An aunt of Marian’s died, leaving her a “small” house—worth perhaps a quarter of a million—near the Avenue in Sixty-fifth Street, and eighty thousand in cash. About the same time Stokely told Howard of a fine speculative opportunity in certain copper properties. Howard hesitated. He knew that the way of speculation was the way of bondage for his newspaper and for him. But this particular adventure seemed harmless and he yielded. The money was invested and within a few months was producing an income of fifteen thousand a year which promised to be steady. Howard’s ownership of stock in the paper increased; and as the profits advanced swiftly with its swift growth in its illustrated form, his own income was nearly fifty thousand a year. They were growing very rich. There was no longer the slightest anxiety as to money in his mind.
“You know the great dread I had in marrying,” he said to her one day, “was lest I should make myself and you dependents, should some day sacrifice my freedom to my fear of losing—happiness.”
“Yes, and very foolish you were, not to have more confidence in yourself and in me.”
“Perhaps. But what I am thinking is that you have brought me luck. I am free, beyond anybody’s reach. I could quit the paper to-morrow and we should hardly have to change our style of living even if I did not get something else to do.”
“Style of living—” in that phrase lay the key to the change that was swiftly going on in Howard’s mind and mental attitude. It is not easy for a man with environment wholly in his favour to keep his point of view correct, to keep his horizon wide and clear, his sense of proportion just. It is next to impossible for him to do so when his environment opposes.
The man who looks out from misery and squalor upon misery and squalor is, if he thinks at all, naturally an anarchist. To him the established order shows only injustice and persistence of injustice. The man who looks out from luxury and ease and well-being upon luxury and ease and well-being is forced by the very limitations of the human mind to an over-reverence for the established order. He is unreasonably suspicious of anything that threatens change. “When I’m comfortable all’s well in the world; change might bring discomfort to me.” And he flatters himself that he is a “conservative.”
Howard had had a long training at the correct standpoint and in right thinking. But the influences were there, were at work, were destroying his devotion to a social and political ideal wholly alien to the life he was now living under the leading of his wife. He did not blame her, indeed he could not justly have blamed her, for his falling away from what he knew were correct principles for him. While she had brought him into this environment, while at first it was in large part for her that he gave so much time and thought to the accumulation of wealth, soon love of luxury, dependence upon a train of servants, fondness for the great extravagances to which New York tempts the rich and those living near the rich, became stronger in him than it was in her. And through the inevitable reaction of environment upon the man, the central point in his valuation of men and women tended to shift from the fundamentals, mind and character, to the surface qualities—dress and style and manners and refinement, and even dress.
This process of demoralisation was well advanced when they moved from the apartment. After four years of “expansion” there, they had begun to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real New York “establishment.”
“Isn’t this just the house for us?” she said. “I hate huge, big houses. Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now this house is just big enough. You don’t know how wonderful it would be.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” he laughed, “and you must try it.” He was as enthusiastic as she.