“A pity to waste such talents on this thankless business,” said King. “If he’d gone into real business, he would have a salary of a hundred thousand a year, would be rich and secure for life. Why, a business man could and would make a whole career on the ideas he has in a single week. As it is——”
King shrugged his shoulders and Vroom finished the sentence for him: “Coulter and Stokely could kick him out to-morrow and the News-Record would go straight on living upon his ideas for ten years at least.”
Howard needed no one to make this truth clear to him to the full. Often, as he thought of his expanding tastes, his expanding expenditures and his expanding plans both for his private life and for his career, he felt an awful sinking at the heart and a sense of fundamental weakness.
“I am building upon sand,” he said to himself. “In business, in the law, in almost any other career to-day’s work would be to-morrow’s capital. As it is, I am ever more and more a slave. To be free I ought to be poor or rich. And I cannot endure the thought of poverty again. I must be rich.”
The idea allured him to a degree that made him ashamed of himself. Sometimes, when he was talking to Marian or writing editorials, all in the strain of high principle and contempt for sordidness, he would flush at the thought that he was in reality a good deal of a hypocrite. “I’m expressing the ideals I ought to have, the ideals I used to have, not the ideals I have.”
But the clearer this discrepancy became to him and the wider the gap between what he ought to think and what he really did think, the more strenuously he protested to himself against himself, and the more fiercely he denounced in public the very poison he was himself taking.
“I am living in a tainted atmosphere,” he said to Marian. “We all are. I fight against the taint but how can I hope to avoid the consequences if I persist in breathing it, in absorbing it at every pore of my body?”
“I don’t understand you.” Marian was used to his moods of self-criticism and did not attach much importance to them.
He thought a moment. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “What’s the use of discussing what can’t be helped?” How could he tell her that the greatest factor in his enervating environment was herself; that the strongest chains which held him in it were the chains which bound him to her? Indeed, was he not indulging in cowardly self-excuse in thinking that this was true? Had not his success, rather than his love, made ambition unfettered by principle the mainspring of his life?