The Real Adventure
have help. I don't want to be soothed and comforted like a child, and I
don't want to be made love to. I just want to be treated like a human
being."
"I see," he said. Very deliberately he lighted a cigarette, found
himself an ash-tray and settled down astride a spindling little chair.
(It was lucky for Florence McCrea's peace of mind that she didn't see
him do it.) "All right," he said. "Now, come on with your troubles." He
didn't say "little troubles," but his voice did and his smile. The whole
thing would probably turn out to be a question about a housemaid, or a
hat.
Rose steadied herself as well as she could. She simply mustn't let
herself think of things like that. If she lost her temper she'd have no
chance.
"We've made a horrible mistake," she began. "I don't suppose it's either
of our faults exactly. It's been mine in a way of course, because it
wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been--thoughtless and ignorant. I
might have seen it if I'd thought to look. But I didn't--not really,
until to-night."
He wanted to know what the mistake was. He was still smiling in
good-humored amusement over her seriousness.
"It's pretty near everything," she said, "about the way we've
lived--renting this house in the first place."
He frowned and flushed. "Good heavens, child!" he said. "Can't you take
a joke? I didn't mean anything by what I said about the house--except
that--well, it is a precious, soulful, sacred--High Church sort of
house, and we're not the sort of people, thank God--I'll say it
again--who'd have built it and furnished it for ourselves. You _aren't_
right, Rose. You're run down and very tired and hypersensitive, or you
wouldn't have spent an evening worrying over a thing like that."
"You can make jokes about a thing that's true," she persisted. "And it's
true that you've hated the way we've lived--the way this house has made
us live.--No, please listen and let me talk. I can't help it if my voice
chokes up. My mind's just as cool as yours and you've got to listen. It
isn't the first time I've thought of it. It's always made me feel a
little unhappy when people have laughed about the 'new leaf' you've
turned over; how 'civilized' you've got, learning all the new dances and
going out all the time and not doing any of the--wild things you used to
do. In a joking sort of way, people have congratulated me about it, as
if it were some sort of triumph of mine. I haven't liked it, really.
But I never stopped to think out what it meant."
"What it does mean," he said, with a good deal of attention to his
cigarette, "is that I've fallen in love with you and married you and
that things are desirable to me now, because I am in love with you, that
weren't desirable before. And things that were desirable before, are
less so. I don't see anything terrible about that."
"There isn't," she said, "when--when you're in love with me."
He shot a frowning look at her and echoed her phrase interrogatively.
She nodded.
"Because you aren't in love with me all the time. And when you aren't,
you must see what I've done to you. You must--hate me for what I've done
to you. I remember the first day we ever talked--when you laughed at my
note-books. You talked about people who wore blinders and drew a cart
and followed a bundle of hay. That's what I've made you do."
His face flushed deep. He sprang to his feet and threw his cigarette
into the fire. "That's perfectly outrageous nonsense," he said. "I won't
listen to it."
"If it weren't true," she persisted, "you wouldn't be excited like that.
If I hadn't known it before, I'd have known it when I saw you with the
Lakes. You can give them something you can't give me, not with all the
love in the world. I never heard about them till to-night--not in a way
I'd remember. And there are other people--you spoke of some of them at
dinner--who are living here, that you've never mentioned to me before.
You've tried to sweep them all out of your life; to go to dances and the
opera and things with me. You did it because you loved me, but it wasn't
fair to either of us, Roddy. Because you can't love me all the time. I
don't believe a man--a real man--_can_ love a woman all the time. And if
she makes him hate her when he doesn't love her, he'll get so he hates
loving her."
"You're talking nonsense!" he said again roughly. He was pacing the room
by now. "Stark staring nonsense!"
Of course the reason it caught him like that was simply that it echoed
so uncannily the things that went through his own head sometimes in his
stolen hours of solitude--thoughts he had often tried, unavailingly, to
stamp out of existence.
"I'd like to know where you get that stuff. Is it from James Randolph?
He's dangerous, that fellow. Oh, he's interesting, and I like him, but
he's a cynic. He doesn't want anybody to be happier than he is. But what
may be true of him, isn't true of me. I've never stopped loving you
since the first day we talked together. And I should think I'd done
enough to prove it."
"That's it," she said. "You've done too much. And you're so sorry for me
when you don't love me, that it makes you do all the more."
She had found another joint in his armor. She was absolutely clairvoyant
to-night, and this time he fairly cried out, "Stop it!"
Then he got himself together and begged her pardon. "After all, I don't
see what it comes to," he said. "I don't know what we're fighting about
to-night. You're saying you think we ought to do more playing around
with the Lakes and people like that; not spend all our time with the
Casino set, as we have done this winter. Well, that may be good sense.
I've no objection certainly."
"Well, then," she said, "that's settled--that's one thing settled. But
there's something else. Oh, it all comes to the same thing, really.
Roddy,"--she had to gulp and draw a long breath and steady herself
before this--"Roddy, how much money have you got, and how much are we
spending?"
"Oh, good lord!" he cried. "_Please_ don't go into that now, Rose. It's
after one o'clock, and you're worn to a frazzle. If we've got to go into
it, let's do it some other time, when we can be sensible about it."
"When I am, you mean?"
"Yes," he said.
"Well, I'm sensible now. I can't help it if my--voice chokes and my eyes
fill up. That's silly, of course, but down in my mind, I don't believe
I've ever been as sensible as I am right now. And I've had the nerve to
ask--I don't know when I will again--and I know you won't bring the
subject up by yourself. I've been trying to for ever so long. But
money's always seemed the one thing I couldn't b-bear to talk about with
you.
"You see, when I first told mother and Portia about you--about how you
helped me with the conductor that night, I told them your name, and
Portia said she didn't think it could be you, because you were a
millionaire. I supposed she knew. Anyway, I didn't think very much about
it. You yourself,--just being with you and hearing you talk, were so
much more important. After we got engaged, and you began doing all
sorts of lovely things for me, I enjoyed it of course. But it was just
something that went with you. After we were married and took this
house ... Well, I knew, of course, I hadn't married you for money, but
I thought it would sound sort of queer and prying to ask questions about
it; because I hadn't anything."
He had looked up two or three times and drawn in his breath for a
protest, but apparently he couldn't think of anything effective to say.
Now though, he cried out, "Rose! Please!"
But she went steadily on. "You were always so dear about it. You never
let me feel like a beggar, and--well, it was the easy way, and I took
it. I got worried once during the winter when I heard the Crawfords
talking. All those people were millionaires, I'd supposed. They were
going on at a dinner here, one night, about being awfully hard up, and I
began to wonder if we were. I spent a week trying to--get up my courage
to ask you about it. But then Constance got a new necklace on her
birthday, and they went off to Palm Beach the next week, so I persuaded
myself it was all a joke. The thing's come up again several times since,
but never so that I couldn't side-step it some way, until to-night. But
to-night--oh, Roddy ...!" Her silly ragged voice choked there and
stopped and the tears brimmed up and spilled down her cheeks. But she
kept her face steadfastly turned to his.
"That's what I said about being married and not sowing wild oats, I
suppose," he said glumly. "It was a joke. Do you suppose I'd have said
it if I meant it?"
"It wasn't only that," she managed to go on. "It was the way they looked
at the house; the way you apologized for my dress; the way you looked
when you tried to get out of answering Barry Lake's questions about what
you were doing. Oh, how I despised myself! And how I knew you and they
must be despising me!"
"The one thing I felt about you all evening," he said, with the patience
that marks the last stage of exasperation, "was pride. I was rather
crazily proud of you."
"As my lover you were proud of me," she said. "But the other man--the
man that's more truly you--was ashamed, as I was ashamed. Oh, it doesn't
matter! Being ashamed won't accomplish anything. But what we'll _do_ is
going to accomplish something."
"What do you mean to do?" he asked.
"I want you to tell me first," she said, "how much money we have, and
how much we've been spending."
"I don't know," he said stubbornly. "I don't know exactly."
"You've got enough, haven't you, of your own ... I mean, there's enough
that comes in every year, to live on, if you didn't earn a cent by
practising law? Well, what I want to do, is to live on that. I want to
live however and wherever we have to to live on that--out in the suburbs
somewhere, or in a flat, so that you will be free; and I can work--be
some sort of help. Barry and the others--your real friends, that you
really care about, won't mind. And as long as we want to get rid of the
other people anyway, that's the way to do it."
"You can wash the dishes and scrub the floors," he supplemented, "and I
can carry my lunch to the office with me in a little tin box." He looked
at his watch. "And now that the thing's reduced to an absurdity, let's
go to bed. It's getting along toward two o'clock."
"You don't have to get to the office till nine to-morrow morning," said
Rose. "And I want to talk it out now. And I don't think I said anything
that was absurd."
The devil of it was she hadn't. The precise quality about her
suggestions that pointed and barbed them, was their fantastic logic. It
would be ridiculous--impossible--to uproot their life as she wanted it
done. One simply couldn't do such a thing. Serious discussion of it was
preposterous. But to explain why ...! He was apt enough at explanations
generally. This one seemed to present difficulties.
"I shouldn't have called it absurd," he admitted after a rather long
silence. "But it's exaggerated and unnecessary. I don't care to make a
public proclamation that I'm not able to support you and run our
domestic establishment in a way that we find natural and agreeable;--and
that I've been a fool to try. The situation doesn't call for it. You've
made a mountain out of an ant-hill. When our lease is up, if we think
this house is more than we want, we can find something simpler."
"But we'll begin economizing now," she pleaded; "change things as much
as we can, even if we do have to go on living in this house. It won't
hurt me a bit to work, and you could go back to your book. We'd both be
happier, if I were something besides just a drag on you."
"Discharge a couple of maids, you mean," he asked, "and sweep and make
beds and that sort of thing yourself?"