"No. To become joint, equal partner in our career."
She shook her head. "You couldn't, wouldn't have a partner, male or female—not yet. Besides it would be impossible for me to interest myself in getting rich or taking care of riches or distributing them among a crowd of sycophants."
"I'm not getting rich," replied he. "I'm making a good salary, and spending it almost all. But I'm not making much, outside."
"I had heard otherwise. They tell me your sort of business is about the best 'graft'—isn't that the word?—downtown, and that you are where you can get as much as you care to carry away."
"Yes. I could."
"But you don't? I knew it!"
Her belief in his honesty made him uncomfortable. "I didn't say I was different from the others—really different," he said hesitatingly. That very morning he had been forced to listen to a long series of reports on complaints of O.A.D. policy holders—how some had been swindled by false promises of agents whom he must shield; how others had been cheated on lapsed or surrendered policies; how, in a score of sly ways, the "gang" in control were stealing from their wards, their trusting and helpless victims. "I can't, and don't purpose to, deny," he went on to her, "that I'm part of the system of inducing some other fellow to sow, and then reaping his harvest, or most of it. I don't put it in my own barn, but I do help at the reaping. Oh, everything's perfectly proper and respectable—at least, on the surface. But—well, sometimes I get desperately sick of it all. Just now, I'm in that mood; it brought me here to-day. There's a row on down there, and it's plot and counterplot, move and check, all very exciting, but I—hate it! Nobody's to blame. It's simply a system that's grown up. And if one plays the game, why, he's got to conform to the rules."
"If one plays the game."
"What's a man to do? Go back to the farm and become a slave to a railroad company or a mortgage? We can't all be painters."
She glanced at him quickly with a sudden narrowing of the eyelids that seemed to concentrate her gaze like a burning glass. "I hadn't thought of that," said she.