Amber Reeves Blanco White

“ If Mary had been another business man James would have cursed her and put her out of his mind until the moment had come for decisive action. But she was not a business man, she was his wife; his whole moral universe was sensitive to her behaviour.
He could not believe in the depth and reality of Mary's feelings. He saw her merely determined to get her own way, and moved by a woman's natural love of scenes. To him the effort she had made, when she gave up her scheme for increasing the waitresses' wages, had seemed perfectly natural. ”

“ Mary, if she had been alone, could have hidden her own face in her hands for self-contempt. She was the leader in this adventure, she was the mother, she the woman of age and experience, the woman who had taken credit for keen perceptions and ready sympathy. And here she had sat, hard, cruel, disgusted, shutting out kindness and pity from her heart while a girl, her paid secretary, had taken her place. She had despised these poor creatures because their ugliness and their sin were spread before her, but what of the sin, the deceit and pride she had been hiding in her own heart? ”

“ But Mary could not very well assert herself to make Rosemary unhappy by postponing the marriage while she herself was guarding her own happiness by giving way in so cowardly a fashion to James. She told herself, therefore, that her feelings were the feelings natural to every woman who sees her youngest daughter leaving her; they were selfish feelings, and she, like every other mother, must put them aside. If they had any value it was their private value, as emotion, for her—she would not have wished at such a moment to feel nothing or only to feel what was pleasurable. ”

“ Mary let him go without showing him the indignation that she felt. She was forty-six, at an age when a man is considered in the prime of his life, and they wanted to treat her as though she were delicate like a child or a bent old woman. It was quite natural, a great many wealthy women let themselves be treated like that. She herself had been far too apt to talk of herself as old, to behave as though her faculties were decaying. As she lay in bed with a bell under her hand and her maid in the next room attentive to her slightest signal, Mary realised that her attitude to life had changed. ”

“ It is one's duty to be fair. But the tired gesture with which so much anger came to an end, the droop of Miss Percival's defiant head, made Mary forget her protest in compassion. "Poor child," she said, "poor child!" and crossing the room she put her arm round the secretary's shoulders.
The young woman did not move for a moment, then she yielded, and Mary found herself soothing a passion of tears. She was surprised, but after a minute she was not puzzled. If Miss Percival's emotional nature had been so stirred by holding Giles it was because, in the past, she had loved a baby. ”

“ If Mary had written a book its hero would have been not James, but the glorified creature that lay hidden in James. What a hero he would make! "Of course," she said to Laura, "I suppose it is difficult for women to know what men are like when they are together."
Laura was busy accusing herself of having grumbled about Harry, and she said nothing.
"It's very nice that men are so talkative," Mary went on, to break the silence. "Their lives are exciting, and, I suppose, as they're not forced back upon subtleties, they find ours dull." ”

“ She was gone, and she had left Mary nothing but another picture of suffering and evil. Mary did not know what Miss Percival's story had been, but to change her as it had clearly changed her, it must, Mary felt, have been abominable. There was something wrong about this question of men and women, something twisted and wrong underneath the comforting appearance of everyday social life. She had always known that there are wicked men and terribly wicked women, but she had always thought of them as outside, exceptional, far away. Now, everywhere she looked, she saw ugliness and suffering and sin. ”

“ For a moment she did not turn round to greet her daughter; when she did Rosemary was shocked by her white face. "How she minds!" she thought, and then she felt a sudden shyness and embarrassment at the idea that her mother should mind. They kissed one another then and Rosemary disengaged herself and stroked the satin of her mother's sleeve.
"I love you in fine clothes, mother," she said, "you are one of the people who can wear them. You ought to have big flounced skirts and a stiff stomacher embroidered with pearls."
Mary did not answer. ”

“ It had touched her imagination, it had filled her with respect for men. This was what men could do when they bent their brains to women's work. Mary remembered her own early struggles with cook-generals on the battle-ground of tea-trays, the drillings, the chivyings, the exhortations, her triumph on days when the silver was clean and the cloth smooth and the bread and butter nicely cut. The making of the tea itself had been her own charge, that pouring of boiling water onto measured leaves was too delicate, too sacred, for the hired and casual fingers of a servant. ”

“ Laura had said that once, even Laura hadn't lost what she'd lost without regretting it. It wasn't that she didn't love Tony, she loved him so much that she was happy to be giving up everything for him, but she regretted herself, the self that was soon to be changed into a wife and a mother. She liked the world, she liked adventures; a wife is shut away from adventure, a mother shuts the world away from her children. She consoled herself by thinking that every woman who marries young has had these thoughts. ”

“ Mary might make a point of seeing a good deal of Laura, who, anyway, had chosen her own husband for herself and must make what she could of him. James had never, in his life, seen a young woman more in love. He preferred the old style, on the whole, Mary's style. He had thought that perhaps Laura was giving herself away. "If a woman lies down at a man's feet," he finished, "she's likely to get trodden on when he's thinking of something else. Laura can't expect Moorhouse to be ill too, whenever she can't play golf. I've been afraid sometimes that she's given to making her own unhappiness!" ”

“ Miss Percival shook her head. "I don't know how it came," she said, "though I could find a hundred reasons—I can see a fresh reason in every man I meet! When I look at their faces in the street, in a 'bus, anywhere, their mean stupid faces—men who get their ideals out of the halfpenny papers, men who think about money on an office stool all day, and then go home and treat some woman as an inferior—I wonder that any woman has ever loved a man. They're ugly, they're greedy, they're coarse-minded!" ”

“ They were happy—she wondered how much their happiness had cost of the freedom she had so painfully given them.
She rose from the chair where she had been sitting to walk up and down the room. She was stung again by the knowledge that Rosemary was gone, that she looked to other loves, to a new life, to another loyalty. She tried in vain to change her thoughts by centring them on her own foolishness. "I've been dreadful," she told herself, "ugly, grasping, blind! She has a right to choose her happiness." ”

“ That James as a husband might remain unblemished in goodness and wisdom she had resolved to know nothing of James the public employer.
James for his part had not so much accepted her sacrifice as not noticed it, and now it was wasted. She knew now what her husband's goodness and wisdom were. He was neither honest, nor loyal, nor pure—he was a loose man, stained, unscrupulous; a man—she told herself this because it made her suffer—a man no better than the men who preyed on Florrie Wilson. ”

“ Mary shivered. She did not disbelieve James, but what he said seemed to her incredible. How was it possible to do what James had done and not care? It did not occur to her to feel sorry for James, for his discomfort and his humiliation, but she found herself for a moment pitying the woman who dwelt in so monstrous a world. To be a woman of whom a man could say, "I never dreamed of caring!" ”

“ She had felt the poverty and insecurity of that when she had given Laura and Rosemary a better education than most girls of their class. She had trained their intellects to give them a second, a firmer hold on life. And they, having got it, were of opinion, that they should have more. They wanted, through politics, to regain their hold on a world that the modern craving for size and complexity had taken away from women. She had never troubled to follow them there. She had said that she wanted a vote because James believed that she ought to have one, and Trent believed she ought not. ”

“ She took the knitting on to her lap, but forgot to go on with it. She was glad she had done what she had, but she had not, all the same, left off being afraid. It did make a difference being married—it must. It had made, people said, "a woman" of Laura. She didn't want to be a woman, she thought. Most women were cowardly creatures, lazy, ridden by feeling, immersed in their own little pools of happiness or discontent. She liked girls, she liked being a girl, ignorant and adventurous, with nothing in her life about which she could not speak and be honest. ”

“ Heyham if I had made you take me into your confidence. But I couldn't bear that you should manipulate him and be tactful with him. I hated him, I wanted you to fight him, and hurt him, and get the better of him. And of course he has won, and the person who has been hurt is you."
Mary stared at her painfully, but she could only see the back of Miss Percival's head. "Why do you hate my husband?" she asked.
Miss Percival's reply came slowly. "I don't hate him particularly. I hate all men when they're powerful and using their power to be cruel to women. ”

“ She had never considered it as a great influence on James's mind, teaching him to look away from the primitive things of life to which women sit close, teaching him to think first of methods, of institutions, of organisations, the moulds and forms into which human emotion and energy are poured.
That was what Miss Percival must have meant when she talked of a man's world. It was a world that cared more for things, for arrangements, than for people. Women didn't come so easily to care for things. ”

“ Industry was represented in her mind by the shops where she bought her clothes and ordered her provisions, by factories, heard of but never seen, by a bank with large stone pillars that sent her cheque-books, by so much money from her husband every week. When she tried to escape from it all, at least to vary it, she travelled on padded seats of first-class carriages, she slept in hotels where she was carried to her room in a lift, she stared at views whose last details of excellence had been dissected in guide books. ”

“ He took her hand to lead her from the room, but Mary, moved by a sudden impulse, threw her arms round his neck. "James—my dear—I do love you so!" she told him.
James, surprised and pleased, stroked back her soft hair very tenderly. "Little thing," he said, "we've not done badly, have we, to love one another like this for so many years? If the young people are as happy as we are they won't have much to complain of." He would have liked to say more, but he never felt in the mood for making love so soon after lunch.
Mary, quite satisfied, let him take her upstairs and put her on the sofa. ”

“ James, as he walked, could only abuse himself. Fool!—he'd been worse than a fool! He could not imagine now what had kept him from speaking, what had made him drag out all this. It was only a chance that he had remembered it—red hair. Now he would have to explain, to tell her about it, or God knows what infamy she would be imagining! But what good would his explanation be—how could he make her understand? When a woman knows as little of evil as Mary.... ”

“ Miss Percival, who was seated at her desk, had not answered at once. Instead she had drawn a beautiful lady with curling hair on her pad of blotting-paper. Then, in a startled tone, as if she had just awaked, she said, "Very well, Mrs. Heyham, just as you wish of course. Have you decided yet where the home is to be?"
Mary had not decided, but she thought it must be somewhere bracing with a pier and a band, and plenty of nigger minstrels. "It won't do to choose a place where they would feel lonely," she conceded. ”

“ There was nothing monstrous about it, she told herself, nothing more strange, nothing more unbelievable, than that she had been a fool. James cared for the thing he had created, for his achievement, his title to respect in the eyes of the world. Any man can marry a wife, any man can beget children, but James had built up this business with the strength of his manhood, and now the business made James a powerful man. ”

“ She was a good woman, with a good woman's point of view. The world does not like to see a woman uphold immorality, or starve her servants in order to make money. Nevertheless, when James did these things, she was bound, according to the world's judgment, to forgive him, or give way to him, as the case might be. Men praised her stricter standard as long as she applied it to nobody but herself.
For a moment of one darkening winter's afternoon it seemed to Mary that men stood before her, stripped of all but their wickedness, as they might have stood before Miss Percival. ”

“ Anthony's mother was sitting on a sofa, calm, superior, but triumphant. Her eye travelled slowly over the chattering crowd with an air of august approval. "See what a fuss these people make," she seemed to say, "how they dress up, rejoice, invite their friends, because their girl has succeeded in catching my son! See how they have decked out the fortunate creature herself so that she may seem beautiful and pleasing!" Mrs. Hastings was a tall lady with a dignified nose, and she bent over Mary when she had made room for her on the sofa. "How charming dear Rosemary looks!" ”