Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.
“I don’t know that I can explain,” she faltered.
He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth. The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face, which had a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the surface-refinement of its setting.
“Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?” he asked.
“In our ideas—?”
“The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to stand for.” He paused a moment. “The ideas on which our marriage was founded.”
The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then—she was sure now that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it was founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his house to examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of course—the house rests on it—but one lives abovestairs and not in the cellar. It was she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the religion of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel the need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage as frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the primitive needs of the heart, and needed no special sanction to explain or justify it.
“Of course I still believe in our ideas!” she exclaimed.
“Then I repeat that I don’t understand. It was a part of your theory that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?”
She hesitated. “It depends on circumstances—on the public one is addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them don’t care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are attracted simply by its novelty.”
“And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and learned the truth from each other.”
“That was different.”
“In what way?”
“I was not a young girl, to begin with. It is perfectly unfitting that young girls should be present at—at such times— should hear such things discussed—”
“I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that such things never ARE discussed before young girls; but that is beside the point, for I don’t remember seeing any young girl in my audience to-day—”
“Except Una Van Sideren!”
He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.
“Oh, Miss Van Sideren—naturally—”
“Why naturally?”
“The daughter of the house—would you have had her sent out with her governess?”
“If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in my house!”
Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile. “I fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself.”
“No girl knows how to take care of herself—till it’s too late.”
“And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of self-defence?”
“What do you call the surest means of self-defence?”
“Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to the marriage tie.”
She made an impatient gesture. “How should you like to marry that kind of a girl?”
“Immensely—if she were my kind of girl in other respects.”
She took up the argument at another point.
“You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect young girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation—” She broke off, wondering why she had spoken.
Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the beginning of their discussion. “What you tell me is immensely flattering to my oratorical talent—but I fear you overrate its effect. I can assure you that Miss Van Sideren doesn’t have to have her thinking done for her. She’s quite capable of doing it herself.”
“You seem very familiar with her mental processes!” flashed unguardedly from his wife.
He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.