It was with some trepidation that Ishbel sought her husband in the library a few hours later, and, in spite of her resolve to “be square,” could not resist assuming her most ingratiating manner. Her eyes were full of witchery, her kissable mouth wore its most provocative curves. Anything less like an emancipated wife or a prospective business woman never rose upon man’s haunted imagination; and as for Mr. Jones, who had been waiting for an explanation of some sort, he thought that she had come to apologize, to confess to a passing hysteria, possibly to jealousy induced by the fact that the wife of one of the South African millionaires had worn a ruby the night before that was the talk of the town. Well, she should have a bigger one if the earth could be made to yield it up.
Mr. Jones returned home every afternoon at precisely the same hour, and to-day, having “smartened up,” was sitting in a leather chair near the window with a finance review in his hand, when Ishbel entered. He did not rise, but asked her if she felt better, indicated a chair opposite his own, and waited for her to begin. She should have her ruby, or whatever it was she wanted, but not until she was properly humble and asked for it.
Ishbel smiled into those eyes that always reminded her of shoe buttons, and said sweetly, “I was horrid, of course, last night?—”
“You were. And it was extremely unpleasant for me at the ball. Nobody addressed me except to ask where you were. I felt like a keeper minus his performing bear.” His tone was not without bitterness.
“I am so sorry. But I could not go. I wanted to think.”
“Think? Why on earth should you think? You have nothing to think about; merely to spend money and look beautiful.”
Ishbel smiled again, showing her dimples. There was not an edge of her inflexible will visible in the beautiful hazel eyes that she turned full upon him. “Well, the fact remains that I did think. And this is the result: I wish to earn my living.”
His jaw dropped. He thought she had lost her mind.
“It is quite true, and I mean to do it. I find I don’t like living on any one. We’ve never pretended to love each other. If we did—well, I think I should have felt the same way a little later. As it is, I don’t find it nice, living on you?—”
“You’re my wife!” thundered Mr. Jones. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve no right to be your wife—”
“You’ve been a damned long time finding it out—”
“Five years. Bridgit says I have an Irish imagination. I’ve worked it persistently for five years, and worked it to death. I not only persuaded myself that I was doing you a tremendous service, but that I was entirely happy in being young and having all the luxuries and pleasures and gayeties that youth demands. I am only twenty-four. Five years in one’s first youth is not so long a time for delusion to last?—”
“Have you fallen in love?”
“Not for more than three hours at a time. Somehow, you all fall short, one way or another. I think I have fallen in love with myself. At all events I want an individual place in the world, and, as the world is at present constituted, the only people that are really respected are those that either inherit fortunes or abstract the largest amount of money from other people. Even birth is going out of fashion. It doesn’t weigh a feather in the scale against money.”
“You’re talking like a lunatic. I couldn’t have got into society with all my millions without you, or some one else born with a marketable title, and you know it.” Mr. Jones was so astonished that only plain facts lighted the chaos of his mind.
“All the same you are far more respected than my poor old father, who is a lineal descendant of the O’Neil. Even if people did not respect you personally,—and of course they do,—they all respect you far more than they do me. Who would look at me if I had married one of your clerks—birth or no birth? And who regards me, as it is, but anything more than one of your best investments? I am useful to you and pay my way, but I’m of no earthly importance as an individual. I haven’t even as good a position as Bridgit, who inherited a fortune, although a bagatelle compared to yours?—”
“Is that what you’re after—a slice of my fortune in your own right?”
“No, I only want enough to start me in business, and I shall pay it back?—”
“I’ll have you put in a lunatic asylum. What business do you fancy you could make a go in? Mine?”
“No. The French bourgeoisie are about the only people that have solved the sex problem: every woman in the shop-keeping class, at least, is her husband’s working partner. But financial brains are not indigenous to my class. If I had one, I’d make myself useful to you in the only way that counts, and charge you high for my services. But as it is, I’m going to do the one thing I happen to be fitted for—I’m going to be a milliner.”
“A milliner!” roared Mr. Jones. His face was purple. It was all very well to assume that his butterfly had gone mad; he had a hideous premonition that she was in earnest and as sane as he was. In fact, he felt on the verge of lunacy himself. He could hear his house of cards rattling about him.
“Yes,” said Ishbel, smiling at him, as she had always smiled when asking him to invite another of her sisters to visit them. “I can trim hats beautifully. My hats are noted in London?—”
“They ought to be. The bills that come from those Paris robbers?—”
“I retrim every hat I get from the best of them. And I’ve pulled to pieces the hats of some of the richest of my friends. They will all patronize me. I shan’t rob them, and I have at least fifty ideas for this season that will be original without being bizarre—hats that will suit individual faces and not be duplicated. Oh, I know that I have a positive genius for millinery!”
The purple fell from Mr. Jones’s face, leaving it pallid. He stared at her, not only in consternation, but in deeper perplexity than he had ever felt in his life. Probably there is no state of the masculine mind so amusing to the disinterested outsider as the chaos into which it is thrown by some unexpected revelation of woman’s divergence from the pattern. It has only been during those long periods of the world’s history, as Bridgit and Ishbel had discovered, when men were at war, that women, poor, even in their castles, with every faculty strained to feed and rear their children, and no society of any sort, often without education, have given men the excuse to regard them as inferior beings—physical prowess at such times being the standard. But men have had so many rude awakenings that their continued blindness can only be explained by the fact that a large percentage of women, while no idler and lazier than many men, have been able to flourish as parasites through the accident of their sex. During every period of comparative peace and plenty, women of another caliber have shown themselves tyrannous, active, exorbitant in their demands, and mentally as alert as men. If they disappeared periodically, it was only because they had not fully found themselves, had exercised their abilities to no definite end. A recent German psychologist, one of the maddest and most ingenious, discovered something portentous in such periodicity as he took note of: the prominence of woman in the tenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth and twentieth, assuming it to be the result of an excess of hermaphrodite and sexually intermediate forms, a state of affairs not unknown in the vegetable kingdom. Therefore, must woman’s periodic revolt mean nothing more than a biological phenomenon.
This theory would furnish food for much uneasiness were it not that the philosopher overlooked, deliberately or otherwise, the fact that woman’s star has flamed at some period or other in nearly every century, and that these periods have coincided with man’s ingenuous elevation of her to gratify his vanity while his chests were full and his weapons idle. Since the beginning of time, so far as we have any record of it, women have sprung to the top the moment that peace permitted wealth, leisure, and servants; and so far from their success being due to abnormality, their progress and development have been steadily cumulative. To-day, for the first time, they are highly enough developed to take their places beside men in politics, know themselves well enough to hold on, not drop the reins the moment the world’s conditions demand the physical activities of the fighting sex.
Although the great Woman’s Suffrage movement was, for the moment, in the rear of the world’s problems, thousands of women in England and America were thinking of little else, planning and working quietly, awaiting their leader. This psychological wave had washed over Ishbel’s sensitive brain and done its work quite as thoroughly as if she had gone to Manchester and sat at the feet of Dr. Pankhurst. It is the fashion t............