I was able to bear their reproaches with the superior good nature that springs from success,to point out why the American tradition to which they so fatuously clung was a things of the past.The habit of taking dinner with them at least once a week had continued,and their arguments rather amused me.If they chose to dwell in a backwater out of touch with the current of great affairs,this was a matter to be deplored,but I did not feel strongly enough to resent it.So long as I remained a bachelor the relationship had not troubled me,but now that I was married I began to consider with some alarm its power to affect my welfare.
It had remained for Nancy to inform me that I had married a woman with a mind of her own.I had flattered myself that I should be able to control Maude,to govern her predilections,and now at the very beginning of our married life she was showing a disquieting tendency to choose for herself.To be sure,she had found my intimacy with the Peterses and Blackwoods already formed;but it was an intimacy from which I was growing away.I should not have quarrelled with her if she had not discriminated:Nancy made overtures,and Maude drew back;Susan presented herself,and with annoying perversity and in an extraordinarily brief time Maude had become her intimate.It seemed to me that she was always at Susan's,lunching or playing with the children,who grew devoted to her;or with Susan,choosing carpets and clothes;while more and more frequently we dined with the Peterses and the Blackwoods,or they with us.With Perry's wife Maude was scarcely less intimate than with Susan.
This was the more surprising to me since Lucia Blackwood was a dyed-in-the-wool "intellectual,"a graduate of Radcliffe,the daughter of a Harvard professor.Perry had fallen in love with her during her visit to Susan.Lucia was,perhaps,the most influential of the group;she scorned the world,she held strong views on the higher education of women;she had long discarded orthodoxy for what may be called a Cambridge stoicism of simple living and high thinking;while Maude was a strict Presbyterian,and not in the least given to theories.When,some months after our homecoming,I ventured to warn her gently of the dangers of confining one's self to a coterie--especially one of such narrow views--her answer was rather bewildering.
"But isn't Tom your best friend?"she asked.
I admitted that he was.
"And you always went there such a lot before we were married."This,too,was undeniable."At the same time,"I replied,"I have other friends.I'm fond of the Blackwoods and the Peterses,I'm not advocating seeing less of them,but their point of view,if taken without any antidote,is rather narrowing.We ought to see all kinds,"I suggested,with a fine restraint.
"You mean--more worldly people,"she said with her disconcerting directness.
"Not necessarily worldly,"I struggled on."People who know more of the world--yes,who understand it better."Maude sighed.
"I do try,Hugh,--I return their calls,--I do try to be nice to them.
But somehow I don't seem to get along with them easily--I'm not myself,they make me shy.It's because I'm provincial.""Nonsense!"I protested,"you're not a bit provincial."And it was true;her dignity and self-possession redeemed her.
Nancy was not once mentioned.But I think she was in both our minds....
Since my marriage,too,I had begun to resent a little the attitude of Tom and Susan and the Blackwoods of humorous yet affectionate tolerance toward my professional activities and financial creed,though Maude showed no disposition to take this seriously.I did suspect,however,that they were more and more determined to rescue Maude from what they would have termed a frivolous career;and on one of these occasions--so exasperating in married life when a slight cause for pique tempts husband or wife to try to ask myself whether this affair were only a squall,something to be looked for once in a while on the seas of matrimony,and weathered:or whether Maude had not,after all,been right when she declared that I had made a mistake,and that we were not fitted for one another?In this gloomy view endless years of incompatibility stretched ahead;and for the first time I began to rehearse with a certain cold detachment the chain of apparently accidental events which had led up to my marriage:to consider the gradual blindness that had come over my faculties;and finally to wonder whether judgment ever entered into sexual selection.Would Maude have relapsed into this senseless fit if she had realized how fortunate she was?For I was prepared to give her what thousands of women longed for,position and influence.My resentment rose again against Perry and Tom,and I began to attribute their lack of appreciation of my achievements to jealousy.They had not my ability;this was the long and short of it....I pondered also,regretfully,on my bachelor days.And for the first time,I,who had worked so hard to achieve freedom,felt the pressure of the yoke I had fitted over my own shoulders.I had voluntarily,though unwittingly,returned to slavery.This was what had happened.And what was to be done about it?I would not consider divorce.
