“But Margaret,” my wife urged, “will never be of that sort: money will not change either her habits or her affections.”
“Perhaps. You can never trust to inherited poverty. I have no doubt that she will resist the world, if anybody can, but my advice is that if you want to keep along with Margaret, you'd better urge your husband to make money. Experience seems to teach that while they cannot come to us, we may sometimes go to them.”
My wife and Mrs. Fletcher were both indignant at this banter, and accused Morgan of want of faith, and even lack of affection for Margaret; in short, of worldly-mindedness himself.
“Perhaps I am rather shop-worn,” he confessed. “It's not distrust of Margaret's intentions, but knowledge of the strength of the current on which she has embarked. Henderson will not stop in his career short of some overwhelming disaster or of death.”
“I thought you liked him? At any rate, Margaret will make a good use of his money.”
“It isn't a question, my dear Mrs. Fairchild, of the use of money, but of the use money makes of you. Yes, I do like Henderson, but I can't give up my philosophy of life for the sake of one good fellow.”
“Philosophy of fudge!” exclaimed my wife. And there really was no answer to this.
After six weeks had passed, my wife paid a visit to Margaret. Nothing could exceed the affectionate cordiality of her welcome. Margaret was overjoyed to see her, to show the house, to have her know her husband better, to take her into her new life. She was hardly yet over the naive surprises of her lovely surroundings. Or if it is too mach to say that her surprise had lasted six weeks—for it is marvelous how soon women adapt themselves to new conditions if they are agreeable—she was in a glow of wonder at her husband's goodness, at his love, which had procured all this happiness for her.
“You have no idea,” she said, “how thoughtful he is about everything—and he makes so little of it all. I am to thank you, he tells me always, for whatever pleases my taste in the house, and indeed I think I should have known you had been here if he had not told me. There are so many little touches that remind me of home. I am glad of that, for it is the more likely to make you feel that it is your home also.”
She clung to this idea in the whirl of the new life. In the first days she dwelt much on this theme; indeed it was hardly second in her talk to her worship—I can call it nothing less—of her husband. She liked to talk of Brandon and the dear life there and the dearer friends—this much talk about it showed that it was another life, already of the past, and beginning to be distant in the mind. My wife had a feeling that Margaret, thus early, was conscious of a drift, of a widening space, and was making an effort to pull the two parts of her life together, that there should be no break, as one carried away to sea by a resistless tide grasps the straining rope that still maintains his slender connection with the shore.