The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 23

"But isn't that logical?" Mrs. Wayne pursued. "If all women are so, and she's a woman?"

"Ah, logic, dear lady," said Wilsey, holding up a finger--"logic, you know, has never been the specialty of your s.e.x."

"Of course it's logic," said Lanley, crossly. "If you say all Americans are liars, Wilsey, and you're an American, the logical inference is that you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn't mean that she thinks all women are inferior--"

"I must say I prefer men," she answered almost coquettishly.

"If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I'd believe in giving them the vote," said Wilsey.

"Please don't," she answered. "I don't want it."

"Ah, the clever ones don't."

"I never pretended to be clever."

"Perhaps not; but I'd trust your intuition where I would pay no attention to a clever person."

Lanley laughed.

"I think you'd better express that a little differently, Wilsey," he said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.

"My daughter came to me the other day," he went on to Mrs. Baxter, "and said, 'Father, don't you think women ought to have the vote some day?'

and I said, 'Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.'"

"There's no answer to that," said Mrs. Baxter.

"I fancy not," said Wilsey. "I think I put the essence of it in that sentence."

"If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad."

"O Mrs. Baxter," said Mrs. Wayne, "really you don't understand women--"

"I don't? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman."

"All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you said; but that isn't _all_ they are. The women I see, the wives of my poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they're not the sort of women you describe. Perhaps," she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward concession, "perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as you say--"

Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. "My friends, Mrs. Wayne," she said--"my friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your drunkards."

Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.

"Shall we go up-stairs?" he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his arm. "An admirable answer that of yours," he murmured as he led her from the room, "admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and your friends."

"Of course you realize that she doesn't know any of the people I know,"

said Mrs. Baxter. "Why should she begin to abuse them?"

Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.

"Just because she doesn't know them. That, I'm afraid, is the rub. That's what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists--the sense of being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little _usage du monde_. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm, your background, your grand manner."

They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a common impulse.

Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.

"I'm so sorry I've spoiled your party," she said.

"You've done much worse than that," he returned gravely.

"O Mr. Lanley," she wailed, "what have I done?"

"You've spoiled a friendship."

"Between you and me?"

He shook his head.

"Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet I've been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly--"

"Oh, I'm so terrible when I'm frank," she said.

"Do I talk like that?"

She looked at him and looked away again.

"Good G.o.d! you think I do!"

"No, you don't talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a good deal."

"I don't want to," he answered. "I'm sixty-four, but I don't ever want to talk like Wilsey. Won't you stop me whenever I do?"

Mrs. Wayne sighed.

"It will make you angry."

"And if it does?"

"I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier."

He looked up, startled.

"I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?"

"You said you might be old-fashioned but--"

"Don't, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne." He went on more seriously: "I've got to an age when I can't expect great happiness from life--just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but since I've known you, I've felt a lightening, a brightening, an intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness as anything I've ever felt, and I don't want to lose it on account of a reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there."

He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her departure. He a.s.sisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so light-hearted.

He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.