“There!” she said, implying that her fingers
had been worked to the bone by a brutal taskmaster.
He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her
an object-lesson and that the matter was closed, but
on the contrary it was merely beginning. Laundry
pile followed laundry pile—at long intervals;
dearth of handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief—at
short ones; not to mention dearth of sock, of shirt,
of everything. And Anthony found at length that
either he must send it out himself or go through the
increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with
Gloria.
On their way East they stopped two days in Washington,
strolling about with some hostility in its atmosphere
of harsh repellent light, of distance without freedom,
of pomp without splendor—it seemed a pasty-pale
and self-conscious city. The second day they made
an ill-advised trip to General Lee’s old home
at Arlington.
The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous
people, and Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm
brewing. It broke at the Zoo, where the party
stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt
of monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down
the curse of Heaven upon monkeys, including in her
malevolence all the passengers of the bus and their
perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.
Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There
it met other busses and immediately a swarm of women
and children were leaving a trail of peanut-shells
through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length
into the room where he was married. On the wall
of this room a pleasing sign announced in large red
letters “Ladies’ Toilet.” At
this final blow Gloria broke down.
“I think it’s perfectly terrible!”
she said furiously, “the idea of letting these
people come here! And of encouraging them by making
these houses show-places.”
“Well,” objected Anthony, “if they
weren’t kept up they’d go to pieces.”
“What if they did!” she exclaimed as they
sought the wide pillared porch. “Do you
think they’ve left a breath of 1860 here?
This has become a thing of 1914.”
“Don’t you want to preserve old things?”
“But you can’t, Anthony. Beautiful
things grow to a certain height and then they fail
and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.
And just as any period decays in our minds, the things
of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re
preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine
that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown,
for instance. The asses who give money to preserve
things have spoiled that too. Sleepy Hollow’s
gone; Washington Irving’s dead and his books
are rotting in our estimation year by year—then
let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things
should. Trying to preserve a century by keeping
its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive
by stimulants.”
