A fine world we should have if the masters of it consulted the feelings of those whom destiny compels them to use or to discard.
I looked at this precious pair of plotters satirically. “Naturally,” said I, “you never spoke to me of James’s purpose so long as there was a chance of your profiting by his intended treachery to me.” Then to Aurora I added: “I understand now why, for several months after James left, you persisted in begging me to take him back.”
Aurora burst into tears. As tears irritate me, I left the room. Thinking over the scandalous exhibition of cupidity which these children of mine had given, I was almost tempted to tear up my will and make a new one creating a vast public institution that would bear my name, and endowing it with the bulk of my wealth. I have often wondered why an occasional man of great wealth has done this. I now have no doubt that usually it has been because he was disgusted by the revolting greediness of his natural heirs. If rich men should generally adopt this course, I suspect their funerals would have less of the air of sunshine bursting through black clouds—it’s particularly noticeable in the carriages immediately behind the hearse.
Jack Ridley says my sense of humour is like an Apache’s. Perhaps that’s why the idea of a posthumous joke of this kind tickles me immensely. Were I not a serious man, with serious purposes in the world, I might perpetrate it.
The net result of Walter and Aurora’s effort to advance themselves—I wonder what Walter promised Aurora that induced her to aid him?—was that I formed a new plan. I resolved that Walter should marry at once. As soon as he has a male child I shall make a new will leaving it the bulk of my estate, and giving Walter only the control of the income for life—or until the child shall have become a man thirty years old.
That evening I ordered him to arrange with Natalie for a wedding within two months. I knew he would see her at the opera, as my wife had invited her to my box. I intended to ask him in the morning what he and she had settled upon, but before I had a chance I saw in my paper a piece of news that put him and her out of my mind for the moment.
James, so the paper said, was critically ill with pneumonia at his house in East Sixty-third Street, near Fifth Avenue. He has lived there ever since he was married, and has kept up a considerable establishment. I am certain that his wife’s dresses and entertainments are part of the cause of my wife’s rapid aging. Really, her hatred of that woman amounts to insanity. It amazes me, used as I am to the irrational emotions of women. I could understand her being exasperated by the social success of James and his wife. I confess that it has exasperated me—almost as much as has his preposterous luck in Wall Street. But there is undeniably a better explanation than luck for his and her social success. They say she has beauty and charm, and her entertainments show originality and talent, while my wife’s are commonplace and dull, in spite of the money she lavishes. But, in addition to those reasons, there are many of the upper-class people who hate me. Mine is a pretty big omelet; there is a lot of eggs in it; and, with every broken egg, somebody, usually somebody high up, felt robbed or cheated.
But I did not trust to my wife’s insane hate for James’s wife to keep her away from her son in his illness. I went straight to her. “I see that James is ill, or pretends to be,” I said. “Probably he and his wife are plotting a reconciliation.”
My wife has learned to mask her feelings behind a cold, expressionless face; but she has also learned to obey me. She often threatens, but she dares not act. I know it—and she knows that I know it.
“You will not go to him under any circumstances,” I went on—“neither you nor any of the rest of us. If you disobey, I shall at once rearrange my domestic finances. Thereafter you will go to Burridge for money whenever you want to buy so much as a paper of pins.”