“Can’t you? Well, I am afraid—I’m really afraid. I have always said that if I wished to—enslave a people I would make them prosperous, would give them property, make them dependent upon their dollars. Then the fear of losing their dollars, their investments, would make them endure any oppression. Freedom’s battles were never fought by men with full stomachs and full purses.”
“But rich men have given up everything for freedom—Washington was a rich man.”
“Ah, but how many Washingtons has the world produced? I see the time coming when I shall have to choose. I see it and—I dread it.”
She rose and stood behind him leaning over with her arms about his neck and her check against his.
“You are brave. You are strong,” she whispered. “You will meet that crisis if it comes and I have no fear, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, as to how the battle will go.”
He was glad that he did not have to face her eyes just then. “We will go abroad next Wednesday week,” he whispered, “and we’ll be happy in France—in Switzerland—in Holland—I want to see the park at the Hague again; and the tall trees with their straight big trunks green with moss; and the boughs meeting over the canals and making the clear water so black; and the snow-white swans sailing statelily about.”
With the Atlantic between him and his work, he was able to suspend the habit of so many years. You would have fancied them just married, at whatever stage of their wanderings you might have met them. They were always laughing and talking—an endless flow of high spirits, absorption each in the other. They rose when they pleased, went to bed when it suited them. They had a manservant and a maid with them to relieve them of all the details. They travelled only in the afternoons, and then not far. If they missed one train, they cheerfully waited for another.
“I think we are achieving my ideal of vacation,” he said.
“What is that—perfect idleness? We certainly are idle. I shouldn’t have believed you could be so idle.”