Book 1. Sylvia As Wife - Part 2

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_ BOOK I. SYLVIA AS WIFE - PART II

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? _

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