The Author

Anne O'Hagan was born in Washington, D. C. in 1869, daughter of Captain John O'Hagan and Mary Fennell O'Hagan. She graduated from Boston University in 1890.

O'Hagan was a member of Heterodoxy, a feminist debating club based in Greenwich Village and she was a founding officer of the Women's Democratic Union. She served on the board of the Equal Suffrage League of New York, and the Women's Suffrage Study Club, among other New York suffrage organizations. She also supported the reform of prohibition laws. O'Hagan was a member of the Protestant Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village at the same time as Eleanor Roosevelt.

As a journalist, O'Hagan was a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, Harper's, Munsey's, Collier's, and other popular periodicals, often writing on feminist topics. For example, an article for Munsey's magazine in 1901 titled "The Athletic Girl," celebrated the entry of women and girls into active recreation, for their long-term health as well as for their release from restrictive clothing and passive pursuits. O'Hagan discusses the differing roles of the spinster and the married woman and how women can choose to be celibate and have mature conversations with single men.

Of particular interest to her was the exploitation of young women shop clerks. After suffrage, Shinn covered American politics for the New York Times, including a long interview with the future presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith in 1922.

O'Hagan participated in several collaborative fiction projects, where multiple authors would write chapters of a novel or series, including The Good Family series in Harper's Magazine (1907), and The Sturdy Oak serialized political novel in Collier's Magazine (1917). O'Hagan was also a prolific writer of short fiction.

Anne O'Hagan is thought to have lived with her mother until she married Francis Adin Shinn in 1908. She is thought to have written an anonymous article that described the problems of a modern single woman who lived with her old-fashioned mother. She died in June 1933, age 63, after a brief illness, in New York City. Her funeral was held in Litchfield, Connecticut, where she had a country home. The O'Hagan Shinn Scholarship Fund at Boston University was established in 1936 in her memory, for scholarships in English literature.

Bread Eaten in Secret

IT is difficult for even the most subtly agile of moralists to append the quod erat demonstrandum to this record of the final solution of Susan Apthorpe's emotional complexities. Twist the tale as one will, there is no point at which he can say: "Here was the great mistake; here she had indubitable choice. Had she but turned in this direction the outcome would have been utterly different." Chance, blind and cruel, played so large a role in the shaping of events; and temperament, as capricious, as uncontrollable, as chance, walked hand in hand with it. Even the mysteries among which the little drama came to its culmination were, perhaps, but Susan's fancies grown all-victorious.

Susan was twenty-two, and a normal young woman as young women go, when she met Hardaker. She was not a beauty, but she had charm—laughter, whimsy, wit of an uncertain, fine, feminine flavor, imagination. The impulsiveness of her youth was tempered with something of the poise of a woman of the world. Left an orphan, and not an heiress, before the end of her first decade, she had early learned something of the arts of concealment, of apparent subserviency, of simulated self-forgetfulness—arts whose practice is necessitated by a shifting residence among semi-indifferent relatives. Her tact, however, never degenerated into hypocrisy; she was, at bottom, too affectionate not to be willing to pay, in helpfulness and entertainment, for the haphazard care and shelter she received. But from the time when the child first perceived that the world had not been constructed for her—a fact which orphaned children recognize many years before their fellows—she had made a little world of her own, in which she ruled, a kind and lovely young princess. She emerged from it cheerfully enough at the call of the actual, and her guardians never had cause even to describe her as "dreamy," so immediate was her return.

Hardaker, at the time they met, was in the zenith of his social popularity, though he had not yet won complete recognition as an artist. He was, perhaps, forty; but he had carried into this beginning of middle age all the slim, strong grace of body which had made him the most picturesque wrestler of his day in college. His was the classic regularity of feature which Susan lacked. Only his mouth, less full, with less of that sensuous joyousness which we call pagan than the Greek type, laid a modern impress upon his face. It was almost thin-lipped, aristocratic, its native austerity converted into something which in repose resembled cruelty, as is often the way when a man of predominant intellect is deliberately a pleasure-seeker.

No one of the group assembled at Cedarholm, the Willis Apthorpe suburban place, expected Hardaker to be seriously interested in Susan, for whom the Willis Apthorpes were dutifully providing that season. When it became evident that the young woman held his attention for more than the evening or two for which the least fascinating of Susan's sex might hope to hold it, Mrs. Willis conscientiously did her utmost for her husband's cousin. She recalled to the girl the discrepancy in their ages, warned her that Hardaker was not of the marrying type, and related enough of the story of his successes with women to indicate that these were matters of notoriety rather than of fair renown. Susan received the information with the right degree of worldly, familiar indifference, tempered with a little youthful disgust.

"I don't think we need worry, Willis," said Mrs. Willis that night. "Susan has a good deal of the coquette in her makeup. I doubt if she'll ever be very hard hit. And I think I succeeded in making her see that he will be a drab, uninteresting person of fifty when she is in the very flower of her young matronhood. If once you can make a girl connect a man with gruel and porous plasters, she's safe enough."

While the astute Mrs. Willis reasoned thus, Susan lay in the darkness, her soft mouth pressed against her forearm on the pillow. He had kissed it when she had extended her hand for a friendly good-night. His kiss against her cool, firm flesh was not warmer than that of her own lips caressing what his touch had made so rapturously dear.

She knew, even while she summoned before her closed eyes the look which had burned in his, that her cousin's wife had told her the truth about Hardaker. But for the hour she elected to forget it, to live in her own familiar kingdom of make-believe. In the morning she would issue into the real world and conduct herself as was seemly. To-night she would dream a splendid, thrilling dream.

For once she found it difficult to separate her two realms. Into her jealously cherished blindness of the night the bitter truth would flash its illuminations—he was a man who only played at love; into the daytime clearness of her perceptions some golden memory of her dream would drift, filling her laughing eyes with sudden warmth and tenderness, breaking the cool smile upon her lips into the sigh of happy reverie. Hardaker, not in the secret of her moods, was puzzled, piqued, fascinated, almost to the undoing of his plans. In a month, half their acquaintances began to wonder if he was, by a miracle, in earnest. When, at the end of the second month, he departed abruptly for Europe, there were as many willing to award her the palm for consummate coquetry as to add her name to the monotonous list of his victims. Only she knew that he had gone without asking her to marry him, and only he knew that he had gone lest he most imprudently might. In his creed, an artist's only excuse for marriage was the increase of his leisure or opportunity for work.

During her deliberate yielding to the intoxication of her dream, Susan had nursed the delusion that she discounted the pain of awakening by anticipating it. She found, however, that the real pangs were not so easily evaded. When he had gone, she longed for him as intensely as if she had expected, like the village maiden of familiar tragedy, to keep him forever; she missed his protestations of love—protestations made in a myriad ways—as if she had received them with full belief. It seemed to her that her hand was parched for the touch of his, that her eyes ached physically for the sight of his.

In her outward manner of life there was no change. She continued to occupy herself in a manner befitting a semidependent young woman of many social gifts but no remunerative talents. She fitted herself with graceful adaptability into several households, being in turn the glittering lure or the effective background for her hostess—here an excellent listener, there a humorous talker; here a skilful maker-over of old garments, there a sufficiently grateful recipient of new ones. Once, in the early period of her desolation, she had tried to make a useful career for herself and had dabbled in philanthropy after the fashion of the broken-hearted of her sex. But Susan's genius was not of the helping-hand variety. She soon withdrew from pursuits alien to her temperament and returned to her own sphere as an adornment of society and a subjugator of man.

In the latter profession she had the wonderful success that attends a native fitness for an undertaking. She liked—she could not help liking—the task of charming. Her inner conviction that she herself was proof against hurt lent, perhaps, an added zest to the sport. She advanced gayly, radiantly, to the duel when she saw an opponent worthy her skill; the sword-play, the passes, the poses, the fire from striking steel, delighted her. She felt that she wore an invisible armor, and sometimes the knowledge of her impregnability made her kind to her fellow fencer and sometimes it filled her with a brilliant recklessness of execution.

But whether she was making an abortive, pathetic attempt to be of use in the world, or whether she was visiting relatives in the country or relatives in town, or whether she was perverting her ardor, her wit, her sentiment, to the tinsel uses of flirtation—whatever her outward life, her outward activities, innerly she thought of herself as James Hardaker's creature. She acknowledged it to herself with a sort of fierce pride in her abasement. She fostered the feeling. It made for her the secret life she had always had since her childhood.

The mere sight of his name in the papers always stopped her heart for the fraction of a second. Each success of his which the paragraphs recounted—and in these years the steps of his approach to his preeminent greatness were magnificent strides which all might mark—started it beating again with the heavy stroke of pride. She admitted his weaknesses, his cruelties, and brushed them aside. Thank Heaven, she said to herself, she had wasted her love upon a man, a great man, a power! False, inconstant, pleasure-seeking, was he? Ah, but he was great! Some women poured their love, their life's devotion, at the feet of poor, inefficient creatures whose moral weakness was redeemed by no strength of intellect, no beauty of artistic achievement. Thank Heaven, she had not been so base, so senseless, a groveller as these!

So six years had passed, and gradually the savor of her meaningless triumphs was growing stale against her palate. She was tormented by a sudden doubt of the nicety of her amusement of all these years; she consoled herself with the reflection that vulgarity of manner was universally conceded to be impossible to an Apthorpe; but was it possible to give dignity to a pursuit so innately trivial and vulgar as flirtation? Moreover, she was no longer able to pass at will into a world dominated by Hardaker. One day, when the trance eluded and defied her, a quick fear made her pale—a fear that she was not essentially different from the other women of her generation—no more fervent in loving, no more blindly loyal. It sickened her. She had had her vanity through the long time of her separation from Hardaker, a deeper vanity than the critics of her flirtations could have understood. It had been to believe herself a woman the intensity and constancy of whose love were boundless, a woman capable of an epic sentiment which only the accident of time and caste denied an epic expression.

The disdain for her amusements, the doubt of the endurance of her love for Hardaker, coincided with the appearance of young Willitson upon her horizon. She saw him first one afternoon at the country club, a big, broad-shouldered, boyish figure. He stood before the fireplace and he was quoting some one to the effect that the capacity for a great passion is as rare as the capacity to compose a great opera. He had had the cold color that an autumn walk brings, she remembered, and she had liked his laugh as he had overthrown some sentimentalist with his bit of philosophy. She herself had thrilled with the consciousness of her secret genius. She had glanced up toward the speaker and had felt the blood mount girlishly to her face beneath the unexpected searching of his gray eyes. It was as though, in an idle conversation concerning poets, some one had divined a hidden gift of song. And yet, it was after that talk that she began to torment herself with the fear that her great song was merely doggerel, after all. She closed her eyes and summoned Hardaker's face. She struggled to wrest from unwilling memory the blueness of his eyes; but blue was a mere word in her mind, not a color, not a living light, as of old. She recalled words—they left her unthrilled. She reminded herself of twilights—sunsets, scenes set for romance, with Hardaker close to her, his hand touching hers, his face, beautiful and eager, bending toward her. But the scenes vanished before their message reached her heart. She was left in the darkness with the memory of young Willitson's divining scrutiny of her.

That young Willitson had soon attached himself rather conspicuously to Susan's train was a matter commented upon by her relatives with the cheerful frankness common to families. Some of them averred that he was a boy, little likely to stir a real ardor in a woman who had so long played with fire. Some said that it would be a shame if she trifled with him after her custom, despoiling him of the morning freshness of his emotions merely to feed an insatiable vanity. Willis Apthorpe expounded a more hopeful theory to his wife.

"Did you ever notice Willitson's jaw?" he asked. "That fresh color of his blinds one to the cut of his face, rather. But you look at him the next time you see him. If he wants Susan, he'll get her. I'll wager you three to one that in five years you'll see her and a pair of young ones driving meekly down to the station to meet him when he comes out from the city in the afternoon. She'll quote his sayings and warm his slippers and humbly wait for him to finish the newspaper before interrupting him—provided he wants it. You mark my words."

Table of Contents

The Author

Bread Eaten in Secret