As soon as I discovered, by being elected to membership, the existence of the universal order of abandoned husbands I took the liveliest interest in it. I was eager to learn whether there was another fool quite so foolish as myself, also whether the other fools were aware of their own folly. I found that most of them were rather proud of their membership, indulged in a ludicrous cocking of the comb and waggling of the wattles when they spoke of “my family over on the other side for a few years,” or of “my wife, poor woman, exiled in Paris to cultivate my daughter’s voice,” or of “my invalid wife--she has to live in the south of France. It’s a sad trial to us both.” Then--but this came much later--I discovered that these credulous, money-mailing fools, including myself, were not quite so imbecile, as a class, as they seemed to be. I discovered that they were secretly, often unconsciously, glad to be rid of their uncongenial families, and regarded any money they mailed as money well spent. They toiled cheerfully at distasteful tasks to get the wherewithal to keep their loved ones far, far away! The absence of Edna and Margot was an enormous relief to me. Edna was constantly annoying me to accompanying her to places to which I did not care to go. I like the theatre and I rather like some operas, but when I go to either it is for the sake of the performance. Going with Edna and her friends meant a tedious social function. We arrived late; we did not hear the play or the opera. As for the purely social functions, they were intolerable. Perhaps I should not have been so unhappy had I been the kind of man who likes to talk for the sake of hearing his own voice. Women are attentive listeners when the man who is talking is worth flattering. But I talk only for purpose, and when I listen I wish it to be to some purpose also. So, Edna, always urging me to do something distasteful or giving me the sense that she was about to ask me, or was irritated against me for being “disobliging”--Edna made me uncomfortable, increasingly uncomfortable as I grew more intelligent, more critical, more discriminating. As for Margot, I could not talk with her ten minutes without seeing protrude from her sweet loveliness some vulgarity of snobbishness. It irritated me to hear her speak to a servant. I had to rebuke her privately several times for the tone she used in addressing her governess or my secretary--this when her mother and all her mother’s friends used precisely the same repellent “gracious” tone in the same circumstances. I saw that she, sometimes instinctively, again deliberately tried to hide her real self from me, that I was making a hypocrite of her. Any sort of frankness or sympathy between her and me was impossible.