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WHILE below they took me into the patio, that quiet inner garden which was so attractive from above. It was a lovely place. The moon was riding high and shone down into it; a slender fountain spray rose shimmering from its carved basin; on the southern-facing wall a great wistaria vine drooped in budding purple, and beds of violets made the air rich with soft fragrance.
Here and there were people walking; and in the shadowy corners sat young couples, apparently quite happy.
“I suppose you don’t know the names of one of them,” I suggested.
“On the contrary, I know nearly all,” answered Hallie. “These apartments are taken very largely by friends and acquaintances. You see, the gardens and roofs are in common, and there are the reading-rooms, ballrooms, and so on. It is pleasanter to be friends to begin with, and most of us get to be afterward, if we are not at first.
“But surely there are some disagreeable people left on earth!”
“Yes; but where there is so much more social life people get together in congenial sets,” put in Nellie; “just as we used to in summer resorts.,,
“There aren’t so many bores and fools as there used to be, John,” Owen remarked. “We really do raise better people. Even the old ones have improved. You see, life is so much pleasanter and more interesting.”
“We’re all healthier, Uncle John, because we’re better fed; that makes us more agreeable.”
“There’s more art in the world to make us happier,” said Jerrold. Hallie thinks it’s all due to her everlasting bread and butter. Listen to that now!”
From a balcony up there in the moonlight came a delicious burst of melody; a guitar and two voices, and the refrain was taken up from another window, from one corner of the garden, from the roof; all in smooth accord.
“Your group here must be an operatic one,” I suggested. But my nephew answered that it was not, but that music — good music — was so common now, and so well taught, that the average was high in both taste and execution.
We sat late that night, my new family bubbling over with things to say, and filling my mind with a confused sense of new advantages, unexplained and only half be lieved.
I could not bring myself to accept as commonplace facts the unusual excellences so glibly described, and I suppose my silence showed this as well as what I said, for my sister presently intervened with decision:
“We must all stop this for tonight,” she said. “John feels as if he was being forcibly fed — he’s got to rest. Then I suggest that tomorrow Owen take him in hand — go off for a tramp, why don’t you? — and really straighten out things. You see, there are two distinct movements to consider, the unconscious progress that would have taken place anyway in thirty years, and then the deliberate measures adopted by the ‘New Lifers,’ and it’s rather confusing. I’ve labored with him all the way home now; I think the man’s point of view will help.”
Owen was a big man with a strong, wholesome face, and a quizzical little smile of his own. He and I went up the river next morning in a swift motor boat, which did not batter the still air with muffled banging as they used to do, and strolled off in the bright spring sunshine into Palisade Park.
“We’ve saved all the loveliest of it — for keeps,” he said. “Out here, where the grass and trees are just as they used to be, you won’t be bothered, and one expositor will be easier to handle than four at once. Now, shall I talk, or will you ask questions?”
“I’d like to ask a few questions first, then you can expound by the hour. Do give me the long and short of this ‘Women-waked-up’ proposition. What does it mean — to a man?”
Owen stroked his chin.
“No loss,” he said at length; “at least, no loss that’s not covered by a greater gain. Do you remember the new biological theory in regard to the relative position of the sexes that was beginning to make headway when we were young?”
I nodded. “Ward’s theory? Oh, yes; I heard something of it. Pretty far-fetched, it seemed to me.”
“Far-fetched and dear-bought, but true for all that. You’ll have to swallow it. The female is the race type; the male is her assistant. It’s established beyond peradventure.”
I meditated, painfully. I looked at Owen. He had just as happy and proud a look as if he was a real man — not merely an Assistant. I though of Jerrold — nothing cowed about him; of the officers and men on the ship; of such men as I had seen in the street.
“I suppose this applies in the main to remote origins?” I suggested.
“It holds good all through life — is just as true as it ever was.”
“Then — do you mean that women run everything, and men are only helpers?”
“Oh, no; I wasn’t talking about human life at all — only about sex. ‘Running things’ has nothing to do with that. Women run some businesses and are in practically all, but men still do the bulk of the world’s work. There is a natural division of labor, after all.”
This was pleasant to hear, but he dashed my hopes.
“Men do almost all the violent plain work — digging and hewing and hammering; women, as a class, prefer the administrative and constructive kinds. But all that is open yet, and settling itself gradually; men and women are working everywhere. The big change which Nellie is always referring to means simply that women ‘waked up’ to a realization of the fact that they were human beings.”
“What were they before, pray?”
“Only female beings.”
“Female human beings, of course,” said I.
“Yes; a little human, but mostly female. Now they are mostly human. It is a great change.”
“I don’t follow you. Aren’t they still wives and mothers?”
“They are still mothers — far more so than they were before, as a matter of fact; but as to being wives — there’s a difference.”
I was displeased, and showed it.
“Well, is it Polygamy, or Polyandry, or Trial Marriages, or what?”
Owen gazed at me with an expression very like Nellie’s.
“There it is,” he said. “You can only think about women in some sort of relation to men, of a change in marriage relations as merely a change in kind; whereas what has happened is a change in degree. We still have monogamous marriages, on a much purer and more lasting plane than a generation ago; but the word ‘wife’ does not mean what it used to.”
“Go on — I can’t follow you at all.”
“A ‘wife’ used to be a possession; ‘wilt thou be mine?’ said the lover, and the wife was his.”
“Well — whose else is she now?” I asked with some sharpness.
“She
