Chapter 16

Margaret did not, of course, think for an instant of giving up her friendship with Catherine Hamilton; but when she suggested the Hamilton family and a few other people whom she liked, but whose names were not on the invitation list, be invited to their big reception, she met with an opposition to which she was obliged to yield.

"To invite such folks as those Hamiltons, that don't even own their own home, little as it is—well, it would just lower the tone of the party, that's all!" Jennie pronounced.

"But I'll be responsible for keeping up the tone of the party!" Margaret gayly volunteered.

She quickly recognized, however, that in a matter like this, co?peration or compromise between the Leitzels and her was impossible and that she must stand aside and let them give their party in their own way. She carried her self-obliteration so far as to even refrain from suggesting, on the auspicious day of the party, the removal from the dining-room sideboard of the life-sized, navy-blue glass owl which was a water pitcher, and the two orange-coloured glass dishes that stood on easels on either side of the owl.

She did spend rather a troubled half-hour in wondering how, since the invitations were of course in her name and Daniel's, Catherine Hamilton would regard the fact that she was not invited. But the absurdity of the Leitzels' delusion that they could withhold or bestow social recognition upon her friend must be so manifest to Catherine that surely she could not take it seriously. It seemed to Margaret that to let this trifling, vulgar episode cast even a shadow upon the ideal friendship into which she and Catherine were growing was to belittle and dishonour it.

"I can't offer her any explanation. I can only trust to her large-minded understanding of my situation."

She had an uncomfortable consciousness that it was a situation which Catherine herself would not have tolerated.

"Even 'Hiram's Lizzie' considers it unbearable," she reflected. "Why, I can't offer any least hospitality to any one unless my sisters-in-law approve of the individual! I can't ask Catherine Hamilton to dine or lunch with me! Which means, of course, that I can't accept her hospitality. It's rather grotesque!"

Yet when she considered how devotedly Daniel's sisters served him, how minutely they attended to every little detail of his comfort, in a way most men, she was sure, would have found harassing, but which to Daniel seemed essential to his well-being, she knew that he would never be able, without great misery, to live apart from them, and that he certainly would not entertain the idea for a moment.

"And as for them, their occupation, their purpose in life, would be taken from them, if they didn't have Daniel to fuss over."

Two days before the date of the reception the evening papers gave New Munich a lurid description, furnished by Jennie and Daniel, of every detail of it, the Philadelphia caterer and the Lancaster florist being advertised in headlines that made Margaret's flesh creep. She had a vision of the consternation of her Charleston relatives should they ever see that paper, and she was thankful that the distance that separated her from them precluded the possibility of their learning of her association with such blatant vulgarity—unless (awful thought!) Daniel should be visited with the idea of mailing them a marked copy!

When, the next afternoon, Margaret was out for a country walk with Catherine Hamilton after office hours, she decided that it would be better to refer casually to the prospective party, rather than so obviously avoid mentioning it.

"Fancy me to-morrow night, Catherine, lined up with Mr. Leitzel and his sisters for two or three hours to shake hands with over one hundred people and make to each one precisely the same inspired remark: 'Mrs. Blank, how do you do? I am glad to see you. I am so glad you got here!' If I could only vary it a bit! But no, I shall have to say those self-same words exactly one hundred and seven times. Isn't it deplorable?"

A faint tremor in her voice as she asked the question caused her friend to turn and look into her face; and something in the strained expression of the beautiful eyes which Catherine Hamilton was growing to love moved this rather austere young woman to a sudden pity; for Catherine, though a girl of keen wit and of a strong, independent spirit, was full of feeling; a combination of qualities which gave her a charm for those of her own sex that she did not have for men.

Obeying an impulse of her heart, she suddenly stopped in the woodsy path where they walked, put her arms around Margaret and clasped her close.

And Margaret, at the unexpected touch of understanding love, almost the first she had ever known in her life, held herself rigid in her friend's embrace that she might not burst into passionate crying, while she clenched her teeth to choke down the pent-up emotion which in this moment could hardly keep its bounds.

She released herself quickly, and for an instant turned away.

When she again spoke, her voice was even and natural. She had not let herself shed one betraying tear.

"You promised to tell me, Catherine, about that career of yours, you know, to which your present work is a stepping-stone, and what my part is to be in it."

Catherine, eager to launch forth upon her hobby to her new friend, glowed with enthusiasm as she talked.

"I have come from a race, Margaret, that for generations have been teachers, college professors, ministers, public school superintendents—the pedagogue seems to be born in every one of us. And it's in me strong. So I am going to devote my life to the establishing of a school for girls in which all the training shall converge to one ideal—that of service—as over against that of the usual finishing school, whatever that ideal is! And, Margaret, here's my point: I'm going to make my school fashionable, a formidable rival of those futile, idiotic institutions in which girls from the country are taught how they must enter a drawing-room or step into an automobile, and are quite incidentally instructed, cautiously and delicately, in every 'branch' in the whole category of learning, so that they may be able to 'converse' on any subject whatever without betraying the awful depths of their ignorance!—the vast expanse of their shallowness. My school shall teach girls that life is meant for earnest work, because work means physical and spiritual health and happiness. My school shall make girls ashamed to admit they've ever been to the other sort of 'finishing' school. It's going to put that sort of school out of business, Margaret! I tell you, the coming woman is going to be the efficient woman. The unqualified of our sex will take a back seat, just as unqualified men do."

"I'm of course entirely in sympathy with your idea, Catherine, but I hope your 'service' education includes home-making and motherhood. Leave us a few of the old-fashioned women, won't you?"

"My dear, don't worry about homes and husbands and babies. It is the futile fashionable woman, not the disciplined, thoughtful, college-bred woman, that refuses to have children. I've never known an earnest woman that didn't love children and yearn for motherhood. The trouble is, men are afraid of the earnest kind. They marry the frivolous, parasitical women, who live upon them like lotus flowers, sapping their vitality and giving nothing in return. Yet you'll find men opposing college education for women, not realizing that a woman who has stood the discipline of a college course has developed a force of character that does not shrink for a moment from the further discipline and burden of motherhood, but welcomes it as her privilege and blessing, while the so-called 'society woman' will none of it. You know," Catherine continued, "in the days when home-making was necessarily an absorbing occupation, it lent to women a dignity of character quite wanting in our present-day large class of feminine parasites, a class that has grown out of the new and easier domestic conditions and the too-great concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. That's the explanation of woman's latter-day restlessness; she's fighting against the deterioration which comes with idleness and too-easy conditions of life. She's fighting for her very life! That's what the 'feminist movement' means."

"And my part in your fine scheme?" asked Margaret, her face glowing with responsive enthusiasm.

"As a rich and influential woman, you will countenance and patronize my school; perhaps send me your daughters; be a stock-holder in it; you can even be fitting yourself, meantime, if you like, to be a teacher in it."

"But, Catherine—'rich and influential?' I? I am neither!"

Catherine looked at her curiously. "What do you call 'rich,' Margaret?"

"Oh, I don't know. I've never handled money in my life. I've always had everything I actually required right at my hand. I am afraid I am absurdly ignorant about money. I never had any of my own."

As Margaret spoke, she glanced up to meet in Catherine's eyes a puzzled, questioning expression which she failed to interpret.

"But surely you know that Mr. Leitzel is very rich?" said Catherine.

"It is such a relative term. My sister's family think themselves awfully poor, but they live more comfortably and spend money more freely than the Leitzels do. Of course I understand that you Northerners are all more frugal than Southerners are," she ended vaguely.

Catherine laughed oddly. "You are an innocent!"

"I'm beginning to realize that I am," nodded Margaret, feeling a something behind Catherine's tone and countenance that she did not quite get.

"I might have been reared in a convent for all I've seen of life, Catherine."

"Yet you've not lacked the essentials," returned Catherine with evident relief at turning the talk from the subject of money.

"The essentials to what?"

"To making you a truly fine and charming woman. You've lived in an environment of culture, of big ideas; and you've had no sordid money cares to embitter you or blunt the sensitive fineness of your spirit."

"But my life has lacked one great essential, Catherine—affection, love."

"Your uncle must have loved you, dear, he must have. For you are lovable, you know. Well, rather!"

"He loved me as his handmaid who kept him comfortable. If ever I tried to be affectionate with him, he would act like a hyena!"

"If he was human, he loved you!"

"He wasn't human, that was it. He had all run to intellect and hadn't a vulnerable spot left."

"Did you love him?"

"I wanted to, but he wouldn't have it. When he died, I did miss him keenly, he had grown to be a habit with me; a stimulant, too. No one could live with Uncle Osmond and not keep very much alive. So of course my life seemed suddenly very empty without him: he had been my chief care and thought for so many years. I suppose I shall never quite get over missing him. But I can't say I ever really grieved for him."

When about a half-hour later, at the end of an exhilarating and satisfying time together which put a new seal upon their friendship, the two young women parted to go to their homes, Catherine considered, as she walked slowly, to give herself time to think, how strange it was that she, as Mr. Daniel Leitzel's confidential secretary, knew so very much more about him and his affairs than did his own wife.

"She actually does not know that she has married a multi-millionaire. And I don't believe it would impress her greatly to discover that she had. She is unique! For a woman like Margaret to find herself tied up with those Leitzels, oh!" Catherine laughed to herself at what seemed to her the extreme absurdity of the combination. "But it is so tragic, too! Why on earth did she marry him if not for his money? Will she, I wonder, ever reach the point of telling me why she did? No," she shook her head conclusively, "not so long as she continues to live with him will any one ever hear one disloyal syllable from her, I'm sure. If she ever came to the point of rectifying by divorce the blunder she made in marrying him, for whatever mysterious reason, then perhaps she'll explain herself to me."

Catherine wondered how long it would take Margaret to find out that she was married to one of the richest men in the state.

"If I ever see her inconvenienced by lack of funds, I'll enlighten her with some facts and figures known only to her husband and myself," she resolved. "Even I don't know all he has, though I do know what the public doesn't dream of."

She was aware that her employer had, before ever trusting her with any knowledge of his financial affairs, tested and proved her to be a very safe repository of his secrets.

"But his wife, supposed to be one with himself and endowed with all his worldly goods, has a right to know the extent of them. If I don't supply her with any actual facts (which would, of course, roll from her like drops of mercury, leaving no least impression), I can, without treachery to Mr. Leitzel, give her to understand that her husband doesn't spend, in the course of a year, more than one thirtieth of the interest on his capital."

She doubted, however, whether even a succinct statement like that would make any difference to Margaret unless she became a mother; for Catherine believed she had succeeded, though with some difficulty, in impressing upon her friend her own theory that the divine right of motherhood ought to make a woman, by law, a full and equal partner in all her husband's "worldly goods."

"I certainly did have a time persuading her that my theory is of any importance in our modern social economy. Wait until the poor child learns to know the Pennsylvania Dutch idea of woman's economic position, and until she begins to get a little acquainted with the man she has married!"

She drew a long breath as she reached the front door of her "rented" home. "Well," she concluded, "my intimacy with my employer's wife promises some excitement!"