what I expected. It seemed to me beforehand that you, even you, would "get on my nerves" just a little at times. I didn"t expect you to appreciate--to feel my moods and to avoid doing--or is it that you simply cannot do--anything jarring. You have amazing instincts or else--" Marian looked at him and smiled mischievously, "or else you have been well educated. Oh, I don"t mind--not in the least.
No matter what the cause, I"m glad--glad--glad that you have been taught how to treat a woman."
"I see you are determined to destroy me," Howard was in jest, yet in earnest. "I am not used to being flattered. I have never had but one critic, and I have trained him to be severe and uncharitable. Now if you set me up on a high altar and wave the censers and cry "glory, glory, glory," I"ll lose my head. You have a terrible responsibility. I trust you and I believe everything you say."
"I"ll begin my duties as critic as soon as we go back to--to earth. But at present I"m going to be selfish. You see it makes me happier to blind myself to your faults."
They rode in silence for a few moments and then she said:
"I wish I had your feeling about--about democracy. I see your point of view but I can"t take it. I know that you are right but I"m afraid my education is too strong for me. I don"t believe in the people as you do.
It"s beautiful when you say it. I like to hear you. And I would not wish you to feel as I do. I"d hate it if you did. It would be stooping, grovelling for you to make distinctions among people. But----"
"Oh, but I do make distinctions among people--so much so that I have never had a friend in my life until you came. I have been on intimate terms with many, but no one except you has been on intimate terms with me. Oh, yes, I"m one of the most exclusive persons in the world."
"That sounds like autocracy, doesn"t it?" laughed Marian. "But you know I don"t mean that. You think all the others are just as good as you are, only in different ways, whereas I feel that they"re not. You don"t mind vulgarity and underbreeding because you are perfectly indifferent to people so long as they don"t try to jump the fence about your own little private enclosure."
"Oh, I believe in letting other people alone, and I insist upon being let alone myself. You see you make the whole world revolve about social distinctions. The fact is, isn"t it, that social distinctions are mere trifles--"
"You oughtn"t to waste time arguing with a prejudice. I admit that what I believe and feel is unreasonable. But I can"t change an instinct.
To me some people are better than others and are ent.i.tled to more, and ought to be looked up to and respected."
Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His pa.s.sion for high principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of sn.o.bbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy with his career.
"She is too intelligent, too high-minded," he often rea.s.sured himself, "to cling to this stupidity of cla.s.s-feeling. She has heard nothing but cla.s.s-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people, with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as they are."
So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity: "Poor fallen queen--to marry beneath her. How she must have fought against the idea of such a plebeian partner."
"Plebeian--you?" Marian looked at him proudly. "Why, one has only to see you to know."
"Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain, ordinary, common, unt.i.tled Americans."
"Why, so were mine," she laughed.
"Don"t! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known that."
"I _am_ absurd, am I not?" Marian said gaily. "But let me have my craze for well-mannered people and I"ll leave you your craze for the--the ma.s.ses."
They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation; for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this matter--his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a sociological unit.
He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening, Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct suggested nothing to her, bored her.
"Just read that," he would say, pointing to an item. She would read it and wonder what he meant.
"It seems to me," she would think, "that it wouldn"t in the least matter if that had not been printed." Then she would ask evasively but with an a.s.sumption of interest, "What are you going to do about it?"
And he would explain the meaning between the lines; the hinted facts that ought to be brought out; the possibilities of getting a piece of news that would attract wide attention. And she would see it, sometimes clearly, usually vaguely; and she would admire him, but resume her unconquerable indifference to news.
She was soon looking at the paper only to read what he wrote; and she often thought how much more interesting he was as a talker than as a writer. "I"ll start right when we get to town," she was constantly promising herself. "It must, must, must be _our_ work."
Howard was, as she had told him, acutely sensitive to her moods. He did not formulate it to himself but simply obeyed an instinct which defined for him the limits of her interest. Before they had been at Lakewood a month, he was working alone without any expectation of sympathy or interest from her and without the slightest sense of loss in not getting it. Why should he miss that which he had never had, had never counted upon getting? He had always been mentally alone, most alone in the plans and actions bearing directly upon his own career. He was perfectly content to have her as the companion of his leisure.
Possibly, if he had been insistent, or if they had been in real sympathy instead of in only surface sympathy in most respects, she might have become interested in his work, might have impelled him to right development. But her distaste and inertia and his habit of debating and deciding questions as to the paper in his own mind, the fear of boring her, the dread of intruding upon her rights to her own individual tastes and feelings, restrained him without his having a sense of restraint.
When, after two months, they went up to town to stay, their course of life was settled, though Marian was protesting that it was not and Howard was unconscious of there having been any settlement, or anything to settle.
XXI.
WAVERING.
Their home was an apartment at Twenty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue--just large enough for two with its eleven rooms, all bearing the stamp of Marian"s individuality. She had a keen sense of the beautiful and she had given her thought and most of her time between the early autumn and the wedding to making an attractive home. He had not seen her work until they came together in the late afternoon of a day in the last week of February.
"You--everywhere you," he said, as they inspected room after room. "I don"t see how I could add anything to that. It is beautiful--the things you have brought together, I mean, the furniture, curtains, carpets, pictures, all beautiful in themselves, but--"
He was looking at her in that way which made her feel his great love for her even more deeply than when he put his arms about her and kissed her. "It reminds me of what I so often think about you. Nature gave you beauty but you make it wonderful because _you_ shine through it, give it the force, the expression of your individuality. Other women have noses, eyes, chins, mouths as beautiful as yours. But only you produce such effects with the materials. I don"t express it very well but--you understand?"
"Yes, I understand." She was leaning against him, her head resting upon his shoulder. "And you like your home?"
"We shall be happy here. I feel it in the air. This is a temple of the three great G.o.ds--Freedom, Love and Happiness. And--we"ll keep the fires on the altars blazing, won"t we?"
His hours were most irregular. Sometimes he was off to work early in the morning. Again he would not rise until noon. Sometimes he did not go to the office after dinner, and again he came hurriedly to dinner, not having the time to dress, and left immediately afterward to be gone until two, three or even four in the morning. At first Marian tried to follow his irregularities; but she was soon compelled to give up. As he most often breakfasted about ten o"clock, she arranged to breakfast regularly at that hour. If he was not yet up, she waited about the house until she had seen him, listened while he talked of those "everlasting newspapers," praised his work a great deal, criticised it little and that gently. She made few and feeble struggles to interest herself in newspapers as newspapers. But he did not encourage her; other interests, domestic and social, clamoured for her time; and the idea of being directly useful to him in his work faded from her mind.
If she had loved him more sympathetically, if she had not been so super-sensitive to his pa.s.sion for complete freedom, she would have resented what in another kind of man would have seemed frank neglect of her. But she thought she understood him and was deceived by his self-deceiving conviction that his work was her service and that the highest proof of his devotion to her was devotion to "our" career. Thus there was no bitterness or reproach of him, rarely much intensity, in her regret that they were together so little.
"Good morning, stranger!" she said, as he came into the dining room one day in early June.
He kissed her hand and then the "topknot" as he called the point into which her hair was gathered at the crown of her head. "It has been four days since I saw you," he said. And he sat opposite her looking at her with an expression of sadness which she had not seen since the first days of their acquaintance.
"I have missed you--you know," she was trying to look cheerful, "but I understand--"
"Yes," he interrupted. "You understand what I intend, understand that I mean my life to be for _us_. But sometimes--this morning--I think I am mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this--" he threw his hand contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, "this trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life, my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these." And he pushed the bundle of papers off the table.
"Something has depressed you." She was leaning her elbow upon the table and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. "I wouldn"t have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should I," she laughed, "or I try to think I shouldn"t."
"Let us go abroad for two months," he said. "I am tired, so tired. I am so weary of all these others, men and things."
"Can you spare the time?"