Howard had had a long training at the correct standpoint and in right thinking. But the influences were there, were at work, were destroying his devotion to a social and political ideal wholly alien to the life he was now living under the leading of his wife. He did not blame her, indeed he could not justly have blamed her, for his falling away from what he knew were correct principles for him. While she had brought him into this environment, while at first it was in large part for her that he gave so much time and thought to the accumulation of wealth, soon love of luxury, dependence upon a train of servants, fondness for the great extravagances to which New York tempts the rich and those living near the rich, became stronger in him than it was in her. And through the inevitable reaction of environment upon the man, the central point in his valuation of men and women tended to shift from the fundamentals, mind and character, to the surface qualities--dress and style and manners and refinement, and even dress.
This process of demoralisation was well advanced when they moved from the apartment. After four years of “expansion” there, they had begun to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real New York “establishment.”
“Isn’t this just the house for us?” she said. “I hate huge, big houses. Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now this house is just big enough. You don’t know how wonderful it would be.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” he laughed, “and you must try it.” He was as enthusiastic as she.
In the late autumn the house was ready; and there was not a more artistic interior in New York. It was not so much the result of great expense as of intelligence and taste. It was an expression of an individuality--a revelation of a woman’s beautiful mind, inspired by love.
“At last I have something to interest, to occupy me,” she said. “This is our very own, through and through our own. It will be such a pleasure to me to keep it always like this.”
“You--degenerated into a household drudge,” he mocked. “Why, you used to laugh at me when I held up a wife who was a good housekeeper as one of my ideals.”