# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 37/Number 3/Give Matrimony a Chance

from the Red Book magazine, 1921 July, pp. 64–68, 98, 100. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
GIVE MATRIMONY A CHANCE
By ALICE DUER MILLER
Illustrated by ALONZO KIMBALL
A FLIRT, according to the dictionary, is “one who plays at courtship; one who coquets for pastime or adventure: said of either sex, but most commonly of a woman.”
Under this definition Sylvia Hazlett was not flirtatious. She did not play at courtship, or coquet for pastime or adventure. She did not in fact want her men friends to fall any more in love with her than was necessary in order to make them absolutely obedient to her wishes.
One of her most dominating wishes was to have—not an individual love-affair—but a warm, steady, comfortable background of masculine admiration. Another wish was to make her Thursday evening dinner-parties agreeable. For both of these wishes extra men were a necessity; and Mrs. Hazlett, though young, pretty, well-off, well-bred and well-born, did find herself obliged io take a good deal of trouble to maintain not the number, but the standard, of her extra men.
She liked celebrities, but celebrities have great disadvantages. They are rarely at leisure; they are often socially unavailable; and they are apt to be spoiled. Many people came to Sylvia's house for the good talk, and, more especially, the good food; but celebrities sometimes demanded even stronger inducements, and with these, it was true, Sylvia did sometimes find herself obliged to flirt a little.
“I only try to make them feel I take a special interest in their work,” she said to her husband. “That makes them think they'd like to come again.”
“It makes some of them think that you'd like to go to the Greek Islands with them.”
Mrs. Hazlett's face darkened a little. “He was very provincial,” she said.
The reference was to a distinguished archæologist, in whose work Sylvia had taken such a profound and personal interest that he had assumed she was ready to spend the rest of her life digging with him in an island in the Ionian Sea. The humiliating feature of his mistake was that the poor man was not perfectly sure he liked the prospect. It was for this reason that Lee Hazlett was so fond of recalling the incident.
“You mean,” he now asked, “it was provincial to want to take you to Delos—or wherever it is he goes?”
“It was provincial to think that every woman who asks you to tea wants to run away with you.”
“Oh, my dear, you asked that fellow to a great deal more than tea,” replied her husband.
“More in quantity, but not more in quality,” said Sylvia.
The archæologist had been one of her few failures. There had been one or two others who, of a less cautious nature, had wanted to flee, like Anna Karenina, to one of the smaller Italian towns; there had been a few jealous wives, and one or two men, who had mysteriously melted away, as if they scented danger: but with these few exceptions Sylvia's friendships with her extra men had turned out well, and her Thursday dinners were considered among the most entertaining entertainments of the initiated New Yorker.
It was on account of these parties of hers that she had accepted the position of chairman of the lecture committee of the Savoy Club. The duties of this position were arduous. They were, in the first place, to familiarize herself sufficiently with the moral, artistic and political movements of the day to enable her to select speakers who would be both famous and interesting, then to discover the whereabouts of these and persuade them that the interest of the Savoy Club in their specialties was so intense that they ought to devote an afternoon to talking to the Club. And then her last, and by far her most difficult duty, was to persuade the ladies of the Club to manifest this intense interest by coming to listen to the speakers. This was almost impossible, so crowded were the lives of these ladies of leisure. All this work Sylvia did, and did well, because she was thus able officially to cast her eye over the celebrities of the day, and decide which ones were available for private consumption.
The first instant she gazed on Raymond Crane she felt like stout Cortez on an occasion more historic but no whit less important—her surmise being that she had at last met the perfect celebrity. His book “Give Matrimony a Chance” was having an immense success—not only selling in the hundred thousands, but being debated by college clubs, being denounced from pulpits, being made into a play, and even, best of all, being ordered off the tentative purchase-table by elderly gentlemen in the Centurion Club. Success could hardly go farther.
Sylvia usually had the speaker of the day to luncheon first and fortified him with a little good food and flattery in preparation for what was to come, the two terrible moments she feared were ahead of him—first, when he saw that hardly anyone had come to his lecture, and second, when all those who had, began to leave before it was over. But Crane hadn't been able to come to luncheon, and so she saw him for the first time in the anteroom of the main hall of the Club, ten minutes before his lecture.
Sylvia sat between two admirers of her hostess. They spoke with reverent voices of her art .... her adorers .... and her husband's devotion.
Grace is attributed to women more often than to men. Crane was graceful, with a slim, vigorous, catlike sort of grace. His dark hair was prematurely streaked with gray—for he was barely thirty; and he had a pair of the wildest, keenest, most amusing blue eyes that were ever seen.
She began to introduce herself to him with a formal sentence that always served her in these circumstances, but he interrupted her
“Oh,” he cried, “how I wish I hadn't said I'd do this!”
“Nonsense!” Sylvia found herself replying, very much as if she had been speaking to one of her own little boys. “It's an excellent thing for you to do.”
“Ha, ha, easy for you to say!” he returned. “Lor', how I could hate you if you didn't seem to be so nice.” He looked at her as a puppy looks when it begins to play with an object of which it is very slightly afraid. He had the directness and sincerity of that friendly animal.
Sylvia stepped rather nervously to the long sapphire-blue curtains that kept some of the draught of the halls from the lecture-room, and looked through to gauge the audience. As she opened the curtains, a loud roar like a breaking wave came to her. The room was crowded. The following sentences reached her ears:
“Have you read his book?”
“No. Isn't it very improper?”
“Well, it's a defense of matrimony.”
“Oh, I thought it was in favor of free-love.”
“I may be mistaken—I haven't read it myself. I get so little time to read now that the children—”
“Free-love? Oh, I'm so tired of free-love. I thought this was the man who said the moon was inside the earth.”
“Now, dear, that's next week.”
“No, darling, next week is the eat-salt-and-live-forever man.”
“It's not eating salt he advocates.”
“Really, Lily, I wish you wouldn't catch me up—everything I say.”
“I never meant to come to hear this man, did I?”
“Well, it doesn't matter much. We shall have to leave as soon as he begins, if we mean to keep our bridge date.”
“Of course I mean to keep my bridge date—”
Sylvia turned with a glowing face to her speaker. “You have a perfectly remarkable audience,” she said.
Of course, she knew that the size of the audience indicated not so much interest as curiosity. The word had gone out that Crane's book was in some subtle way subversive of morals, and so of course a great many people wanted to hear the author speak.
Mrs. Hazlett stepped before him upon the platform, as a priest might lead a sleek young bull to the sacrifice, and began her speech of introduction. She knew it made no difference what she said in the first minute, for the audience was saying: “Oh, is that he? Not so bad, is he?” “Queer boots for the afternoon.” “Still, he doesn't wear a ring on the third finger.” “Oh, my dear, do you hate that too?”
“Ladies,” said Mrs. Hazlett, “I understand that your committee has been criticized for not being practical. I hear that many of you considered Professor McNulty's lecture last week about the earth's being probably hollow as lacking in everyday applicability. Well, this week we have an intensely practical speaker—one who may alter the daily life of everyone of you who is or is to be married. He will tell us how matrimony—the most friendless institution of the twentieth century—may be made perfectly endurable.
“I always ask our speakers for some biographical material, for I think the formal background of the really great is always interesting. Our speaker today was graduated from Union College and then took a degree from the Boston School of Technology, meaning to be a mining engineer; but just before his graduation he published a romantic story, 'Moonlight on the Willows,' which was so successful that he followed it by his first long novel, 'The General,' built, as one of the reviews said, as solid as a bridge and as airy as a tower.
“I will not run through the list of his powerful and widely read works. But not long ago, annoyed by the strictures of one of his radical friends on marriage, he sat down and in a single night wrote his now famous book: 'Give Matrimony a Chance.' Ladies, just one other personal fact, that I did not learn from the speaker, but which I think you ought to know. We have all noticed how well our maiden aunts understand bringing up our children, because they have none of their own. Well, it may be that Mr. Crane understands matrimony for the same reason, because”—she paused significantly—“there is no Mrs. Crane.”
CRANE'S audience was delighted to hear that he was not married—not because any of them had designs upon him, but because they at once felt that they were professionals in a field where he was only an amateur, and that softened their hearts. Crane came forward.
“I'm an advocate of the institution of marriage,” he said, “but not a bigoted one. I think marriage has some terrible features, but I'm of the opinion that its substitutes have worse ones. Now, what are the worst features of matrimony? They are not introduced into it by either the law or the church. The law concerns itself with financial obligations, and the care of the children. Most of us are content with those arrangements. The church imposes faithfulness. Well,—you mayn't agree with me in this,—but I think most people would bear even that, if it weren't for the impossible, unnatural, wearisome restrictions put upon their conduct in the married relation by social custom. I tell you we none of us give matrimony a fair chance.”
He then went on to take up in detail the customs he objected to. He said married people were no longer compelled by custom to share a room, but that many of them still had to share a bathroom. He described at some length the irritation and nervous strain of sharing a bathroom. His audience giggled, a little shocked.
The Savoy Club bore certain sorts of radical doctrine well—the sort that was still a long distance away. They had been intellectually convinced by a lecture on the state care of children, and by another on the abolition of inheritance. But when Crane said that married couples ought never to be asked out to dinner together, every lady in the audience who had a husband at once asked herself whether she would be more or less popular than he; and as more women than men seem to be available in the social field, she saw that his invitations would be more numerous than her own, and became on the instant a passionate opponent of Crane's theory. A great many people believe that any change in social custom that will make them less comfortable is inherently immoral. It was for this reason that “Give Matrimony a Chance” was thought subversive of morals.
To Sylvia, however, the doctrine that married couples should be asked separately to dinners was peculiarly agreeable: it promised a free and inexhaustible supply of extra men—the nicest ones, too, for of course it was always the nicest men who were married first—snapped up in their youth. But by this theory they were released again—at least for social purposes. And as for their wives—well, one could always ask them some other time. She pictured a large—and very remote—dinner composed entirely of the wives of celebrities—or a luncheon.
THE lecture ended—not in a burst of applause, but more flatteringly, in a burst of conversation. Everyone began at once to talk to her neighbor about what Crane had said. Sylvia was delighted. She had offered to drive him home, but he was so surrounded by lovely disputants that she couldn't dig him out, and so she went away and left him, having engaged him to come to dinner on the following Thursday.
She had intended not to boast about him, but to let him come to Lee as a wonderful surprise; but she couldn't keep him entirely to herself—she liked him too much. By Thursday her husband had heard all about him, and had of course read his book. He approved of the Crane doctrine from another standpoint. He was not fond of dining out, and thought it would be an excellent idea if Sylvia did it for both of them.
Before Thursday arrived, Sylvia had begun to be nervous about her treasure. Second meetings were sometimes so different; and parties often went to the head of even the most experienced celebrities. But as soon as Crane entered the room, all her confidence returned. Nothing could spoil his simple directness, nor mar the shy surety of his manner—not all the women in the world crowding about him with their, “Oh, Mr. Crane, I think it's the greatest work ever written,” and, “Will you come to my party on the eighteenth?” and, “Do explain what you meant when you said—”
She watched him through dinner. She had put him between the two cleverest, most selective and critical women of her acquaintance; and all through dinner she watched with pride their lively faces and heard their laughter. That was the effect he had, she thought: he vivified. That was the effect, perhaps, that freedom always had.
After all the others had gone, she made him stay so that Lee might have a word with him. Lee liked him as much as she did.
“That was a wonderful book of yours, Crane,” he said, “particularly wonderful, it seems to me, for a bachelor. I could almost have sworn that that was written by a married man.”
Crane's answer was a complete surprise.
“Oh, it was,” he said. “I'm not a bachelor.”
“You let me tell the ladies of the Savoy Club that you were,” said Sylvia.
He smiled. “You said, if you remember, that there was no Mrs. Crane. Well, there isn't. My wife always uses her own name. But I've been married for six years.”
PERHAPS if Sylvia had been alone with him, she would have been conventional enough to say that she was glad to hear it, and when would he bring Mrs. Crane to dinner. But the presence of her husband removed these inhibitions, and she broke out into a perfectly candid wail.
“Oh, dear,” she said, “I'm so sorry.”
Both men turned to her.
“Sylvia!” said her husband, protestingly.
“What do you care?” said Crane with his terrifying directness.
Sylvia was no coward and decided to see the thing through. “Of course I care,” she said. “I thought I'd made a friend, and now I find that I've only made half of one.”
Crane shook his head sadly. “Early-nineteenth century stuff.”
But Sylvia wouldn't be put off like that. “No,” she said, “suppose your wife met me and hated me—what would that do to our friendship?”
“Nothing—absolutely nothing. A lot of my friends don't like her. And good heavens, you ought to know the way I feel about some of her friends! I think boiling in oil is too good for them. But does that matter to her? Not a bit. They're just as much round the house as ever.”
“Well, then, suppose it's the other way—that I hate her?”
“Sylvia!” her husband protested again.
“Well, Lee, it's a possibility.”
“Certainly it is,” said Crane. “But it wouldn't make any difference. I mean I'd be sorry—the way I always am if two of my friends don't get on together. Nothing more. Look here, Mrs Hazlett, haven't you read my book? I say there just as clearly as I know how to say anything, that I think married people should be two independent personalities, and not one discontented mush.”
“Yes, but what does Mrs. Crane think about it?” replied Sylvia, who found she could be direct too.
“Ah,” answered Crane, “she thinks it a lot more than I do—and practises it as well. And do remember that she doesn't cal! herself Mrs. Crane. Nothing irritates her more. She's a portrait painter—Ida Leonard—you must know her work.”
Sylvia didn't know her work, though she thought vaguely she might have heard the name somewhere; but she was saved from a direct answer by Lee, who wanted to know at this point—as people always do want to know at this point—how Crane and his wife managed about their names when they went to hotels. This led inevitably to so many anecdotes that the conversation did not return to Crane's individual situation until just as he was leaving, when Sylvia said slowly and, to tell the truth, reluctantly:
“Well, I believe I should like to meet your wife. Will you bring her to dinner next week, if I write her a nice note and direct it to Miss Leonard?”
“No, I wont.”
“Which of us are you ashamed of?” said Sylvia.
“Of you,” replied Crane. “You're just asking her because you think it has to be done—after all I've said. As soon as you get it into your head that you are not under any obligation to invite her, just because you invite me, then I'll bring her. I will, at least, if she'll give me an evening. However, she's away now—painting all the capitalists in Pittsburgh—takes some time. Will you go to the theater with me on Monday? I have two seats for an opening?”
“Yes, of course,” said Sylvia, glad that the two seats made it clear that the “you” in his sentence was singular, or otherwise, she, with her absurd old-fashioned ideas, might have thought it included Lee. “Yes, of course; but why did you conceal the fact that you were married?”
“Well, I breakfast with him a lot,” she said. “He brings it in to me himself—on the cunningest little tray you ever saw.”
“I didn't conceal it.”
“You didn't mention it.”
“Well,” he said, “why didn't you mention the fact that you had two infant children? I had to drag it out of you.”
“I didn't think it would particularly interest you to know.”
“That was just the way it was with me..... Good night.” He was gone. His departures were always sudden.
FOR the next ten days Sylvia was very happy over her new, stimulating, dependable, amusing friend. He was one of those people who, if they like you, like everything about you. Crane liked her house and her husband and her children—not only liked them but discovered the most subtle and complicated reasons for believing them to be the most remarkable husband and children in the world.
Moderation was a part of Sylvia's philosophy of life—especially since the incident of the archæologist. She had no intention of asking Crane to dinner again too soon. But a succession of disasters to one of her parties—the death of a rich relation of two of her guests, and the fog-bound steamer of another, reduced her to such straits that when her party had shrunk from fourteen to five,—one of the five being an extra woman,—she decided that the only way to save the situation was to ask Crane
“He wont think it queer—with his theories,” she said to Lee.
She called him on the telephone at the hour at which he preferred to be called, and was answered by a feminine voice.
“Oh.” said the voice, with a tinge of surprise in it, “you want to speak to Mr. Crane?”
“Yes, please.” said Sylvia firmly. She had not been officially notified that Miss Leonard was back from Pittsburgh, but then she had not seen Crane for several days.
“Can't I take the message?”
By strict telephone ethics, she could; so Sylvia said: “This is Mrs. Hazlett. Will you ask Mr. Crane if he could dine with me tomorrow very informally at eight?”
“Hold the wire.”
Sylvia held the wire—held it a long time, went through all the agonies of thinking herself cut off, of imagining that she was holding a dead wire to her ear, of believing that Crane had made a mistake and had not understood that she was waiting for an answer. Just as she was about to hang up the receiver, she heard his voice:
“Sorry to have kept you waiting. Couldn't help it. Look here, Ida has some people coming here tomorrow night. I can't dine with you.”
“Isn't that rather conventional?”
“Oh, no, quite the other way. I received an invitation from Miss Leonard to dinner. I must say I didn't remember it, but I did. I can't break an engagement. But why don't you come here?”
Sylvia turned with a glowing face to her speaker. “You have a perfectly remarkable audience,” she said.
“I?” said Sylvia. She very nearly said “we,” but just caught herself in time. “But I have people dining with me, too.”
“Leave 'em.”
“Oh, I can't do that,”
“Isn't that rather conventional?”
It was rather conventional, particularly as her trouble was that she had an extra woman. If she dined out, it would leave a nice little party of four. She thought her guests over. They would not mind, and it wouldn't matter much if they did. She wanted very much to go to the Cranes'—if she might even in thought so refer to Miss Leonard and her husband. She wanted to adventure in this new social atmosphere to which she already felt so favorably inclined. She wanted to pick out all that was good in the new theory and combine it with what was left of the old. Her ideal was to take the brilliance and wit and attainments of these free spirits and, in the setting of luxury and ease that the old formal society had been trying to perfect for generations, to set them free to be brilliant.
All the time that she was thinking this, Crane was pleading with her to come and taunting her with her hesitation.
“If Miss Leonard really wants me,” she began, and then feeling that it was the phrase of a schoolgirl, she suddenly accepted.
Lee was as usual amused and coöperative. He bought a box at the theater for his guests and promised to do his best with them.
“Only,” he said, as he put her in the car the next evening, “don't absorb such free ideas that you never come back at all.”
She kept him from shutting the door. “You mustn't talk like that even in fun,” she said “It's largely for your sake I'm carrying on these investigations. The theory is to make marriage more romantic, not less so—to keep the gold and“I throw away the dross.”
“Where do you get that dross stuff?” said Lee.
As she drove across the Park, she began to be anxious for the first time as to the effect she might produce. She did not wish to disgrace her friend. “I hope they wont think I'm so stiff and old-fashioned and formal that I spoil their spontaneity,” she thought; “and yet, of course, it would be awful if I deliberately tried to be the other thing.” Her real charm was, although she did not know it, that it was only in rare moments like this that she had time to think about the effect she produced; in the world she was always eagerly thinking about other people.
The dinner was in Ida Leonard's studio—a great, dim room, with great spaces of air and darkness above the heads of the guests, who, when Sylvia entered, were all grouped about the fireplace. Ida Leonard was standing on the hearthrug—a solid, classic figure in heavy brilliant draperies. She was a Titian blonde with brown eyes. The faces of her seated guests half encircled her, like a row of footlights.
She broke off in the midst of a sentence, and said without taking a step forward, but her rich loud voice going before her:
“How do you do, Mrs. Hazlett! Nice of you to come on that informal invitation of Ray's. Ray, here's your guest. I've been hearing a lot about you, Mrs. Hazlett. Ray's letter said something about you and your kindness to him every day.”
SYLVIA'S entrance had not disturbed the semicircle, and a voice from it said: “Ida, does the devoted creature write to you every day?”
“Of course he does.”
“Yes,” said Crane, “and she writes to me about once a year.”
Miss Leonard threw back her head and laughed. “I'm afraid it is about like that,” she said. “I'm the worst correspondent in the world. When I want to express myself, I think of color and form, not of little black letters on a white page.” She made the gesture of writing, a wonderful flowing gesture. She turned back to Sylvia. “You must forgive Ray for not wanting to dine with you tonight. He likes an occasional evening at home with me—just as if he hadn't married an artist.”
“Nothing could be more natural,” said Sylvia, feeling that her phrase was rather conventional even for her old hidebound circle.
“Honestly, Ida,” said one of the footlights, with that tone of exasperation which often is the most flattering of all, “how often do you dine with poor old Ray?”
She tilted her square, bright-colored head. “Well, I breakfast with him a lot,” she said. “He brings it in to me himself—on the cunningest little tray you ever saw. I'm always very gay in the morning—not the way most artistic people are. Ray says it's the best meal of the day.”
“Of course he does, if it's the only one you eat with him.”
“The truth is,” said Miss Leonard more seriously, “I never should have married at all. I always told Ray so, but—” She raised her shoulders indicating how far he had been from being able to listen to reason. “I simply can't do the domestic.”
“You'd think to hear her talk that I wanted her to be domestic,” said Ray.
“No, fortunately, he always finds plenty of lovely ladies to do the domestic for me,” said Ida; and she smiled and opened her eyes wide and nodded at Sylvia, to show that her intention was friendly. She did not deceive Sylvia as to her intention; nor was Sylvia a woman without weapons. But she had come this evening to learn, not to teach. Besides, she was more interested in watching Crane than in thinking about herself.
Once he approached her, but as he drew forward his chair, his wife's voice rang out: “Don't sit down, Ray. Go and make the cocktails. Remember, this is partly your party.”
He dropped the chair and went and made the cocktails.
At dinner Sylvia sat between two juvenile admirers of her hostess. They spoke with reverent voices of her art, her technique, her beauty, her adorers, her virtue and her husband's devotion. Across the table Ray was talking earnestly to a fat white-haired woman, described to Sylvia by one of the youths as “dear old Marty, who really makes Ida's life possible.” And all through dinner Miss Leonard's voice would come ringing down the table: “Ray, you haven't let poor Marty say a word since you sat down.... Ray, do remember that Mrs. Peters is on your other side..... Ray, Charley finds a lot of quotations from me in your book.” Sylvia could have borne it better if she had seen in him any sign of irritation, or even of self-control, but he seemed rather grateful for the notice.
She kept saying to herself: “What can I say to him when he comes to talk to me after dinner? Will he expect praise of this hideous evening—of that bright-colored egotist? He is so honest—can I be honest with him?” But the moment she feared never arrived. As soon as they came back to the fireplace, Miss Leonard was at her side with a pale, bearded man—a celebrated art critic.
If he were critical in general, he had long ceased to be so far as Miss Leonard was concerned. “Have you seen her last exhibition?” he said, closing his eyes and raising pale eyebrows. “Nothing like it in this country.”
While she listened, she watched Crane, who was doing the informal service of the studio, fetching cigars and cigarettes and matches and ash-trays. And then later when the conversation had settled down solidly upon the subject of Miss Leonard's works, he was kept busy getting out canvases and turning lights on and off.
As soon as the hands of the studio clock pointed to ten-fifteen,—the hour at which she had ordered the car back,—Sylvia got up. She had at least the comfort of knowing that her going would not break up the party. She felt stiff all over; the muscles of her face felt stiff, and the motions of her eyes felt spasmodic, like the eyes of a china doll.
She approached Miss Leonard, who was the center of a group about the portrait of a steel-magnate. Sylvia could not quite bring herself to say she had had a delightful evening, but she felt something besides the words “good night” were needed; so she said:
“I hope you will dine with me soon.”
It seemed to her that Miss Leonard's face softened. “We shall be delighted,” she answered; and the “we” fell trippingly from her lips. “Any time. We don't make evening engagements, because I am so apt to be tired in the evening. But we'd come to you, of course.” For the first time the great booming voice sounded cordial.
“Shall we say next Thursday?” asked Sylvia.
“Yes, Thursday is all right for us.”
Sylvia glanced at the remote corner where, behind a lean-to of canvases, Crane was searching for the first sketch of the portrait under discussion. She noticed he had not even been consulted about the date. It seemed to her so strange that her half-formed intention to inquire about Miss Leonard's own views on these questions of marital etiquette was suddenly crystallized.
“I've been meaning to ask you all the evening, Miss Leonard,” she said, “how you feel about your husband's last book—about the theory, you know?”
“How she feels about it! She practically wrote it,” said one of the footlights.
Miss Leonard smiled subtly: “Oh, not that,” she said, “not quite that; but of course he talked it all over with me. I'm in thorough accord, as you can see.”
“You mean,” Sylvia pursued relentlessly, “that if I asked you to dine without him, you wouldn't be angry?”
“Oh, no.”
“If you only knew,” echoed the same voice, “how many people already did it.”
“I see,” said Sylvia. “And then it would be all right, too, if I asked Mr. Crane without you?”
“Of course,” replied Miss Leonard, but the bright friendliness departed from her face. “It would be absolutely all right, only—”
“Only what?” asked Sylvia, still patiently pursuing truth.
“Only you mustn't be disappointed if he doesn't come very often. You see, I'm so little at home—that when I am—well, I'm afraid Ray is stupid enough to prefer my society to—to—the casual dinner-party.”
“I see,” said Sylvia. “Then I shall expect you both on Thursday. Thank you so much for a most enlightening evening.” She moved toward the door.
“Oh, Ray,” called his wife. “Never mind that sketch now. Put Mrs. Hazlett in her motor. It would never cross Ray's mind, if I didn't tell him,” she added to the group about her, “that a lady needs to be put into her motor.”
“I don't absolutely need it,” said Sylvia.
“It's good training for Ray,” replied Miss Leonard.
WITH this benediction the two friends left the apartment together, one of them, at least, embarrassed for an opening sentence; but the need for one never arose, for as they reached the staircase, the well-known voice rang out:
“Ray.”
He moved on.
“Ray.”
He paused.
“Ra-ay!”
“Wait for me a moment,” he said, and went back to the studio.
Sylvia waited for a few minutes, and then ran down the one flight, got into her motor and was driven home.
It is not surprising that huddled in the corner of her car she felt some anger—not because she had had a dull evening, but because she felt she had been deceived, as much deceived as a young girl offered marriage by a bigamist. “He, free!” she said to herself. “The slave—the abject slave! How did he ever come to write such a book?” She wondered; and then speculating on this,—the strangest aspect of all,—it seemed to her that she understood. She remembered how the Star of Hope and other publications of prisoners were always full of green fields and snowy mountains and open spaces. Crane's book had been a wish—a dream of liberty.
She got home an hour before Lee did, and when he entered her room, she said, before he had time to ask any questions:
“Lee, I've discovered a great truth. It isn't the law or the church, nor even social custom that makes some marriages so terrible. It's just the two people who are married. If they're independent, it's free; if they are slaves,—if one of them is,—then it's servile.”
Lee did not seem greatly impressed by this discovery. “Servile,” he—said. “That's a funny word to use in these days.”
She thought he wouldn't think so after next Thursday. But she said nothing more about it for that night.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 81 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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