“Yes,” he interrupted. “You understand what I intend, understand that I mean my life to be for us. But sometimes—this morning—I think I am mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this—” he threw his hand contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, “this trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life, my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these.” And he pushed the bundle of papers off the table.
“Something has depressed you.” She was leaning her elbow upon the table and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. “I wouldn’t have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should I,” she laughed, “or I try to think I shouldn’t.”
“Let us go abroad for two months,” he said. “I am tired, so tired. I am so weary of all these others, men and things.”
“Can you spare the time?”
“I”—he corrected himself—“we have earned a vacation. It will be for me the first real vacation since I left Yale—thirteen years ago. I am growing narrow and stale. Let us get away and forget. Shall we?”
“The sooner the better—if this is not a passing mood. What has depressed you?” she persisted.
“What seems to be a piece of very good luck.” He laughed almost sneeringly. “They have given me a share in the paper, twenty thousand in stock—which means a fixed income of five thousand a year so long as the paper pays what it does now—twenty-five per cent. And they offer me twenty thousand more at par to be paid for within two years. We are in a fair way to be rich.”
“They don’t want to lose you, evidently,” she said. “But why does this make you sad? We are independent now—absolutely independent, both of us.”
“Yes—we are rich. Together we have more than thirty-five thousand a year. But it is not what I wanted. I wanted to be free. Can a man be free who is rich, and rich in the way we are? Will my mind be open? Shall I dare to act and speak the truth? Or will our property, our environment, speak for me?”
“I can’t imagine you a slave to mere dollars.”