“But Horace and the Holy Behemoth, Eulalia, will get sore if you don’t show up, Pet.”
“They’ll get over it. I really am sick of the same old routine, there’s never anything new and it all seems so futile, wasting so much time—”
“That comes from reading these stories by fellows like Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis—I told you they’d make you unhappy. That’s why I leave those birds alone they’re always picking flaws in the best civilization the world’s ever seen—”
“Bathtubs and radio and big business, eh?” Mimi murmured softly, perhaps a shade too softly.
“Yes—bathtubs—and radio and all the other things you sneer at—but just the same you’d be darned unhappy and uncomfortable if you didn’t have these same benefits this civilization’s brought you,” snapped Jimmie testily.
“Oh, well, if you’re going to get angry about it, I’ll go. Only, please don’t raise your voice so—remember the maid is probably listening,” Mimi tried to calm him as he rose from the table.
“Who’s shouting?” Jimmie demanded. “And what if I do? This is my house, isn’t it, and haven’t I got a right to shout in my own house, if I want to?”
He kissed her almost angrily on the cheek. She raised her head, lips half parted, and looked at him, her eyes smiling. He kissed her again on her lips and their warm touch made him contrite, ashamed of his anger.
“Forgive me, Mimi dear—I shouldn’t have spoken so hastily. But you know it’s good business for us to keep on good terms with the Crosbys—she’s a nut and he’s cranky as the devil but I do make a lot of money out of him.”
When Jimmie had again begged forgiveness for his outburst and had left for his office, Mimi sat in the sunny breakfast room for a long time. She hadn’t intended that Jimmie should consider her jocular remark about bathtubs and radios to sound like a sneer. But since he had taken it that way, she wondered what mischievous imp had impelled her to say just those words. Their utterance had loosed within her a nebulous, embryonic discontent that at times worried her, at others made her furiously angry with herself. For more than a year she had been supremely content with the security of the love there was between them, had snuggled deep into the haven she had reached after years of buffeting and struggle and bitter disappointment. In the hectic, glamorous days that preceded their marriage and during the ecstatic happiness of the months after that event, Jimmie had been to her a composite of generosity and decency and comradeship. She had never deluded herself that he was handsome—not even by a generous stretch of loving imagination could he be termed other than fairly good-looking. But that did not matter. She had long since learned to distrust men who were too obviously good-looking, they always knew it though she blamed her own sex for that, far more than she blamed the men themselves.
Her mind, she was now finding with some concomitant discomfort, had been active too long to content itself with the calm placidity of being a housewife. Jimmie was more set than ever that she should remain at home. Since they were married his brokerage business had prospered amazingly and he lavished clothes and jewellery and other luxuries upon her. “I’m just like a Jew,” he laughed one day when he brought her an especially handsome pair of earrings, an ornate blending of diamonds and rubies, “dressing up my wife to show that business is good.” So far as she could trace it definitely, her discontent was born one night at a gay party after the theatre at one of the very smart and very expensive night clubs. Tired of dancing, she sat and watched the dancers. Grimly they went about the task of acquiring pleasure, their faces set in hard, nervous lines as they executed or attempted to execute quick, jerky, ungraceful and intricate new steps. They are working at pleasure and happiness just as though it were a trade, she concluded. “They dance,” she told Jimmie when he had come back to the table puffing and blowing after dancing with Mrs. Shepherd, a young and rather pretty divorcee, “as though they were saying: ‘This night is costing me a couple of hundred dollars and I will get two hundred dollars’ worth of fun out of it!’ ” Jimmie had looked at her queerly but had said nothing.
After that night she watched the faces in the street, in the theatre, wherever she happened to be. There was always that strained, unhappy expression on the countenances of these people who, like scurrying insects, rushed madly here and there, each as though upon his efforts depended the future of civilization and life and everything else. Like cogs in a machine, she said of them one day, and thereafter she always thought of them as cogs. Here they have created a machine of which they are intensely proud and of which they think they are the masters. Instead, ironically enough, the machine has mastered them and they must do its bidding.
From that point she began to inquire more deeply into the manifestations which lay so abundantly at hand. At first she studied these things largely to furnish occupation, perhaps a certain bit of diversion, to her own mind, hoping thereby to fill it so full there would be no room for the vague discontent which was beginning to gnaw her. Out of the chaotic writhings of her growing restlessness she sought and vaguely began to see the dim path which would lead, she thought, to a broader view of the scene of which she was a part. Here and there she heard the voice of one crying out against the monotony, the tastelessness, the vulgarity, the rule by the mob, the lowering faces everywhere. She tried to talk once or
