The Friend of Women and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Page B

times in all that period, and then only at Letty’s or Alfreda’s, as Ralph now distrusted my influence and as Cora herself remembered too bitterly my premarital warnings and was probably afraid that I would stoop to saying “I told you so.” Though I never would have.
    As I put together the sorry tale of that time in her life, it appeared that the marriage was a constant struggle and Cora the constant loser. Ralph, so far as I could make out, was absolutely unyielding; he rarely even bothered to lose his temper. He simply laid down the law of where they should live and whom they should see, and refused her any funds which might have been used to introduce the least variety to their schedule. No child came to unite their interests; I suspected that separate bedrooms had been their rule. I could conclude only that Ralph was the kind of despot who was capable of deriving a grisly satisfaction in contemplating the plight of his victim. He did not, like Nero, play a lyre at the burning of Rome; he simply watched it.
    It was Letty Bernard Amory who, in her practical, realistic way, proposed a solution to Cora’s problem.
    â€œI want you to help me persuade Cora to take a job, Hubert,” she told me. “I’ve offered her a position on the
New Orange Review,
and Eliot has agreed to use her as a file clerk with the chance of rising to be a copy editor. Of course, she has no training, but she can learn. She’s plenty bright enough. And we’ve got to get her out of that apartment where she broods all day and fights with Ralph all night.”
    â€œWon’t she take the job?”
    â€œShe thinks Ralph will have a fit.”
    â€œI’ll talk to him. If he’ll see me.”
    Ralph did see me, and he gave a sullen consent to the change in his wife’s life more easily than I had expected. I supposed that even he had come to realize how badly he had misjudged his bride.
    I didn’t much like Cora’s working for Eliot, whom I deeply distrusted, but knowing how much he resented his wife’s ownership of the periodical and how little he must have liked her imposing an employee on him, I could hope only that he would give Cora a fairly wide berth. At any rate, things seemed to work themselves out, and in the next year the reverberations from the Larkin household appeared to have ceased. Cora was happy in her new job and told me that Eliot had even asked her to help him with the periodical.
    The Bernards’s magazine had originally been devoted to articles on politics and foreign affairs, contributed by supposed experts, but Letty and Eliot had greatly expanded its coverage. It now contained reviews of books, Broadway openings, musical events, and art shows, in addition to pieces on current events both national and international. Eliot had started a woman’s page, with topics ranging from civil rights to fashion, and it was to this that he had had the keenness to promote Cora after a brief time in the files.
    It seemed to Cora like a godsend. All her rather scattered wits appeared to focus in this new assignment. She had needed a cause to pull her disordered life together, and she now found it in women’s rights. Perhaps Ralph had come to symbolize for her everything in the male sex that kept women down, while Eliot had become the shining light of Ralph’s diametric opposite. A shabby peace had been replaced by a heroic war. She read everything about discrimination and the failure of equal treatment for women in every walk of life and came to work with shining eyes.
    â€œI’m becoming another Carrie Nation,” she exclaimed to me with a cheerful laugh. But all this came to a shuddering halt. One early morning, while I was still at breakfast, a pale and haggard Cora appeared on my doorstep. Ralph, she announced in shrill tones, wanted to divorce her, and on grounds of adultery, too! Would I accompany her to a session with his lawyer in the latter’s