Chapter 14

Sadie Leitzel looked as though she were about to collapse with the pressure of all that she had to communicate to Jennie when next morning she returned alone, at noon, from a shopping excursion upon which she had started out just after breakfast with Margaret.

Dropping her bundles upon the centre table in the sitting-room, where Jennie sat in the bay window darning Daniel's socks, she dropped herself upon the sofa with a long breath of mingled excitement and exhaustion.

"Well, did she get her dress? And where is she at?" Jennie inquired.

"No, she didn't get her dress!" breathed Sadie, taking off, one by one, her veil, gloves, hat, furs, overshoes, and coat. "I guess she didn't have an intention of getting a dress when she started out with me! I had the hardest time to get her to even look at their things at Fahnestock's. She seems to think, Jennie, that New Munich hasn't anything good enough for her to wear!"

"Did she say that?" demanded Jennie.

"Well, when she had only just gave a careless glance at some of their ready-made evening dresses, she shook her head and said to me, 'There's nothing here; I'll have to wait until I go to Philadelphia some time.' And when I wanted her, then, to get goods and take it to Miss Snyder, she said Fahnestock's had such a cheap, poor quality of goods, not worth making up!"

"Well," pronounced Jennie, "I guess if our New Munich stores are good enough for you and me, they're plenty good enough for as plain a dresser as what she is! Our clothes are a lot dressier than hers! The idea!"

"Yes, the very idea!"

"And after Danny's telling her he wanted her to have a new dress! And me telling her that her dresses that she's got give us all a shamed face!"

"All she got new for herself," said Sadie, "was another pair of those long white kid gloves at four-fifty a pair. I told her silk ones would do just as good, and them you can wash. But she didn't listen to me; she just took my hand and held it out to the saleslady and told her to measure it and," added Sadie, a veiled pleasure coming into her eyes, "she got me a pair of long white kid gloves, too, and paid for them out of that twenty-dollar check Danny gave her!"

"Oh!" cried Jennie, shocked, "when Danny gave it to her for a dress yet! What'll he say anyhow?"

"She knows he's so crazy about her, she don't seem afraid to do anything!" said Sadie.

"He'll soon stop giving her money if she spends it on other ones instead of for what he tells her to buy!"

"Yes, I guess! But me—I never had any long white kid gloves before, Jennie!" Sadie could not repress her beaming pleasure. "They'll feel grand, I guess."

"Four-fifty is too much to put into a pair of gloves; your white silk ones would do plenty good enough."

"But she got you a pair, too, Jennie! Here they are," added Sadie, fumbling among her packages on the table. "She asked me your size and got you a pair, too."

"I won't wear them! I'll get the money back and give it to Danny!" declared Jennie, who, according to her lights, was as scrupulous as she was "close." "It ain't right to Danny for her to squander his money like that. My gracious! Thirteen-fifty for just gloves! You ought to take yours back, too, Sadie!"

"But the saleslady tried one of mine on and stretched them," returned Sadie, not very regretfully. "And mind, Jennie," she hastily diverted her sister from her suggestion, "mind what she did with the rest part of the twenty dollars!"

"What?" demanded Jennie.

"She spent every cent of it buying presents for her sister's children in Charleston! When I told her Danny wouldn't like it at all for her to do that, she said, 'Oh, but Daniel loves my little nephew and nieces; he will be glad to have me send them something from us both'; and she put in the package a card, 'From Daniel and Margaret for the three dearest babies in the world.'"

"My souls!" Jennie exclaimed. "What'll Danny say yet—her using up all that twenty dollars and nothing to show for it!"

"Except three pairs of white kid gloves." Sadie shook her head pensively, but still with a covert gleam of pleasure in her own share of the "rake-off."

"Well," said Jennie with emphasis, "I'll certainly give her a piece of my mind! Where is she at?"

"She said as it was twelve o'clock, she'd go to Danny's office and walk home with him for dinner; and what do you think she gave me as her reason for doing that?"

"Well, what?"

"She said she wanted a chance to see that Hamilton girl again that works for our Danny! Did you ever?—when we all told her already she can't associate with Danny's clerk!"

"Well, Sadie," said Jennie grimly, "Margaret's easy-going and she thinks we're the same. She'll have to learn her mistake, that's all. She ain't going to run with that Hamilton girl, and that's all there is to it! Enough said!"

"Och, Jennie, if you'd been along this morning you'd have wondered at her the way she acts, speaking so awful friendly and pleasant to the girls that waited on us in the store and even saying, 'Thank you, my dear,' to a little cash-girl! Yes, making herself that familiar! And then when Mrs. Congressman Ocksreider come along through the store and I poked Margaret that she should stop and speak to her, Margaret just nodded and walked right a-past her, though you could see that Mrs. Ocksreider was going to stop and talk to us! And, Jennie, I wanted the store-girls to see us conversing with Mrs. Ocksreider. I would have stopped and talked with her myself, whether or no, but she looked mad and sailed right a-past me the way Margaret had sailed a-past her, and I heard two girls at the button counter tittering and saying, 'Did you ever get left?' I was so cross at Margaret, I told her, 'You hardly spoke to her and she's Mrs. Congressman Ocksreider and worth a half a million dollars!' and Margaret answered me, 'I didn't think she was worth two cents any time I've talked with her. But if she's a member of Congress! Why, Sadie, you are deceiving me, Pennsylvania is not yet a Suffrage state!' she said, and I told her I didn't say it was and certainly hoped it never would be. 'But,' I said, 'that's neither here nor there, whether Pennsylvania's a Suffrage state! What I wish is that if you have to cut any one, let it be cash-girls and not our most high-toned lady-friends,' I said."

"And what," asked Jennie, "did she answer to that?"

"She said, 'Oh, Sadie, I feel quite too humble to want to 'cut' any one, even pretentious people like your Congressman's ordinary little wife!' 'Well,' I said. 'You're got no need to feel humble, now that you're married to our Danny!' But, Jennie," said Sadie, looking bewildered, "think of calling Mrs. Ocksreider 'ordinary little wife!'"

"Well, I think! It was enough to give you the headache, Sadie, such a morning as you've had!"

"But do you think, mebby," Sadie asked, a little awe-struck, "that Governors are higher than Congressmen—Margaret thinking herself better than Mrs. Ocksreider yet!"

"It would look that way," said Jennie, also impressed.

"Here she and Danny come!" Jennie announced at the sound of the opening of the front door. "They're laughing; so I guess he don't know yet about that twenty dollars!"

"And I guess she listened to me after all," added Sadie, "about going in there to his office and acting familiar with Miss Hamilton, or else Danny wouldn't be laughing with her!"

Had they known what had really taken place in Daniel's office while they had been sitting here discussing Margaret (who, to tell the truth, was far more of an enigma to them than they were to her), they would have considered Daniel's laughter, just now, as he entered the house with her, to be nothing short of lunacy.

A half-hour earlier Daniel, on returning to his private office from a tour of inspection through his other offices, had heard, to his surprise, from the adjoining room where his secretary was supposed to be working, her voice in earnest conversation with some one. The door between his room and hers was ajar and he could distinctly hear what she was saying, the character of which was so far removed from any phase of the legal business of his office that Daniel was dumbfounded. It was sacrilege to introduce here anything that did not pertain strictly to the work of the firm.

"The religious introspection," Miss Hamilton was saying, "so widely engendered by Emerson's writings in men and women of a high type, has come to seem to us, in these days, rather morbid; we consider it as unwholesome, now, to think too much about our spiritual, as about our physical, health. Then, too, the struggle for existence being sharper, people have less time to sit down and investigate their souls; they've got to keep going, or be left behind in the race."

"In their effort to win in the race, however—what they call winning—they're very likely to lose their own souls; and 'What profiteth it a man?'" spoke another voice in reply, a voice that brought a quick flush to Daniel's face; a flush of strangely mingled emotions: of anger that she was here with his secretary, and of the joy with which the sound of her voice, the mere ripple of her skirts, never failed to thrill him.

"The art of Mrs. Humphry Ward," Miss Hamilton was again speaking (he had missed a connecting link through the shock of discovering Margaret's presence), "has been a steady, upward growth and development: every novel produced by her is more artistic than its predecessor. But though her art is now at its climax, she is no longer read as she used to be, because her point of view is one that the world has passed by; the women of her books are the ideal feminine creations of fifty years ago and they don't interest us any longer. Now most of us have not yet grown up to Bernard Shaw's point of view, yet we are nearer to him than to Mrs. Ward. To my mind the whole feminist problem is an economic one. No man or woman can be spiritually free who is economically dependent, Emerson and Marcus Aurelius and the Christian Scientists to the contrary notwithstanding. Even the vote isn't going to help women until they make up their minds to 'get off of men's backs,' as Charlotte Perkins Gilman says."

"How about married women who are bearing children?" asked Margaret. "They've got to be financially dependent on some one."

"Since the state does not support women who are giving citizens to it and who are thereby disabled from self-support, they should have a legal right over a fair proportion of their husband's income."

"But in America men don't need to be coerced by laws to treat women generously," suggested Margaret.

"That's your Southern idea. A self-respecting human being does not want generosity; she does not want to stretch out her hand and ask for what she needs. It is humiliating, degrading. Fancy a grown woman asking a man, 'May I buy a hat to-day?' I'd rather take in stairs to scrub!"

"Well," Margaret returned, "I shall educate all my daughters to professions, because, quite apart from the economic side of it, women become such drivelling fools when they live in aimless idleness, when they have no definite interest in life. And they are so discontented and restless. An occupation, an interest, surely makes for happiness and for a higher personal development."

"I believe," said Miss Hamilton, "that a mother wrongs a daughter, just as much as she would wrong a son, when she fails to educate her for a self-supporting occupation. Look at these women of New Munich who live only to kill time—how they lack the personal dignity, the character, that a life of service, of producing, gives to either man or woman! Of course mere work doesn't ennoble—beasts of burden can work—it's work that vitally interests us, as you say, and that we love for its own sake, that is the joy and health of any soul."

"Do you love being Mr. Leitzel's secretary like that?"

"Of course not. Being Mr. Leitzel's secretary is two thirds drudgery and only one third humanly interesting. I'm threatening to take to the platform to expound the Truth that women who have to support themselves are invariably overworked, while women who live on men haven't enough to do to keep them wholesome. Middle-aged married women, for instance, whose children are grown up, go almost insane for want of an interest in life. No wonder human creatures so situated grow fretful and petty and small-souled."

"Perhaps the window-smashing Suffragette is only reacting from too long want of occupation," suggested Margaret. "The emptiness of her life makes her hysterical and she shrieks with rage and throws things! But, my dear, why do you, clever as you are, remain in a position that is two thirds drudgery? Drudgery is for dull people, who of course prefer it to work that would tax them to think."

"It is a stepping-stone for me to the bigger work I shall some day do, Mrs. Leitzel."

"What is that?"

"Something splendid!" Miss Hamilton responded in a voice of quite girlish delight. "Something in which you shall have a share, if you will, a very big share! I'll tell you all about it one of these days. We haven't time now. It's lunch time and I have only a half-hour."

"When can we get together again?" Margaret eagerly asked. "I am just living for these times with you!"

"And you must know," responded Miss Hamilton with feeling, "what they mean to me, starved as I've been for companionship in a place like New Munich! Well, I'm free every evening. And we could take walks any afternoon between five and seven that you were not engaged."

"Then as soon as people have finished giving parties in my honour, I shall be free to be with you as much as you'll let me be, Miss Hamilton. I shan't have to go to parties that are not given specially for me."

"Of course not. You couldn't keep it up. For a woman like you it would be too deadly."

This, to Daniel, was a new and upsetting point of view; he was so sure that all women in Miss Hamilton's position were envious of the social rioting of women placed as his wife was. And here was Margaret planning to discard "society" for evenings and rambles with his stenographer! As if Miss Hamilton were not uppish enough already from her constant offers of higher salaries! Why, even as it was, he could hardly put up with her air of independence; and if he permitted his wife to take her up as an intimate friend—well, of course he would have to emphatically put a stop to the thing. He thought he had expressed himself definitely enough to Margaret last Saturday while they were automobiling, but evidently he had not.

"I'll make myself unmistakably clear this time!" he resolved. "I'll let Margaret know that I am not accustomed to having my wishes set aside as of no importance!"