The first time he had explained this kindly to Roger, but, as the weeks slipped by, and Roger had continued to make the same suggestions for the adjustment of conditions which Hilary pretended were disturbing him, Hilary had gradually allowed his impatience to appear.
"What's the good, Barton, of talking like that?" he had demanded almost angrily one day, about a week before the Mitchell dinner. "It's the way the man who has never had wealth talks, as if it were an excrescence, something that can be cut away from the possessor without injury to any one else. Wealth is an essential plank in the social structure of our day, the keystone in the arch. Redistribute wealth suddenly and the whole thing will fall."
It had been a tiring day full of very clear deductions on Roger's part that something was fundamentally wrong with the whole economic system. He shrugged impatiently. "I don't know but what it might not be a good thing if it did—only the wrong people would probably be underneath."
Sitting in the well-appointed office of his employer the man's manicured nails, his ostentatiously unconventional soft shirt and tie were as offensive as the smug personal safety of his theories.
For a moment Wainwright had not answered. Then, with marked repression and annoying calm, as if Roger were a fractious child to be excused because of his usually good behavior:
"That's rather wild talk, Barton. You can't knock out the essential plank of a structure and not make things worse for every one."
"And you can't expect Tom and Pete and Jim to get all worked up over the luxuries Mr. Vanderbilt might have to go without under a new order."
"Because the average workingman doesn't think clearly. His mind is untrained. He doesn't see beyond the food and clothes of the day."
"No. The average man doesn't think—yet."
"I'm afraid it will take many years." Hilary had reminded Roger of one perfunctorily mourning the death of a hated relative whose passing was to his financial advantage.