"What is it you wish to say?" she asked her husband in a cold, defensive tone that had grown almost habitual.
Though pale she was looking very pretty in a new dress that she had worn at a woman"s luncheon, where she had spent the first part of the afternoon.
She had been much admired at the luncheon, had taken the lead in the talk about a new novel which was making a ten days" sensation. Her mind was still occupied partly with what she had said about the book. These discussions with Rob on household matters, at increasingly frequent periods, always froze her. "He makes me show my worst side," she said to herself. At the children"s tea, moreover, an attack of indigestion had developed. Bessie was fond of rich food, and in her nervous condition, which was almost chronic, it did not agree with her, and made her irritable.
"I have been going over our affairs," Falkner began in measured tones. That was the usual formula! Bessie thought he understood women very badly. She wondered if he ever did anything else those evenings he spent at home except "go over their affairs." She wished he would devote himself to some more profitable occupation.
"Well?"
Falkner looked tired and listless. The summer was always his hardest time, and this summer the road had been pushing its terminal work with actual ferocity. He wore gla.s.ses now, and was perceptibly bald. He was also slouchy about dress; Bessie could rarely induce him to put on evening clothes when they dined alone.
"Well?" she asked again. It was not polite of him to sit staring there as if his mind were a thousand miles away. A husband should show some good manners to a woman, even if she was his wife!
Their chairs were not far apart, but the tones of their voices indicated an immeasurable gulf that had been deepening for years. Falkner cleared his voice.
"As I have told you so often, Bessie, we are running behind all the time.
It has got to a point where it must stop."
"What do you suggest?"
"You say that three servants are necessary?"
"You can see for yourself that they are busy all the time. There"s work for four persons in this house, and there ought to be a governess beside. I don"t at all like the influence of that school on Mildred--"
"Ought!" he exclaimed.
"If people live in a certain kind of house, in a certain neighborhood, they must live up to it,--that is all. If you wish to live as the Johnstons live, why that is another matter altogether."
Her logic was imperturbable. There was an unexpressed axiom: "If you want a dowd for your wife who can"t dress or talk and whom n.o.body cares to know,--why you should have married some one else." Bessie awaited his reply in una.s.sailable attractiveness.
"Very well," Falkner said slowly. "That being so, I have made up my mind what to do."
Mildred entered the room at this moment, looking for a book. She was eight, and one swift glance at her parents" faces was enough to show her quick intelligence that they were "discussing."
"What is it, Mildred?" Bessie asked in the cooing voice she always had for children.
"I want my _Jungle Book_," the little girl replied, taking a book from the table.
"Run along, girlie," Bessie said; and Mildred, having decided that it was not an opportune moment to make affectionate good-nights, went upstairs.
"Well, what is it?" Bessie demanded in the other tone.
"I have a purchaser for the house, at fair terms."
"Please remember that it is _my_ house."
"Wait! Whatever remains after paying off the mortgage and our debts, not more than six thousand dollars, I suppose, will be placed to your credit in the trust company."
"Why should I pay all our debts?"
Her husband looked at her, and she continued hastily:--
"What do you mean to do then? We can"t live on the street."
"We can hire a smaller house somewhere else, or live in a flat."
Bessie waved her hand in despair; they had been over this so many times and she had proved so conclusively the impossibility of their squeezing into a flat. Men never stay convinced!
"Or board."
"Never!" she said firmly.
"You will have to choose."
This was the leading topic of their discussion, and enough has been said to reveal the lines along which it developed. There was much of a discursive nature, naturally, introduced by Bessie, who sought thereby to fog the issue and effect a compromise. She had found that was a good way to deal with a husband. But to-night Falkner kept steadily at his object.
"No, no, no!" he iterated in weary cadence. "It"s no use to keep on expecting; five thousand is all they will pay me, and it is all I am really worth to them. And after this terminal work is finished, they may have nothing to offer me.... We must make a clean sweep to start afresh, right, on the proper basis." After a moment, he added by way of appeal, "And I think that will be the best for us, also."
"You expect me to do all the work?"
"Expect!" Falkner leaned his head wearily against the chair-back. Words seemed useless at this point. Bessie continued rather pitilessly:--
"Don"t you want a home? Don"t you want your children brought up decently with friends about them?"
"G.o.d knows I want a home!" the husband murmured.
"I think I have made a very good one,--other people think so."
"That"s the trouble--too good for me!"
"I should think it would be an incentive for a man--"
"G.o.d!" Falkner thundered; "that you should say that!"
It had been in her heart a long time, but she had never dared to express it before,--the feeling that other men, no abler than Rob, contrived to give their wives, no more seductive than she, so much more than she had had.
"Other men find the means--"
She was thinking of John Lane, of Purrington,--a lively young broker of their acquaintance,--of Dr. Larned,--all men whose earning power had leaped ahead of Falkner"s. Bessie resented the economic dependence of married women on their husbands. She believed in the foreign _dot_ system. "My daughters shall never marry as I did," she would say frankly to her friends. "There can be no perfectly happy marriage unless the woman is independent of her husband in money matters to a certain extent." ... For she felt that she had a right to her ideals, so long as they were not bad, vicious; a right to her own life as distinct from her husband"s life, or the family life. "The old idea of the woman"s complete subordination has gone," she would say. "It is better for the men, too, that women are no longer mere possessions without wills of their own." It was such ideas as this that earned for Bessie among her acquaintances the reputation of being "intelligent" and "modern."
And Falkner, a vision of the mountains and the lonely cabin before his eyes, remarked with ironic calm:--
"And why should I earn more than I do, a.s.suming that I could sell myself at a higher figure?"
For the man, too, had his dumb idea,--the feeling that something precious inside him was being murdered by this pressing struggle to earn more, always more. As man he did not accept the simple theory that men were better off the harder they were pushed, that the male brute needed the spur of necessity to function, that all the man was good for was to be the competent forager. No! Within him there was a protest to the whole spirit of his times,--to the fierce compet.i.tive struggle. Something inside him proclaimed that he was not a mere maker of dollars, that life was more than food and lodging, even for those he loved most.
"What do I get out of it?" he added bitterly. "Perhaps I have done too much."
"Oh, if that is the way you feel,--if you don"t love me!" Bessie exclaimed with wounded pride. "Probably you are tired of me. When a man is sick of his wife, he finds his family a burden, naturally."