“It wasn’t until after I married him that I realized how idle his life is,” she remarked.  “At home all the men have something to do, running their plantations, or getting elected to some office.  But Douglas never does anything that I can possibly think is useful.”

His fortune was invested in New York City real-estate, she went on to explain.  There was an office, with a small army of clerks and agents to attend to it—­a machine which had been built up and handed on to him by his ancestors.  It sufficed if he dropped in for an hour or two once a week when he was in the city, and signed a batch of documents now and then when he was away.  His life was spent in the company of people whom the social system had similarly deprived of duties; and they had, by generations of experiment, built up for themselves a new set of duties, a life which was wholly without relationship to reality.  Into this unreal existence Sylvia had married, and it was like a current sweeping her in its course.  So long as she went with it, all was well; but let her try to catch hold of something and stop, and it would tear her loose and almost strangle her.

As time went on, she gave me strange glimpses into this world.  Her husband did not seem really to enjoy its life.  As Sylvia put it, “He takes it for granted that he has to do all the proper things that the proper people do.  He hates to be conspicuous, he says.  I point out to him that the proper things are nearly always conspicuous, but he replies that to fail to do them would be even more conspicuous.”

It took me a long time to get really acquainted with Sylvia, because of the extent to which this world was clamouring for her.  I used to drop in when she ’phoned me she had half an hour.  I would find her dressing for something, and she would send her maid away, and we would talk until she would be late for some function; and that might be a serious matter, because somebody would feel slighted.  She was always “on pins and needles” over such questions of precedent; it seemed as if everybody in her world must be watching everybody else.  There was a whole elaborate science of how to treat the people you met, so that they would not feel slighted—­or so that they would feel slighted, according to circumstances.

To the enjoyment of such a life it was essential that the person should believe in it.  Douglas van Tuiver did believe in it; it was his religion, the only one he had. (Churchman as he was, his church was a part of the social routine.) He was proud of Sylvia, and apparently satisfied when he could take her at his side; and Sylvia went, because she was his wife, and that was what wives were for.  She had tried her best to be happy; she had told herself that she was happy yet all the time realizing that a woman who is really happy does not have to tell herself.