The Second Generation Part 3

But when I--"

"It's no compliment to me," she cut in, the prompter to admit the truth because it would make him feel better. "He thinks I'm 'only a woman,'

fit for nothing but to look pretty as long as I'm a girl, and then to devote myself to a husband and children, without any life or even ideas of my own."

"Mother always seems cheerful enough," said Arthur. His content with the changed conditions which the prosperity and easy-going generosity of the elder generation were making for the younger generation ended at his own s.e.x. The new woman--idle and frivolous, ignorant of all useful things, fit only for the show side of life and caring only for it, discontented with everybody but her own selfish self--Arthur had a reputation among his friends for his gloomy view of the American woman and for his courage in expressing it.

"You are _so_ narrow-minded, Artie!" his sister exclaimed impatiently.

"Mother was brought up very differently from the way she and father have brought me up--"

"Have let you bring yourself up."

"No matter; I _am_ different."

"But what would you do? What can a woman do?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I _do_ know I hate a humdrum life."

There was the glint of the Ranger will in her eyes as she added: "Furthermore, I shan't stand for it."

He looked at her enviously. "You'll be free in another year," he said.

"You and Ross Whitney will marry, and you'll have a big house in Chicago and can do what you please and go where you please."

"Not if Ross should turn out to be the sort of man you are."

He laughed. "I can see Ross--or any man--trying to manage _you_! You've got too much of father in you."

"But I'll be dependent until--" Adelaide paused, then added a satisfactorily vague, "for a long time. Father won't give me anything.

How furious he'd be at the very suggestion of dowry. Parents out here don't appreciate that conditions have changed and that it's necessary nowadays for a woman to be independent of her husband."

Arthur compressed his lips, to help him refrain from comment. But he felt so strongly on the subject that he couldn't let her remarks pa.s.s unchallenged. "I don't know about that, Del," he said. "It depends on the woman. Personally, I'd hate to be married to a woman I couldn't control if necessary."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," cried Del, indignant. "Is _that_ your idea of control--to make a woman mercenary and hypocritical? You'd better change your way of thinking if you don't want Janet to be very unhappy, and yourself, too."

"That sounds well," he retorted, "but you know better. Take our case, for instance. Is it altogether love and affection that make us so cautious about offending father?"

"Speak for yourself," said Adelaide. "_I'm_ not cautious."

"Do try to argue fair, even if you are a woman. You're as cautious in your way as I am in mine."

Adelaide felt that he was offended, and justly. "I didn't mean quite what I said, Artie. You _are_ cautious, in a way, and sometimes. But often you're reckless. I'm frightened every once in a while by it, and I'm haunted by the dread that there'll be a collision between father and you.

You're so much alike, and you understand each other less and less, all the time."

After a silence Arthur said, thoughtfully: "I think I understand him.

There are two distinct persons inside of me. There's the one that was made by inheritance and by my surroundings as a boy--the one that's like him, the one that enables me to understand him. Then, there's this other that's been made since--in the East, and going round among people that either never knew the sort of life we had as children or have grown away from it. The problem is how to reconcile those two persons so that they'll stop wrangling and shaming each other. That's _my_ problem, I mean. Father's problem--He doesn't know he has one. I must do as he wishes or I'll not be at all, so far as he is concerned."

Another and longer silence; then Adelaide, after an uneasy, affectionate look at his serious profile, said: "I'm often ashamed of myself, Artie--about father; I don't _think_ I'm a hypocrite, for I do love him dearly. Who could help it, when he is so indulgent and when even in his anger he's kind? But you--Oh, Artie, even though you are less, much less, uncandid with him than I am, still isn't it more--more--less manly in you? After all, I'm a woman and helpless; and, if I seriously offend him, what would become of me? But you're a man. The world was made for men; they can make their own way. And it seems unworthy of you to be afraid to be yourself before _any_body. And I'm sure it's demoralizing."

She spoke so sincerely that he could not have resented it, even had her words raised a far feebler echo within him. "I don't honestly believe, Del, that my caution with father is from fear of his shutting down on me, any more than yours is," he replied. "I know he cares for me. And often I don't let him see me as I am simply because it'd hurt him if he knew how differently I think and feel about a lot of things."

"But are you right?--or is he?"

Arthur did not answer immediately. He had forgotten his horses; they were jogging along, heads down and "form" gone. "What do _you_ think?" he finally asked.

"I--I can't quite make up my mind."

"Do you think I ought to drudge and slave, as he has? Do you think I ought to spend my life in making money, in dealing in flour? Isn't there something better than that?"

"I don't think it's what a man deals in; I think it's _how_ he deals.

And I don't believe there's any sort of man finer and better than father, Arthur."

"That's true," he a.s.sented warmly. "I used to envy the boys at college--some of them--because their fathers and mothers had so much culture and knowledge of the world. But when I came to know their parents better--and them, too--I saw how really ignorant and vulgar--yes, vulgar--they were, under their veneer of talk and manner which they thought was everything. 'They may be fit to stand before kings' I said to myself, 'but my father _is_ a king--and of a sort they ain't fit to stand before.'"

The color was high in Del's cheeks and her eyes were brilliant. "You'll come out all right, Artie," said she. "I don't know just how, but you'll _do_ something, and do it well."

"I'd much rather do nothing--well," said he lightly, as if not sure whether he was in earnest or not. "It's so much nicer to dream than to do." He looked at her with good-humored satire. "And you--what's the matter with your practising some of the things you preach? Why don't you marry--say, Dory Hargrave, instead of Ross?"

She made a failure of a stout attempt to meet his eyes and to smile easily. "Because I don't love Dory Hargrave," she said.

"But you wouldn't let yourself if you could--would you, now?"

"It's a poor love that lags for let," she replied. "Besides, why talk about me? I'm 'only a woman.' I haven't any career, or any chance to make one."

"But you might help some man," he teased.

"Then you'd like me to marry Dory--if I could?"

"I'm just showing you how vain your theorizing is," was his not altogether frank reply. "You urge me to despise money when you yourself--"

"That isn't fair, Arthur. If I didn't care for Ross I shouldn't think of marrying him, and you know it."

"He's so like father!" mocked Arthur.

"No, but he's so like _you_," she retorted. "You know he was your ideal for years. It was your praising him that--that first made me glad to do as father and mother wished. You know father approves of him."

Arthur grinned, and Del colored. "A lot father knows about Ross as he really is," said he. "Oh, he's clever about what he lets father see.

However, you do admit there's some other ideal of man than successful workingman."

"Of course!" said Adelaide. "I'm not so silly and narrow as you try to make out. Only, I prefer a combination of the two. And I think Ross is that, and I hope and believe he'll be more so--afterwards."

Adelaide's tone was so judicial that Arthur thought it discreet not to discuss his friend and future brother-in-law further. "He isn't good enough for Del," he said to himself. "But, then, who is? And he'll help her to the sort of setting she's best fitted for. What side they'll put on, once they get going! She'll set a new pace--and it'll be a grand one."

At the top of the last curve in the steep road up from Deer Creek the horses halted of themselves to rest; Arthur and his sister gazed out upon the vast, dreamy vision--miles on miles of winding river s.h.i.+mmering through its veil of silver mist, stately hills draped in gauziest blue.

It was such uplifting vistas that inspired the human imagination, in the days of its youth, to breathe a soul into the universe and make it a living thing, palpitant with love and hope; it was an outlook that would have moved the narrowest, the smallest, to think in the wide and the large. Wherever the hills were not based close to the water's edge or rose less abruptly, there were cultivated fields; and in each field, far or near, men were at work. These broad-hatted, blue-s.h.i.+rted toilers in the ardent sun determined the turn of Adelaide's thoughts.

"It doesn't seem right, does it," said she, "that so many--almost everybody--should have to work so hard just to get enough to eat and to wear and a place to sleep, when there's so much of everything in the world--and when a few like us don't have to work at all and have much more than they need, simply because one happened to be born in such or such conditions. I suppose it's got to be so, but it certainly looks unjust--and silly."

"I'm not sure the workers haven't the best of it," replied Arthur. "They have the dinner; we have only the dessert; and I guess one gets tired of only desserts, no matter how great the variety."

"It's a stupid world in lots of ways, isn't it?"