A gracious smile, a gracious nod, and Edna rejoined me. Innocent as I was, and under the spell that blinds the American man where the American woman is concerned, I could not but be upset by this example of how our house was run—an example that all in an instant brought to my mind and enabled me to understand a score, a hundred similar examples. There was I, toiling away to make money, earning every dollar by the hardest kind of mental labor, struggling to rise, to make our fortune, and each day my wife was tossing carelessly out of the windows into the street a large part of my earnings. I did not know what to do about it.
Edna’s next stop was at the grocer’s. I had not the courage to halt and listen. I knew it would be a repetition of the grotesque interview with the butcher. And she undoubtedly a clever woman—alert, improving. What a mystery! I went on to my office. That day, without giving my acquaintances there an inkling of what was in my mind, I made inquiries into how their wives spent the money that went for food—the most important item in the spending of incomes under ten or twelve thousand a year. In every case the wife or the mother did the marketing by telephone. All the men except one took the ignorance and incompetence of the management of the household expenses as a matter of course. One man grumbled a little. I remember he said: “No wonder it’s hard for the men to save anything. The women waste most of it on the table, paying double prices for poor stuff. I tell you, Loring, the American woman is responsible for the dishonesty of American commercial life. They are always nagging at the man for more and more money to spend, and in spending it they tempt the merchants, the clerks, their own servants, everyone within range, to become swindlers and thieves.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said I. “You’re a pessimist. The American woman is all right. Where’d you find her equal for intelligence and charm?”
“She may be intelligent,” said he. “She doesn’t use it on anything worth while, except roping in some poor sucker to put up for her and to put up with her. And she may have charm, but not for a man who has cut his matrimonial eye teeth.”
I laughed at Van Dyck—that was my grumbling friend’s name. And I soon dropped the subject from my mind. It has never been my habit to waste time in thinking about things when the thinking could not possibly lead anywhere. You may say I ought to have interfered, forced my wife to come to her senses, compelled her to learn her business. Which shows that you know little about the nature of the American woman. If I had taken that course, she would have hated me, she would have done no better, and she would have scorned me as a sordid haggler over small sums of money who was trying to spoil with the vulgarities of commercial life the beauties of the home. No, I instinctively knew enough not to interfere.
But let us take a long leap forward to the day when I became president of the railroad, having made myself a rich man by judicious gambling with eight thousand dollars loaned me by father Wheatlands. He was a rich man, and in the way to become very rich, and he had no heir but Edna after the drowning of her two brothers under a sailboat in Newark Bay. Margot was in a fashionable school over in New York. My wife and I, still a young couple and she beautiful—my wife and I were as happy as any married couple can be where they let each other alone and the husband gives the wife all the money she wishes and leaves her free to spend it as she pleases.
When I told her of my good fortune, and the sudden and large betterment of our finances, she said with a curious lighting of the eyes, a curious strengthening of the chin:
“Now—for New York!”
“New York?” said I. “What does that mean?”