The wild piquance of being myself--who but for extreme saneness would be mad--rises up and smashes that concept.
But being a Right Shape and Size I involuntarily imagine it.
Fleetingly I imagine a flat in the West Seventies in New York, or a bungalow on the Jersey side, or a middle-sized house in a middle-sized town in Middle-West Illinois--whichever might happen--with me set marriedly down in the midst of it like a suitable maggot in a suitable nut. Suitableness, diametrically opposed to Romance, is its keynote.
I fancy me walking about my married house mornings after breakfast in a neat linen dress and high-heeled satin slippers: snipping dead leaves off my window-sill plants, dusting bits of porcelain, giving my maid some tame household directions. My Body looks slender and supple and newly-married and in-the-drawing in the linen house-dress. The geometric gods regard me with immense satisfaction as being an exact proved theorem. I go to the telephone to order some Little Neck clams and some vermouth cocktails for dinner, and a roast and some Brussels sprouts and the assemblings of a salad: and in it I am ingrainedly domestic, dreadfully useful, a strong pillar of the vast good nice world.
Afternoons I go out to a modiste’s to fit a gown, or to a mild bridge-party along with other suitable women, or to a matinée with a suitable neighbor.
Everything is perfectly right in my insides and in my thoughts: my thoughts run in little troughs in which there is no leakage or deviation, thoughts of a dreadful niceness, thoughts which ever presuppose potted plants on my window-sills.
Evenings I go out with my husband, or sit around with my husband, or take leave of him for a few hours at the hall door.
My husband would be the sort of man that is called a Good Scout. And he would have married me not for my wistfulness or wickedness or weirdness but for that I am a proper Shape and Size, with a smooth proper covering of flesh, to make a suitable sizable wife. And he would be a heavy grappling anchor to hold me fast in an ocean of domesticness.
Men of the genus Good Scout are all fiercely alike. All women, no matter what their genus, are exceptions to the rule. But men--rich men, poor men, beggar-men, thieves: so only they are Good Scouts--are of marvelous sameness. It comes from the want of minute lifelong pinpricking care of petticoats and potted plants--a detailed intensely personal sort of pain which touches dull solid tones of individuality with vivid various spots of color.