“There’s only one answer to these attacks,” she said to me. “You must give up your apartment and move to this hotel. We must open the house and live in it together and entertain together.” I was not unprepared. I had threshed out the whole matter with myself, had made my choice between the two courses open to me--or, rather, had forced myself to see the truth that there was in decency but the one course. “Very well,” said I to her--and that was all. I moved to the Plaza the same day; I was seen constantly with her; I did my best to show the world that all was serene between us. In fact, if you saw us during those scandal-clouded days you may have thought us a couple on a honeymoon. Behind the scenes we quarreled--about anything, about everything, about nothing--as people do when forced to play in public the farce of billing and cooing lovers. Especially if one of them has not the faintest glimmer of a sense of humor. But in public---- The newspapers soon had to drop their campaign of slander by insinuation. So it came to pass that by the opening of the season Edna and I were installed in the big house, decidedly improved now thanks to the collecting both of ideas and of things she had done abroad. And we were giving all kinds of parties, with me taking part to an extent I should have laughed at beforehand as impossible. She had become so irritating to me that the mere sight of her put me in a rage. Have you ever been forced into intimate daily contact with a nature that is thoroughly artificial--after you have discovered its artificiality, its lack of sincerity, its vanity and pretense and sex trickery? There is, as we all know, in everyone of us a streak of artificiality, of self-consciousness, a fondness for posing to seem better than we are. But somewhere beneath the pose there is usually a core of sincerity, a genuine individuality, perhaps a poor thing but still a real thing. It may be there was this reality somewhere in Edna. I can only say that I was never granted a sight of it. And I rather suspect that she, like most of the fashion-rotted women and men, had lost by a process of atrophy through suppression and disuse the last fragment of reality. Had Gabriel’s trumpet sounded and the great light from the Throne revealed the secrets of all hearts, it would have penetrated in her to nothing but posing within posing. I shall get no sympathy from man or woman--or fellow-beast--after talking thus of a woman and a lady. It is the convention to speak gallant lies to and about women--and to treat them as if they were beneath contempt. So my habit of treating them well and speaking the truth about them will be condemned and denounced with the triple curse. Well--I shall try to live through it.