Further than this, its addition would make the hole in the Sum big enough to drive a wagon through—a band-wagon at that with a whole circus procession behind it. Indeed, the remains of the Sum would be merely fragmentary, so to speak, and only the glad Christmas season could make it possible for me to confess and justify to the Little Woman the fulness of the situation.
Luckily, Christmas was not far distant. The dark men agreed to hold the big Khiva until the day before, and then deliver it to the janitor. With the janitor's help I could get it up and into the apartment after the Little Woman had gone to bed. I could spread it down at my leisure and decorate the walls with some of those now on the floor. When on the glad Christmas morning this would burst upon the Little Woman in sudden splendor, I felt that she would not be too severe in her judgment.
It was a good plan, and it worked as well as most plans do. There were some hitches, of course. The Little Woman, for instance, was not yet in bed when the janitor was ready to help me, and I was in mortal terror lest she should hear us getting the big roll into the hallway, or coming out later should stumble over it in the dark. But she did not seem to hear, and she did not venture out into the hall. Neither did she seem to notice anything unusual when by and by I stumbled over it myself and plunged through a large pasteboard box in which there was something else for the Little Woman—something likely to make her still more lenient in the matter of the rug. I made enough noise to arouse the people in the next flat, but the Little Woman can be very discreet on Christmas eve.
She slept well the next morning, too,—a morning I shall long remember. If you have never attempted to lay a ten-by-twelve Khiva rug in a small flat-parlor, under couches and tables and things, and with an extra supply of steam going, you do not understand what one can undergo for the sake of art. It's a fairly interesting job for three people—two to lift the furniture and one to spread the rug, and even then it isn't easy to find a place to stand on. It was about four o clock I think when I began, and the memory of the next three hours is weird, and lacking in Christmas spirit. I know now just how every piece of furniture we possess looks from the under side. I suppose this isn't a bad sort of knowledge to have, but I would rather not acquire it while I am pulling the wrinkles out of a two-hundred-pound rug. But when the Little Woman looked at the result and at me she was even more kind than I had expected. She did not denounce me. She couldn't. Looking me over carefully she realized dimly what the effort had cost, and pitied me. It was a happy Christmas, altogether, and in the afternoon, looking at our possessions, the Little Woman remarked that we needed a house now to display them properly. It was a chance remark but it bore fruit.
XII.
Gilded Affluence.
Yet not immediately. We had still to make the final step of our Progress in apartment life, and to acquire other valuable experience. It happened in this wise.
Of the Sum there still remained a fragment—unimportant and fragile, it would seem—but quite sufficient, as it proved, to make our lives reasonably exciting for several months.
A friend on the Stock Exchange whispered to me one morning that there was to be a big jump in Calfskin Common—something phenomenal, he said, and that a hundred shares would pay a profit directly that would resemble money picked up in the highway.