And though idle as scholars we stand,
Where they pilfer and swarm in our home,
The honey of power waits the hand
But daring to pilfer the comb.
John Hartley, "The Siren City."
A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a grain of salt.—"The Silver Poppy."
To Cordelia over her coffee-cup Mrs. Spaulding confided a remarkable example of her husband's perversity.
Their talk had drifted round to this point because of a scene, of which Cordelia had been an unfortunate witness, the night before. A flurry of unexpected bills had come in at the first of the month. After looking them over, the alert and ever-keen business instinct of Alfred Spaulding had at first gently and then quite vigorously rebelled against what seemed to him nothing but wanton extravagance. A florist's bill in particular—it was for eight hundred dollars—had startled him into indignation, though Mrs. Spaulding remained heroically silent as to the fact that the great bulk of that bill had been due to the unconsidered visits of Cordelia, and had been quite as much a surprise to her as it now was to her husband.
It was not often that his equable temper showed the effect of the storm and stress through which his tired nerves went day by day. Nor was it often that to his wife he spoke in anything stronger than an accent of mild protest. But on rare occasions his patience became exhausted, and at such times she was given to understand—with a display of great anger, always ultimately atoned for by the arrival of significant little boxes from the Spauldings' jeweler—that her husband was not altogether the pliant and passive man which more than one of her friends, and even she herself at times, had been led to believe him.
Mrs. Spaulding sighed heavily.
"And Alfred makes his money so easily!" she said.
"Why does he work so hard, anyway?" asked Cordelia.