and dryer – must eventually be tinder, easily lighted and destroyed.
Chapter X
The Counsel of Winter: Fortune’s Ambassador Calls
In the light of the world’s attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie’s mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?[41]
In the view of a certain stratum of society, Carrie was comfortably established – in eyes of the starveling, beaten by every wind and gusty sheet of rain, she was safe in a halcyon harbor. Drouet had taken three rooms, furnished, in Ogden Place, facing Union Park, on the West Side. That was a little, green-carpeted breathing spot than which, to-day, there is nothing more beautiful in Chicago.[42] It afforded a vista pleasant to contemplate. The best room looked out upon the lawn of the park, now sear and brown, where a little lake lay sheltered. Over the bare limbs of the trees, which now swayed in the wintry wind, rose the steeple of the Union park Congregational Church, and far off the towers of several others.
The rooms were comfortably enough furnished. There was good Brussels carpet on the floor, rich in dull red and lemon shades, and representing large jardinières[43] filled with gorgeous, impossible flowers. There was a large pier-glass mirror[44] between the two windows. A large, soft, green, plush-covered couch occupied one corner, and several rocking-chairs were set about. Some pictures, several rugs, a few small pieces of bric-а-brac, and the tale of contents is told.
In the bedroom, off the front room, was Carrie’s trunk, bought by Drouet, and in the wardrobe built into the wall quite an array of clothing – more than she had ever possessed before, and of very becoming designs. There was a third room for possible use as a kitchen, where Drouet had Carrie establish a little portable gas stove for the preparation of small lunches, oysters, Welsh rarebits[45], and the like, of which he was exceedingly fond; and, lastly a bath. The whole place was cozy, in that it was lighted by gas and heated by furnace registers, possessing also a small grate, set with an asbestos back, a method of cheerful warming which was then first coming into use. By her industry and natural love of order, which now developed, the place maintained an air pleasing in the extreme.
Here, then, was Carrie, established in a pleasant fashion, free of certain difficulties which most ominously confronted her, laden with many new ones which were of a mental order, and altogether so turned about in all of her earthly relationships that she might well have been a new and different individual. She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world’s opinions, and saw a worse. Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.
“My, but you’re a little beauty,” Drouet was wont to exclaim to her.
She would look at him with large, pleased eyes.
“You know it, don’t you?” he would continue.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she would reply, feeling delight in the fact that one should think so, hesitating to believe, though she really did, that she was vain enough to think so much of herself.
Her conscience, however, was not a Drouet, interested to praise. There she heard a different voice, with which she argued, pleaded, excused. It was no just and sapient counselor, in its last analysis. It was only an average little conscience, habit, convention, in a confused way. With it, the voice of the people was truly the voice of God.
“Oh, thou failure!” said the voice.
“Why?” she questioned.
“Look at those about,” came the whispered answer. “Look at those who are good. How would they scorn to do what you have done. Look at the good girls; how will they draw away from such as you when they know you have been weak. You had not tried before you failed.”
It was when Carrie was alone, looking out across the park, that she would be listening to this. It would come infrequently – when something else did not interfere when the pleasant side was not too apparent, when Drouet was not there. It was somewhat clear in utterance at first, but never wholly convincing. There was always an answer, always the December days threatened. She was alone; she was desireful; she was fearful of the whistling wind. The voice of want made answer for her.
Such mental conflict was not always uppermost. Carrie was not by any means a gloomy soul. More, she had not the mind to get firm hold upon a definite truth. When she could not find her way out of the labyrinth of ill-logic which thought upon the subject created, she would turn away entirely.
Drouet, all the time, was conducting himself in a model way for one of his sort. He took her about a great deal, spent money upon her, and when he traveled took her with him. There were times when she would be alone for two or three days, while he made the shorter circuits of his business, but, as a rule, she saw a great deal of him.
“Say. Carrie,” he said one morning, shortly after they had so established themselves, “I’ve invited my friend Hurstwood to come out some day and spend the evening with us.”
“Who is he?” asked Carrie, doubtfully.
“Oh, he’s a nice man. He’s manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s.”
“What that?” said Carrie.
“The finest resort in town. It’s a way-up, smell place.”[46]
Carrie puzzled a moment. She was wondering what Drouet had told him, what her attitude would be.
“That’s all right,” said Drouet, feeling her thought.
“He doesn’t know anything. You’re Mrs. Drouet now.”
There was something about this which struck Carrie as slightly inconsiderate. She could see that Drouet did not have the keenest sensibilities.
“Why don’t we got married?” she inquired, thinking of the voluble promise he had made.
“Well, we will,” he said, “just as soon as I get this little deal of mine closed up.”
He was referring to some property which he said he had, and which required so much attention, adjustment, and what not, that somehow or other it interfered with his free moral, personal actions.
“Just as soon as I get back from my Denver trip in January we’ll do it.”
Carrie accepted this as basis for hope – it was a sort of salve to her conscience, a pleasant way out. Under the circumstances, things would be righted. Her actions would be justified.
She really was not enamored of Drouet. She was more clever than he. In a dim way, she was beginning to see where he lacked. If it had not been for this, if she had not been able to measure and judge him a way, she would have been utterly wretched in her fear of not gaining his affection, of losing his interest, of being swept away and left without an anchorage. As it was, she wavered a little, slightly anxious, at first, to gain him completely, but later feelings at ease in waiting. She was not exactly sure what she thought of him – what she wanted to do.
When Hurstwood called,
