She flushed.
“And you have accepted his overtures when you knew he made them only because he needed your money?”
She hung her head. “I love him,” she said simply. Then she looked straight at me and I liked her expression. “A woman has no false pride when love is at stake,” she said. “We leave that to you men.”
“Love!” I retorted, rather satirically, I imagine. “How much had your own imperiled fortune to do with your being so forgiving?”
“Something,” she admitted. “You must remember I have children. I must think of their future. I don't want them to be poor. I want them to have the station they were born to.” She went to one of the windows overlooking the street. “Look here!” she said.
I stood beside her. The window was not far above the street level. Just below us was a handsome victoria, coachman, harness, horses, all most proper, a footman rigid at the step. A crowd had gathered round—in those stirring days when I was the chief subject of conversation wherever men were interested in money—and where are they not?—there was almost always a crowd before my offices. In the carriage sat two children, a boy and a girl, hardly more than babies. They were gorgeously overdressed, after the vulgar fashion of aristocrats and apers of aristocracy. They sat stiffly, like little scions of royalty, with that expression of complacent superiority which one so often sees on the faces of the little children of the very rich—and some not so little, too. The thronging loungers, most of them either immigrant peasants from European caste countries or the un-disinfected sons of peasants, were gaping in true New York “lower class” awe; the children were literally swelling with delighted vanity. If they had been pampered pet dogs, one would have laughed. As they were human beings, it filled me with sadness and pity. What ignorance, what stupidity to bring up children thus in democratic America—democratic to-day, inevitably more democratic to-morrow! What a turning away from the light! What a crime against the children!
“For their sake, Mr. Blacklock,” she pleaded, her mother love wholly hiding from her the features of the spectacle that for me shrieked like scarlet against a white background.
“Your husband has deceived you about your fortune, Mrs. Langdon,” I said gently, for there is to me something pathetic in ignorance and I was not blaming her for her folly and her crime against her children. “You can tell him what I am about to say, or not, as you please. But my advice is that you keep it to yourself. Even if the present situation develops as seems probable, develops as Mr. Langdon fears, you will not be left without a fortune—a very large fortune, most people would think. But Mr. Langdon will have little or nothing—indeed, I think he is practically dependent on you now.”
“What I have is his,” she said.
“That is generous,” replied I, not especially impressed by a sentiment, the very uttering of which raised a strong doubt of its truth. “But is it prudent? You wish to keep him—securely. Don't tempt him by a generosity he would only abuse.”