Part 46 (1/2)
Cheever has promised him a full partners.h.i.+p the day he marries, and it wouldn't be so bad. Bobby is a good sport, and we'd live the out-door life at Burlingame instead of the in--sports ... tournaments ... polo ... cut out dissipation. We've both really had enough of it. But I believe business would be more interesting. After all that's what you marry for unless you want children--which I don't--to be interested.
What'll we be? Decorators?”
”I suppose so. But all this has only just come to a head, although I know now that it has been slowly gathering force in my deepest deeps.
If we do I'll take Alice on. She's sick of the game too and she has simply ripping ideas.”
”Perfect. 'Dwight, Thorn--', no, 'Thornd.y.k.e, Lawton and Dwight.' I'm too excited--convicts must feel like that when they tunnel a hole and get out. It will be our real, our first adventure.”
CHAPTER XX
I
But two weeks later Aileen told Alexina that although she had cannily waited for what she believed to be the propitious moment and told her father about the great scheme, she had never seen him so upset. She stormed, argued, wept, but he was adamant. He would give her neither a cent nor his permission. When she accused him of inconsistency (he had supported woman's suffrage) he replied that women forced to work needed the franchise and no fair-minded man would withhold it; and if for no other reason he would forbid his daughter to go out and compete with women who must work whether they wanted to or not.
But that was only one point.
What did progress mean if women deliberately dropped from a higher plane to a lower? What had their ancestors worked for, possibly died for? It was their manifest duty to their cla.s.s, to their family, to go up not down.
Moreover, when women had men to support them and insisted upon forcing their way into the business world, they made men ridiculous and undermined society. It was dangerous, d.a.m.ned dangerous. If he had his way not a woman in any cla.s.s, outside of nursing and domestic service, should work. He'd tax every male in the land, according to his income or wage, to say nothing of the rich women, and keep every last one of the unportioned in idleness rather than risk the downfall of male supremacy in the world.
He hated every form of publicity for the women of his cla.s.s. If he had his way their names, much less photographs, should never appear in the public press. Society should be sacrosanct. Its traditions should be handed on, not lowered.... Charity boards and settlement work, perhaps, but no further exposure to the vulgar gaze ... he was glad she had never gone in for the last.
Civilization would be meaningless without that small cla.s.s at the top that proved what Earth could accomplish in the way of breeding, the refinements of life, the beauty of distinction, in making an art of leisure, of pleasure--quite as much an art as writing books or painting pictures.
If the men in the younger nations had to work, at least they were able to prove to the older that the exquisite creatures they bred and protected were second to none on this planet, at least.
If women had genius that was another question. Let them give it to the world, by all means. That was their personal gift to civilization....
He was not bigoted like some men, even young men, who thought it a disgrace for a lady publicly to transfer herself to the artistic plane and compete with men for laurels.... But when it came to stripping off the delicate badges that only the higher civilization could confer, and struggling tooth and nail with the mob for no reason whatever--it was disloyal, ungrateful and monstrous.
He was no sn.o.b. He thought himself better than no man. (Different, yes.) But in regard to women, the women of his cla.s.s, the cla.s.s of his father before him, and of his father's father, he had his ideals, his convictions.
That was all.
II
”In short, he's modern but not too modern. My twentieth-century arguments were brushed aside as mere fads. And yet there's probably not an important case tried in any court in either hemisphere that he doesn't read--learn something from if he can. He takes in the leading newspapers and reviews of America and Europe and even reads the best modern novels as carefully as he ever read Thackeray and d.i.c.kens--says they are the real social chronicles. He's a profound student of history, and the history of the present interests him just as much--he has those Balkans under a microscope; and collects all the data on every important strike here and elsewhere. And yet where women are concerned he is a fossil. An American fossil--worst sort. Some of the young ones are just as bad ... I'll have to give in. I can't break his heart. I suppose I'll marry Bobby.”
III