Mary hesitated, and then decided to get what information she could. "What happens to the staff?" she asked, "to the employees, the people like our waitresses?"
Julius shrugged his shoulders. "Out of the frying-pan into the fire, poor devils. Must get dividends somehow. Depends a bit on whether the shareholders are patient or not. Interests of the shareholders come first, of course." He sighed. Nobody could hold sounder views than he. James had been unreasonable about the directorship considering where the money came from. There ought to have been one of the Trents on the Board.
Mary considered this slowly. "If the capital is larger and the profits are the same the dividends will be smaller," she said. "I see. So there is a temptation to get it back out of the wages."
"You may call it a temptation if you like. There's nothing else to get it out of, in a properly run business," her brother agreed. "Mind you, those girls only spend their money on finery. If they were to save it now for when they get married it would be another matter. Well, well, it's a hard world!"
Mary turned the subject to Julius's plans for his wedding and for his subsequent life with Esther.
[CHAPTER XV]
WHEN her brother had gone Mary sat for some time trying to adjust her ideas to the new situation. She had not, until now, taken James's plans very seriously. James had so many plans. But if Julius was right these particular plans were plans no longer, they were arrangements.
She did not trust Julius, when it occurred to her to call his word in question, but his phrase "the interests of the shareholders" struck her as familiar and significant. There was very little in the way of long hours and low wages and bad conditions that the interests of the shareholders would not cover. She could see too that a managing director whose pockets were well lined with the shareholders' money might feel himself under an almost quixotic obligation to restore the prosperity which he had endangered. "The interests of the shareholders"—how smoothly, how easily, it would come from James's lips, and how conscious he would be, as he said it, of his virtue and honesty!
If she was right and if Julius was right he must not be given a chance of saying it. She would have to find courage and strength enough to stop him. But first, before she spoke to him about it, she must collect some reliable information. She could not go to James and defy his wishes on the strength of some casual remarks made by Julius. She would go to the London Library, when her head was not aching so badly, and find out there if there was anything written upon the subject. She could not remember anything to the point in the books that she had read. It was a pity that Miss Percival had gone; even Rosemary and Anthony might have helped her.
She was leaning back in her chair, tired and in pain, when she was again interrupted by her maid, half hidden this time by an elaborate basket of flowers. A young man from the office had brought them, she said, and a message from the master that he was sorry he would be kept late.