But to such people as the Bromfields the word ruin meant—ruin. They had not had enough to lose to make their catastrophe seem important to others; indeed, the fact that a little was saved made their friends feel like congratulating them. But the ruin was none the less thorough. They were shorn of all their best belongings—all the luxury that was through habit necessity. They must give up the comfortable house in Connecticut Avenue, where they had lived for twenty years. They must leave their associations, their friends. They must go to a New England factory village. And there they would have a tiny income, to be increased only by the exertions of two women, one a helpless hypochondriac, both ignorant of anything for which any one would give pay. And this cataclysm was wrought within a week.
“Fate will surely strike the finishing blow,” thought Emily, as she wandered drearily through the dismantling house. “We shall certainly lose the little we have left.” And this spectre haunted her wakeful nights for weeks.
Mr. Bromfield was not a “family man.” He had left his wife and home first to the neglect of servants, and afterward to the care of his daughter. As Emily grew older and able to judge his life-failure, his vanity, his selfishness—the weaknesses of which he was keenly conscious, he saw or fancied he saw in her clear eyes a look that irritated him against himself, against her, and against his home. He was there so rarely that the women never took him into account. Yet instead of bearing his death with that resigned fortitude which usually characterises the practical, self-absorbed human race in its dealings with the inevitable, they mourned him day and night.
After one of his visits of business and consolation, General Ainslie returned home with tears in his eyes.
“It is wonderful, wonderful!” he said in his “sentimental” voice—a tone which his wife understood and prepared to combat. She liked his sentimental side, but she had only too good reason to deplore its influence upon his judgment.
“What now?” she inquired.
“I’ve been to see Wentworth’s widow and daughter. It was most touching, Abigail. He always neglected them, yet they mourn him in a way that a better man might envy.”
“Mourn him? Why, he was never at home. They hardly knew him.”
“Yet I have never seen such grief.”
“Grief? Of course. But not for him. They don’t miss him; they miss his salary—his four thousand a year. And that’s the kind of grief you can’t soothe. The real house of mourning is the house that’s lost its breadwinner.”