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I’d always been prepared for the unexpected, where Cristina was concerned. One never knew, with that attenuated Aristotle in snake-skin shoes just which way the cat was going to jump. And a mere man, I was equally persuaded, would never interfere much with either her mental or her material activities.

That, at least, was my impression of the tinkling Cristina. But Cristina, apparently, wasn’t running true to form. She wasn’t being quite herself. Even an oaf knee-deep in his thirteenth chapter could see that a little of the luster had gone from her eyes and a trace of the old-time lilt from her laugh. She was moody and abstracted and self-immured, to say nothing of appearing unnecessarily sharp-tongued when I accused her of smoking too much.

So I went to my wife, in my predicament, as husbands have a habit of doing. I went to Margaret. And from Margaret came light.

“What’s the matter with Cristina?” I demanded as I overheard that young lady’s car go tearing past the library-windows and scatter the blue stone at the drive-corners before it vanished into the night.

“It’s Roddie,” explained Margaret as she ran a critical eye over my Scotch golf-stockings and seemed disappointed that no abraded surface demanded her darning-needle.

“What’s Roddie been doing?”

“He’s been acting atrociously with that Sheppard girl,” averred Margaret.

“But what’s that to Cristina?”

“It’s everything,” asserted my sister-in-law’s sister as she neatly turned the disappointing stockings into a ball.

“But I thought that Cristina had given him up. She told me herself she never wanted to see him again as long as she lived.”

“You don’t seem to know much about women.”

“I don’t,” I honestly acknowledged.

“If you did,” proclaimed Margaret, “you’d understand that a girl never gives up a man she’s in love with.”

“Oh, then Cristina’s still in love with her Roddie?”

“Of course she is.”

“Then why did she give him the go-by? Why did she chuck him? Why didn’t she stick to him?”

“There are times when a woman can’t,” explained the perspicacious Margaret. “We had a scrap or two ourselves, you’ll remember, before I finally succeeded in roping you in!”

I chose to disregard the acidulated note in my wife’s voice at the same time that I avoided the unhappy episode in my troubled past. But there was a thing or two I wanted to get clear on.

“Then you feel that Cristina will eventually rope her Roddie in, as you phrase it?”

“If she’s given half a chance.”

“And am I to infer from that that it’s the woman who does the pursuing in modern courtship?”

“Ask Cristina,” was Margaret’s unnecessarily curt reply.

And I intended to ask Cristina. But the thirteenth chapter had merged into the fourteenth before I had a chance to hold converse with that moody-eyed fly-by-night who seemed able to feather the nest of misery with an incredible number of social diversions. Housing Cristina, in fact, sometimes seemed calamitously like trying to cage a canary with an attack of tarantism. And when Cristina eventually came to tell me that I wasn’t a good color and that I’d better do eighteen holes with her before the Dannemans dropped in for dinner, she talked about something quite different from courtship.

“I wish,” said Cristina as she walked to the window, “I knew what was wrong with me.”

I didn’t answer Cristina, at the moment. But I put a paper-weight on my day’s work and swung about to inspect the young woman who presumptively possessed about everything in the world to make her happy, including a very exceptional brother-in-law.

“What’s the matter with women, anyway?” demanded Cristina, fixing me with a morose eye.

“Well, you’re a woman,” I pointed out. “What’s the answer?”

“I thought you knew everything,” derided Cristina, who had so recently intimated that her first mission in life was to be the improvement of my mind.

“Not quite,” I conceded, “though I have been bitten once or twice by Solomon’s dog. You’re probably smoking too much.”

“Rubbish,” said Cristina as she reached for a cigarette. “The trouble is I want something to do!”

“Then run along and get married and have half a dozen babies and you’ll probably forget about this weltschmerz that’s——”

“Now you’re getting vulgar,” cried Cristina.

“Biology,” I retorted, “is never vulgar. But even if you can’t have half a dozen babies, haven’t you your welfare work and your woman’s club and your musicales and your new car and theaters and bridge and picture galleries and shopping?”

“Those fripperies!” exclaimed Cristina, reminding me of a tawny tigress in a zoo cage as she paced my worn Sarouk. “I want something that counts, something real. And the trouble is,” she cried, turning on me with a look I couldn’t altogether approve of, “you men have taken those things away from women!”

“As I know the men of this fair land,” I protested, “they’re so busy giving things to women they haven’t time to gather up much in return.”

“Exactly!” countered the irrepressible Cristina. “You’ve glorified your manhood by giving us so much that you’ve really pauperized our own souls. We’re like the park squirrels that have been presented with peanuts every day until they’ve altogether forgotten how to provide for themselves. You’ve made the world a man’s world and shut us out of it and told us the hard work of life is really man’s and——”

“I thought women were more and more coming into it,” I interrupted.

“Oh, you’ve taken a few of us under your wing,” admitted Cristina, “but you’ve jolly well seen to it that we’ve none of the big jobs. And while you were doing that you took our regular work away from us and left us with such idle hands and empty heads that we have to dope ourselves with amusements and delude ourselves with the belief that the second-hand life of novels and plays and pictures can make up for the loss.”

It wasn’t often I saw the tinkling Cristina’s brow darkened by any such frown of frustration as at that moment shadowed her delicately incarnadined face. But I refused to feel sorry for her.

“Would you prefer staying walled up in a back garden with gillyflowers and jessamine and spiked lavender and treacle-possets and a sewing basket, the way your great-grandmother did?” I indignantly demanded.

“If I know anything about it,” retorted Cristina, “our great-grandmothers did a great deal more than decorate a gillyflower garden. As I recall it, they had flax to spin and wool to card and stockings and mufflers to knit and bread to bake and cream to churn and hams to cure and side-meat to pickle and beef-rolls to spice and dried apples to string and quilts to make and rugs to hook and pillows to stuff and peaches and pears to preserve and ale to brew and wine to bottle and candles to mold and damson jam to concoct and pillow-lace or cross-stitch embroidery to do in the evenings when they weren’t entertaining the curate and making poplin rompers for the unenlightened heathen of darkest Africa.”

I waited, with purely coerced patience, until Cristina had recovered her breath.

“And you modern women who were going to reform everything by law and now have to be reminded whether you’re Republican or Democrat on election day, why aren’t you rounding out your lives with something of the same homely devotion and simple-hearted passion to promote the health and comfort of others and the quiet patience and courage and tenderness and unselfishness that kept those older-fashioned females from talking about their rights while they so uncomplainingly fulfilled them?”

“For the simple reason,” retorted Cristina, fixing me with a rather glacial eye, “that you men won’t let us. We did once tan the hides and make the clothes and prepare the food for you lordly males. But you were so clever at contriving machines to do things so much quicker if not so much better than the human hand could do them that you took all our tribal jobs away from us. You industrialized life and crowded us into cities and let the factories do about everything we used to do. For centuries and centuries woman had been stitching the seams of the world, and you bowled her over with a sewing-machine. For ages and ages she had been drying the meats and berries to tide the family over its lean spells, and you put her out of business with a tin can. And when over a quarter of a century ago your diabolically clever inventors forced on her a leisure she neither wanted nor knew how to use, she had no need to learn the laws of work and lost what ability she had for sustained effort and——”

“And developed an aversion to listening to the other side of any question she might at the moment be championing,” I interpolated with more heat than I had intended.

“Well, isn’t it true,” demanded Cristina with a reproving quietness, “that modern machinery has changed modern life in the way I said and that woman’s restlessness is due to the idleness that twentieth-century life has thrust on her?”

“Not entirely,” I contended. “And I’ve never observed any undue idleness in the rural woman. Out in western Canada, in fact, I recall seeing twenty Doukhobor women dragging a plow to turn over the prairie sod for their first wheat crop. I may be wrong, of course, but to me they made a much nobler picture than twenty women fighting for the front seats at a lecture on ‘Efficiency as an expedient in morals.’”

Cristina’s laugh was a slightly satiric one.

“You mean, of course, that we’re much lovelier as draught-animals than as intellectual companions?”

“But you decline to be either,” I said as I watched Cristina somewhat indignantly powder her nose. “The thing that most impresses me is the modern woman’s aversion to toil, to sustained toil, unless that toil is in some way associated with the more decorative processes of life. And your second characteristic, my dear, is your catlike, feminine, impenetrable and imperturbable independence and your stubborn detachment from your husband’s cares and labors.”

“But I don’t happen to have a husband,” Cristina tartly reminded me.

“Perhaps that’s what’s the matter with you,” I as acrimoniously retorted.

“You’re a pig,” averred Cristina.

“And you’re merely a hunk of mud. I know, because that’s exactly what Aristotle called you. But to return to the amenities of impersonal discussion,” I continued, “it always impressed me that both in England and in France a man’s wife is really his partner. But in America it’s different. Even Henry James has complained that the New World wife knows nothing of her husband’s affairs except that they are of not the slightest importance.”

“And the poor idiot of a husband,” promptly retorted the lady with the luminous eyes, “is so ready to leave her outside that sacred circle of work, is so selfishly proud to think that he must shield her from every form of worry and care, that he’s satisfied to see her relapse into the harem type that spends all its time making itself attractive to the mate it can control only through his appetites!”

“Well, even Solomon has never told us why a well-turned ankle should so repeatedly put one over on a cultured mind,” I weakly admitted. “But there may be a glimmer of light in the suspicion that those so-called nobler minds among your up-to-date sisters have diffused their vitality in endless little channels of altruism and frittered away their primary force in a febrile circle of activities that possibly gets them a vice-presidency in a discussion club, but leaves them reluctant to nurse their own babies.”

“Aren’t we bungling into biology again?” queried the cold-eyed Cristina.

“It wasn’t me who hauled harems and appetites into this discussion,” I proclaimed. “What I was talking about was the American husband—and there’s a hero, I think, who really ought to have a monument put up to him. He may not be long on what the ladies call culture and he may not be unduly brilliant over a teacup, but he strikes me as being superlatively heroic in ministering to the wants of his mate, in accepting her at her own none too modest valuation, and in unconsciously transforming himself from a drudge into a devotee by that tranquil selflessness and unconsciousness of sacrifice which in your grandmother’s day was accepted as the peculiar prerogative of the female.”

Cristina sat down and regarded me with a provokingly estimative stare.

“The lady you married has never impressed me as adhering any too passionately to that particular opinion,” observed my over-cerebral sister-in-law.

“She at least married me,” I said with an acerbity I was sorry for, a moment after I’d spoken. For I could see the faint pink that mantled Cristina’s well-powdered cheek.

“That’s right, flaunt my being an old maid in my face,” she cried with a cold eye but a slightly tremulous underlip.

“Oh, you’ll marry quickly enough,” I protested by way of restitution, “when you get tired of peeling the onion of curiosity.”

“I don’t quite understand about peeling the onion,” said the lady with the clouded brow.

“Well, that’s what too many of you modern women are doing,” I announced. “You’re taking up the onion of life and trying to peel away the sordid outer wrappings and when you’ve removed layer after layer you suddenly discover there’s no onion left.”

Cristina took a deep breath. She looked very lovely and troubled and Mona-Lisa-like in the late afternoon sunlight that filtered through the mulberry-colored curtains.

“Do you mean we’re demanding a fineness of life that really isn’t there?” she asked. “That we’re in some way missing our true mission through this newfangled restlessness and——”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “This restlessness of women isn’t quite as newfangled as you imagine. And that’s where a little historical background is a bit of a help to the brute known as Man. The women of Sparta must have had a touch of this same restlessness, for this same old Aristotle that I’ve already mentioned complains that the economic independence of Spartan women was surely one of the causes of that state’s decadence.”

“But Sparta seems rather a long way back,” complained the cloudy-eyed Cristina.

“In that case,” I conceded, “let’s come down to the lady of Rome, about the time a certain Porcian orator was raising merry hell over the goings-on of the feminists of the day.

“Cato sounds pretty modern when in his speech defending the Oppian Law he voices the time-worn uneasiness of the male when confronted by the insurgent female. ‘If, Romans,’ Livy has somewhere reported that orator as saying, ‘every individual among us had made it a rule to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex.’ And although Metellus Macedonicus condoned marriage on patriotic grounds, he rather anticipated much later pessimists by proclaiming: ‘If we could get along without wives, we should all dispense with the nuisance.’ And she was a bit of a club woman, too, that Roman Lady, for Juvenal somewhere asserts that he hates the woman who is always consulting the grammatical rules of Palæmon and recalling verses unknown to him and correcting the phrases of his friends. And even Cicero wanted to see established a censor who should teach men how to govern their wives properly. And Seneca was certainly twentieth-centuryish enough when he complained that it was hard to keep a wife whom every one admired, and even harder, if no one happened to admire her, to live with her yourself. So you see, fair one, that even in your wickednesses you’re not as original as you fancied.”

Cristina stood up and shook out her skirts.

“You’re very brave when you get behind a musty old wall of books,” proclaimed the insurgent daughter of to-day, “but I can’t help wondering how many of those moth-eaten old insults you’d trot out if Margaret were here!”

“By the way,” I asked, “where is Margaret?”

“She’s down baking those oysters Rockefeller that you and Bill Danneman are so fond of,” explained Cristina. “And I’m sorry I won’t be here to help you enjoy them.”

“Why not?” I asked as Cristina powdered her nose.

“Because I’m going out on the Little Lake with Dickie Frendel.”

“Canoeing?”

“Yes, canoeing and uking and everything!”

I didn’t like either the flippant note in Cristina’s voice or the reckless look in her eye.

“Why,” I demanded, “do you waste your time on a fudge-eater like young Frendel?”

Cristina studied my face for a moment of silence.

“Because you, old top, refuse to waste your time on me.”

“But I’ve wasted a good hour on you,” I pointed out, a trifle perplexed, as I proceeded to straighten up my desk, by a certain tremulous note that had crept into Cristina’s small voice.

“But all you do is powwow and preach,” objected the lawless young lady with the unsatisfied light in her eyes.

“What d’you want me to do?” I demanded with purely defensive bruskness.

“Love me a little,” announced the unabashed Cristina. “I’m lonely.”

She looked very alluring, in the mellowed side-light that came from the big windows with the mulberry-colored drapes. She looked flower-like and forlorn and inarticulately in need of consolation. But I knew that any man, at that particular moment, would be merely a pinch-hitter for her inaccessible Roddie. And I’d no intention of seeing any lawless young Calypso practising on me.

“I do love you, Cristina,” I solemnly averred. “I do love you,” I repeated as I put the desk between her outstretched arms and my slightly arthritic frame. “I love you, my child, as your own father might!”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Cristina with a doe-like stamp of her foot on my worn desk-rug. And as I solemnly proceeded to restore my solemn big books to their cases she stood there studying me, studying me with an unmistakable look of pity in her eye. Then, having powdered her nose for what must have been the twentieth time that day, she turned and walked slowly out of the room.