“Then, as I’ve already said, let’s look this thing fairly and squarely in the face. We’ve taken a gambler’s chance on a big thing, and we’ve lost. We’ve lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what you say is true, we haven’t lost our home, and what is still more important, we haven’t lost our pride.”
My husband looked down at his plate.
“That’s gone, too,” he slowly admitted.
“It doesn’t sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like that,” I promptly admonished. But I’d spoken before I caught sight of the tragic look in his eyes as he once more looked up at me.
“If those politicians had only kept their word, we’d have had our shipyard deal to save us,” he said, more to himself than to me. Yet that, I knew, was more an excuse than a reason.
“And if the rabbit-dog hadn’t stopped to scratch, he might have caught the hare!” I none too mercifully quoted. My husband’s face hardened as he sat staring across the table at me.
“I’m glad you can take it lightly enough to joke over,” he remarked, as he got up from his chair. There was a ponderous sort of bitterness in his voice, a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight back the surge of pity which was threatening to strangle my voice, pity for a man, once so proud of his power, standing stripped and naked in his weakness.
“Heaven knows I don’t want to joke, Honey-Chile,” I told him. “But we’re not the first of these wild-catting westerners who’ve come a cropper. And since we haven’t robbed a bank, or—”
“It’s just a little worse than that,” cut in Dinky-Dunk, meeting my astonished gaze with a sort of Job-like exultation in his own misery. I promptly asked him what he meant. He sat down again, before speaking.
“I mean that I’ve lost Allie’s money along with my own,” he very slowly and distinctly said to me. And we sat there, staring at each other, for all the world like a couple of penguins on a sub-Arctic shingle.