The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

adventure's just begun," he said.

"Anyhow," she murmured drowsily, "you can talk to me again. Just as if we weren't married."

* * * * *

And there is just about where they stand to-day--at the beginning, or hardly past the beginning, of what he spoke of as their real adventure; they are going forward prepared to make the best of it and see what happens.

What did happen within two or three days after this last conversation of theirs that I have chronicled was that Rose went back with Rodney and the twins to Chicago, stayed there only until Miss French could be summoned back from her vacation, and then went on to New York to a badly worried Alice and the now extremely urgent affairs of Dane & Company.

Summer is a slack time for a lawyer, of course, since judges are gentlemen who like long vacations. So Rodney persuaded Rose to take a bigger apartment in the same building and to put a card in the mail-box that would account for him as well as for herself. He came down pretty often, and always had, it must be owned, a rather hard time of it. The spectacle of Rose driving along an ungodly number of hours a day while he idled about doing nothing was one he found it hard to get used to. It didn't altogether reconcile him to it to have her point out that there were times when he drove like that. They had two or three good Sundays, though; one of them out on Long Island with John Galbraith--a meeting and the beginning of a friendship that Rose had been very keen to bring about.

Her work ended with a terrific climax in September, just about as his began, and Rose came back to Chicago, spent a joyous month with the twins and with the little of Rodney his office could spare of him. Then, taking the babies and their nurse with her, she went out to California to see her mother and Portia.

Without any special incentive, just the natural desire of a daughter and a sister for reunion after so long a parting would have taken her there.

But Rose had a special incentive. She wanted to talk to Portia. They hadn't had a real talk since that devastating day--ages ago--when, yielding to an impulse of passionate self-revelation, Portia had exhibited her great sacrifice and her equally great, though thwarted desire; had said to Rose, "I am the branch they cut off so that you could grow. You're living my life as well as yours. The only thing I ever could hate you for would be for failing." She wanted to tell Portia how the life she had given up the chance of living had grown in her sister's trust. She wanted Portia's, "Well done."

Also, as a practical matter of justice, she wanted to repay, as far as money could repay--what Portia, at such a cost, had given her. It was a project that had often been in her thoughts; at first, just as a dream, latterly, as a realizable hope.

Considered just as a visit to her mother and sister, the journey to California was a success. Her mother, especially, got a vast satisfaction out of the twins, and Rose herself an equal satisfaction out of seeing how happy and content she was.

She was writing a book--a sort of autobiography. Not that her life, as she modestly said, was worth writing about, but that the progress of the Cause she had devoted her life to could hardly be illustrated in a better way than with an account of that life; of the ideas she had found current in her girlhood; of the long struggle by means of which those ideas had become modified; and, last and most important, of the danger lest, now that the old fixed ideas had become fluid, they should flow in the wrong direction. Portia was acting as her amanuensis--faithful, competent, devoted, and just as of old--or perhaps more so, Rose couldn't be sure--ironic; a little acrid.

Mrs. Stanton's attitude toward Rose's own adventure perplexed and amused her a little. She'd half expected to be embarrassed with approbation. She was prepared to deprecate a little the idea that by the example of her revolt and her attained independence she had done a service to the great Cause. She didn't feel at all sure that she had; couldn't believe that she and Rodney, with all their struggles, had settled anything; and she had hesitated as to how far she could convey that doubt to her mother.

But she might have spared her pains. Mrs. Stanton's attitude, while it fell short of "the less said the better," was one, at least, of suspended judgment. She couldn't, conceivably, ever have left Henry Stanton. She couldn't, evidently, understand why Rose mightn't have done her wifely duty and been content with that. She felt it incumbent on women to demonstrate to men that the new liberties they sought would not, when granted, lead them to disregard the ties that were the essential foundations of Christian society. But Rose belonged to the new generation--a generation that confronted, no doubt, new problems, and would have to solve them for itself.

This suited Rose well enough. What she wanted from her mother, anyway, was just the old look of love and trust and confidence. And she got that abundantly.

The thing she wanted from Portia she didn't get. As long as any one else was by--her mother, or Miss French in charge of the twins--she and Portia chatted easily, on the best of terms. But, left alone with her--as it seemed to Rose she actually took pains not to be--Portia's manner took on that old ironic aloofness that had always silenced her when she was a girl. She made at last a resolute effort to break through.

"One of the things I came out for," she said, "was to talk to you--talk it all out with you. I want to know what sort of job you think I've made of it."

"You've evidently made a good job of the costume business," said Portia. "I read that little article about you in _Vanity_ about a month ago. That didn't seem to leave much doubt as to who's who."

"I don't mean that," said Rose. "I mean what sort of job of it altogether; of the--of the life that's yours as well as mine."

She stopped there and waited, but all the assent she got from Portia was that she forbore to change the subject. They were sitting in the study which her mother had just abandoned for her afternoon nap, and Portia had busied herself sorting over the litter of papers her mother's activities always left.

"I want to tell you all about it," Rose said. "I'd like to tell you every smallest thing about it, if it were possible, so that you could--remember it as I do."

She tried to do this; to give her sister--not a narrative (her letters, after all, had put Portia in possession of the outlines of the story)--but at least an interpretation of it that would go to the bottom; things she couldn't write in her letters, the actuating desires and hopes that lay behind the things she'd done. But the attempt collapsed. She was talking in a vacuum. Her phrases grew more disjointed until she felt that they were meaningless. At least, scrambling back to solid ground again, she told Portia that she wanted to pay back to her the cost of her education, as well as that could be calculated, and of her trousseau.

Portia's negative of this proposition was as keen and straight as a knife-edge. The thing wasn't to be discussed; not to be considered for an instant. "We're perfectly well off, mother and I. We're living easily within our income out here, and--we're as contented as possible." The cadence of those last three words had a finality about it that closed the subject.

Portia didn't want to share, vicariously, in the life she'd made possible for Rose. The branch had withered indeed and didn't want the pain of feeling the sap struggling up under its bark again. The ashes had better be left banked up about the fading coal. The silence was like the click of a closing door. Then Portia said:

"What does the North Side bunch think of you now you've come back? And those Lake Forest friends of yours? They must have been hideously scandalized. Are they going to forgive you?"

"Oh, they're lovely to me," said Rose. "The only one I've lost out with is Frederica. She'll be a long time making it up with me, if she ever does."

"She saw what Rodney went through while you were away, I expect," Portia suggested.

"That, of course," said Rose. "And then--well, my going away like that, especially as she began to see what the idea was, must have seemed a sort of criticism on her own way of life, which she's every reason to feel perfectly satisfied with. And that, after she'd let herself get really fond of me, and had brought me up by hand--which is what she did that first season, must be pretty hard to forgive. She has forgiven me, of course. She's a dear. But we've--sort of got to begin again."

Portia wanted to know about all the others: that pretty Williamson woman, and a few more whose names she remembered.

Rose told her; showed a feverish interest in the rather indifferent topic just to bury the memory of the one that had failed so dismally. She described a dinner or two she had been to since her return, and told of the little triumph that had been made for her on the occasion of the Chicago opening of _Come On In_. Everybody had been there and the Crawfords had given a supper dance for her at the Blackstone afterward. And driving in the last nail, she told of the feeble little witticism old Mrs. Crawford had made apropos of her return--a remark whose tinge of malice was so mild that it was felt by all to constitute an official sanction of her social rehabilitation.

Portia honestly enjoyed all that, but Rose went back to the hotel feeling pretty blue. (They were stopping at the hotel. The twins alone, to say nothing of Miss French and herself, would have been too much for the modest confines of the bungalow.) She wished she could have a good long talk, to-night, with Rodney.

She had a sense of somebody, away up above all mundane affairs--not responsible for them, perhaps, but capable, at all events, of thoroughly taking them in--smiling at them all with a sort of ferocious cynicism. In the foreground of this impression were the good friends--the really good friends she had just been telling Portia about, who had taken her back with so warm a welcome--because she'd succeeded; got away with it!

It was with a deeper feeling of melancholy that she thought of Portia and her mother. Portia, who had fought so gallantly and deserved so much, thwarted, withered, huddling her ashes around her so that her coal of fire might never be fanned into flame again. Her mother, living gently in the afterglow of an outworn gospel. Must every one come to an end like that when some initial store of energy was spent? Begin walling himself in against life? Stuffing new experiences into pigeonholes, unscrutinized? Would the time come when little Portia would have to begin treating _her_