“I could find it in my heart to wish we weren’t always attended by servants,” said I. “I almost never see you alone.”
“What a bourgeois you are,” laughed she. Then—after a thorough glance round to make sure housekeeper or maid or lackey wasn’t on watch—she patted my cheek and kissed me, and added: “But you do make me happy. I’m so proud of you! No matter what I want I’m never afraid to buy it, for I know you can get all the money you want to.”
I winced. Said I: “I’m afraid you’d not be proud of some of the ways I get the money.”
She frowned. “Don’t talk business, please,” she said. “You know we never have in all our married life. You’ve always respected my position as your wife. All business is low—is mere sordidness.”
“Yes, it’s all low,” said I. “Sometimes I think all living is low as well. Edna”—I put my arm round her—“don’t you ever feel that we’d be really happy, that we’d get something genuine out of life—if you and Margot and I——”
She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “You never will grow up to your station, darling.”
I said no more. Indeed, it was on hastiest impulse that I had said so much, an impulse sprung from a mood of depression.
The cause of that mood was a nasty reverse in Wall Street. It had rudely halted me in my triumphant way toward the security of the man of many millions. It had set me to wavering uncertainly, with the chances about even for resuming the march and for tumbling into the abyss of a discreditable bankruptcy.
There are in New York two well-defined classes of the rich—the permanently rich and the precariously rich. The permanently rich are those who by the vastness of their wealth or by the strength of their business and social connections cannot possibly be dislodged from the plutocracy. The precariously rich are those who have much money and are making more, but are not strong enough to survive a series of typhoons, and are without the support of indissoluble business and social connections. My friend G——, for example, head of the famous banking house, associated in business and by marriage with half the permanent plutocracy, was practically bankrupt in the late panic. Had he been a man of ordinary position he would have gone into bankruptcy, and, I more than suspect, into jail. But his fellow plutocrats dared not let him drop, much as they would have liked to see his arrogance brought low, much as they longed to divide among themselves his holdings of gilt-edged securities; if he had gone down it would have made the whole financial world tremble. He was saved. On the other hand, my friend J——, richer actually, was ruined, was plucked by his associates, was finally jailed for doing precisely the things every man of finance did over and over again in that same period of stress—for, what invariably happens to moral codes in periods of stress?
I was at that time—but not now, gentle reader, so cheer up and read on—I was at that time in the class not of the permanently but of the precariously rich. And through a miscalculation I had laid myself open to the dangers that lie in wait for the man short of ready cash. The miscalculation was as to the extravagance of my wife’s undertakings. She, against my express request, had contracted without consulting or telling me several enormous bills. It is idle to say she ought not have done this. I knew her well; I should have been on guard. I had begun my married life wrong, as the young man very much in love is apt to do; so, to hold her love and liking, I had to keep on giving her taste for spending money free rein. If I had not, she would have thought me small and mean, would have made life at home exceedingly uncomfortable for me, for I am not of those men who can take from a woman what they wish whether she wishes to give or not. So the whole fault was mine. When the storm broke, in the light of its first terrific flash that illuminated for me every part of my affairs, I discovered that I was not prepared as I had been imagining. The big bills of my wife were presented, for the merchants knew I was heavily interested in the stocks that were tobogganing. Those bills had to be paid, and paid at once, or it would run like wildfire uptown and down that I was in difficulties; and when a man is known to be in financial difficulties, how the birds and beasts of prey from eagles and lions to buzzards and jackals do come flapping and loping!