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"THE marriage law of the new dispensation will be: _Thou shalt not
be unfaithful--to thyself_."
A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the
haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband
descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a
congratulatory group of ladies. Westall's informal talks on "The New
Ethics" had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally
unemployed--those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have
their brain-food cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident.
Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," but hitherto their
advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He had been, in
his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not to let his
personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late, however,
he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the
gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the
relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a
few admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner
opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of
talks at the Van Sideren studio.
The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on
the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly
valuable as accessories to the _mise en scene_ which differentiated
his wife's "afternoons" from the blighting functions held in long
New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends
whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was
skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a
lay-figure and an easel create; and if at times she found the
illusion hard to maintain, and lost courage to the extent of almost
wishing that Herbert could paint, she promptly overcame such moments
of weakness by calling in some fresh talent, some extraneous
re-enforcement of the "artistic" impression. It was in quest of such
aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him, somewhat to his
wife's surprise, into a flattered participation in her fraud. It was
vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities
were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral
was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass
and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the conventional
color-scheme in art and conduct.
Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of
marriage; she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple.
In the early days of their union she had secretly resented his
disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had
been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice, with a failure to
live up to the convictions for which their marriage was supposed to
stand. That was in the first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike,
she wanted to turn her disobedience into a law. Now she felt
differently. She could hardly account for the change, yet being a
woman who never allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for, she
tried to do so by saying that she did not care to have the articles
of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In this connection, she
was beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar; certainly
there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust the defence
of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was precisely at this point that
Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had chosen to descend
from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking his convictions at
the street-corner!
It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed
upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment. In the first
place, the girl had no business to be there. It was "horrid"--Mrs.
Westall found herself slipping back into the old feminine
vocabulary--simply "horrid" to think of a young girl's being allowed
to listen to such talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and
sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain
radiant innocency which made her appear the victim, rather than the
accomplice, of her parents' vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot
helpless way that something ought to be done--that some one ought to
speak to the girl's mother. And just then Una glided up.
"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!" Una fixed her with large
limpid eyes. "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked with
seraphic gravity.
"All--what, my dear child?"
The girl shone on her. "About the higher life--the freer expansion
of the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self," she glibly
recited.
Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.
"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what
it's all about!"
Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. "Don't
_you_, then?" she murmured.
Mrs. Westall laughed. "Not always--or altogether! But I should like
some tea, please."
Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed.
As Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully.
It was not such a girlish face, after all--definite lines were
forming under the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be
six-and-twenty, and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock
of ideas she would have as her dower! If _they_ were to be a part of
the modern girl's trousseau--
Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some
one else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own
voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental
ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and
Una's tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about for
Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every
uncertainty. She met them now, but only, as she felt, in transit;
they included her parenthetically in a larger flight. She followed
the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which Una had
withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van Sideren
attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment later,
had overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl's side. She
bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the
depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him
to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of
appetite. Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.
On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his
wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. "Did I open their eyes
a bit? Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he asked gaily.
Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. "What _I_
wanted--?"
"Why, haven't you--all this time?" She caught the honest wonder of
his tone. "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not talking
more openly--before--You've made me feel, at times, that I was
sacrificing principles to expediency."
She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What
made you decide not to--any longer?"
She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. "Why--the wish to
please you!" he answered, almost too simply.
"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.
He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.
"Not go on--?"
"Call a hansom, please. I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden
rush of physical weariness.
Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally
hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once
or twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to another Saturday.
She felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence
of his concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in
him with a conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the
hansom, and her hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two
rose, and she let them fall. It was so delicious to cry over
imaginary troubles!
That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
subject of his talk. He combined a man's dislike of uncomfortable
questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she
knew that if he returned to the subject he must have some special
reason for doing so.
"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I
put the case badly?"
"No--you put it very well."
"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me
go on with it?"
She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention
deepening her sense of helplessness.
"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."
"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude.
She was not sure that she understood herself.
"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.
Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the
scene of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the
quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers
scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres,
recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings
of her first marriage had been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and
upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the
mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary marble" between the
folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It was a room with which she
had never been able to establish any closer relation than that
between a traveller and a railway station; and now, as she looked
about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest
affinities--the room for which she had left that other room--she was
startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. The
prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed
to typify a superficial refinement that had no relation to the
deeper significances of life.
Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.
"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.
He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the
hearth. The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face,
which had a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the
surface-refinement of its setting.
"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.
"In our ideas--?"
"The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
stand for." He paused a moment. "The ideas on which our marriage was
founded."
The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure
now that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it
was founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his
house to examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of
course--the house rests on it--but one lives abovestairs and not in
the cellar. It was she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on
reviewing the situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons
which justified her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her
adherence to the religion of personal independence; but she had long
ceased to feel the need of any such ideal standards, and had
accepted her marriage as frankly and naturally as though it had been
based on the primitive needs of the heart, and needed no special
sanction to explain or justify it.
"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.
"Then I repeat that I don't understand. It was a part of your theory
that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of
marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?"
She hesitated. "It depends on circumstances--on the public one is
addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them
don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are
attracted simply by its novelty."
"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and
learned the truth from each other."
"That was different."
"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that
such things never _are_ discussed before young girls; but that is
beside the point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl in my
audience to-day--"
"Except Una Van Sideren!"
He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.
"Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--"
"Why naturally?"
"The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with her
governess?"
"If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in my
house!"
Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile. "I
fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself."
"No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it's too late."
"And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
self-defence?"
"What do you call the surest means of self-defence?"
"Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to the
marriage tie."
She made an impatient gesture. "How should you like to marry that
kind of a girl?"
"Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects."
She took up the argument at another point.
"You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect young
girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--" She broke
off, wondering why she had spoken.
Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the beginning
of their discussion. "What you tell me is immensely flattering to my
oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its effect. I can assure
you that Miss Van Sideren doesn't have to have her thinking done for
her. She's quite capable of doing it herself."
"You seem very familiar with her mental processes!" flashed
unguardedly from his wife.
He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.
"I should like to be," he answered. "She interests me."
Read next: CHAPTER II
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