She hoped he would kiss her; but he did not. He reluctantly released her hand, gave her a lingering look which she had not the vanity or the buoyance rightly to interpret, then gazed slowly round the gardens, brilliant, alluring, warm. She stood motionless and tense, watching his big form, his strong shoulders and forcefully set head as he crossed the gardens, went down the walk and through the gate, to be hidden by the hedge between the lawns and the street. When the last echo of his firm step had ceased in her ears, she collapsed into the chair in which he had sat, and was all passion and tenderness and tears and longings and fears.
"He thinks me cold! He thinks me cold!" she cried. "Oh, Father, why won't You let me be weak? Why can't I take less than all? Why can't I trust him, when I love him so!"
XXX
BY A TRICK
By itself, Armstrong's insult to Fosdick in refusing to "take care of" his son-in-law would have been of small consequence, unpleasant reminder of his shorn power and rude check to his benevolent instincts though it was. Fosdick was not likely, at least soon, to forget his lesson in the wisdom of letting the big Westerner alone. Also, Armstrong was useful to him—not so useful as a tool in the same position would have been; still, far more useful than a representative of some hostile interest. But this insult was the latest and the rashest of a series of similar insults which Armstrong had been distributing right and left with an ever freer, ever bolder hand. While he was "thinking over" Neva's plain talk with him, he, by more than mere coincidence, was experimenting with a new policy which was in the general direction of the one he had adopted as soon as he got control of the O.A.D. It was a policy of "anti-graft"; and once he had inaugurated it, once he had begun to look about him in the O.A.D. for opportunities to stop the plundering, and the pilfering as well, he had pushed on far beyond where he originally intended to halt—as a strong man always does, whatever the course he chooses.
Everyone belongs to some section or class. He may quarrel with individuals in that class, he may quarrel with individuals in another class, or with the whole of it; but he may not break with the whole of his own class. Be he cracksman or financier or preacher or carpenter or lawyer or what not, he must be careful not to get his own class, as a class, against him. If he does, he will find himself alone, defenseless, doomed. Armstrong belonged to the class financier; he had been in finance all his grown-up life. He stood for the idea financier in the minds of financiers, in his own mind, in the public mind. His battles with his fellow-financiers, being within the class lines, had strengthened him, had given him clear title to recognition as a power in finance; he had been like the politician who fights his way through and over his fellow politicians to a nomination or a boss-ship, like the preacher who bears off the bishopric from his rivals, the doctor who absorbs the patronage of the rich, the lawyer who succeeds in the competition among lawyers for the position of chief pander to the plutocratic appetite for making and breaking laws.
But this new policy of Armstrong's was a policy of war on his own class. Cutting down commissions, cutting out "good things," lopping off sinecures, bisecting salaries—why, he was hacking away at the very foundations of the dominance of his class! No privileges, no parasitism, no consideration for gentlemen, no "soft snaps," no ornaments on the pay rolls—where were the profits to come from, the profits that enabled the big fellows to fatten, that filled the crib for their business and social hangers-on? Reform, economy, stoppage of waste, all these were excellent to talk about; and, within limits that recognized the rights of the dominant classes, even might be practiced without offense, especially by a fellow trying to make a reputation and judiciously doing it at the expense of financiers who had lost their grip and so could expect no quarter. But to raise the banner of "anti-graft" for a serious campaign— Anarchy, socialism, chaos!
Armstrong had inaugurated and was pressing a war on his own class. And for whose benefit? Not for his own; he wasn't enriching himself—and therein was a Phariseeism, an effort to pose as a censor of his class, that alone would have made him a suspicious character. He was fighting his own class, was making traitorous, familicidal war for the benefit of the common enemy—the vast throng of the people who hated the upper classes, as everybody knew, and were impudently restless in their God-appointed position of hewers of wood and drawers of water for the financial aristocracy. Were not the people weakening dangerously in reverence for and gratitude to their superiors, the great and good men who provided them with work, took care of their savings for them, supported the church that guarded their souls and the medical profession that healed their bodies, paid all the taxes, undertook all the large responsibilities—and did this truly godlike work, supported this Atlantean burden, in exchange for a trivial commission that brought no benefit but the sorrows of luxury? These were the ignoramuses Armstrong was inflating, these the ingrates he was encouraging. Already he had doubled the dividends of the O.A.D., had made them a seeming rebuke to the other insurance companies. Competition—yes! But not the cutthroat, wicked, ruinous competition that would destroy his own class, its profits and its power. If he were permitted to persist, the clamor for so-called "honesty" might spread from policy holders to stockholders, to wage earners, to the whole mass of the wards of high finance. And they might compel the upper class to grant them more money to waste in drink and in wicked imitation of the luxury of their betters!
Armstrong was expelling himself from his own class—into what? Except in finance, high finance, what career was there for him? He would be like a politician without a party, like a general without an army, like a preacher without a parish, like a disbarred lawyer. His reputation would be gone—for morality is a relative word, and by his conduct he was convincing the only class important to him as a man of action that he had not the morality of his class, that he could not be trusted with its interests. Every era, every race, every class has its own morality, its own practical application of the general moral code to its peculiar needs. The class financier, in the peculiar circumstances surrounding life in the new era, had its code of what was honest and what dishonest, what respectable and what disreputable, what loyal and what disloyal. Under that code his new course was disloyal, disreputable, was positively dishonest. It would avail him nothing, should other classes vaguely approve; if his own class condemned, he was damned.
"A hell of a mess I'm getting into," reflected he, "with trying to play one game by the rules of another." He saw his situation clearly, but he had no disposition to turn back. "All in a lifetime!" he concluded with a shrug. "I'll just see what comes of it. Anything but monotony." To him monotony, the monotony of simply taking in and putting away for his own use money confided to him, was the dullest of lives—and it was beginning to seem the most contemptible—"like going through the pockets of sleepers," said he to himself.