“I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing.”
When Aurora and Kirkby came back from their trip through the South and burst in on us at lunch [it was a Sunday], probably I was the only one at the table who wasn’t surprised by their looks. Helen, I knew, had been expecting Aurora would return with a face like the last scene of the last act of a tragedy. Instead she was radiant, beautifully dressed, and with an assurance of manner that was immensely becoming to her—the assurance of a woman who is conscious of having married brilliantly and is determined to enjoy her good fortune to the uttermost. It was plain that she was on the best possible terms with Kirkby. As for him, he looked foolishly happy and was obviously completely under her control, as I knew he would be. He is certainly in himself not a dignified figure—short and fat and sallow and amazingly ordinary-looking for a man of such birth and breeding. But the instant people hear who he is, they forget his face, figure, and mind. In this world, what things really are is not important; it’s altogether what they seem to be, altogether the valuation agreed upon. I’ve sometimes watched the children at their games, “playing” that pins and rags have fantastic big values; and I’ve thought how ridiculous it was to smile at them and keep serious faces over our own grown-up game of precisely the same kind.
Aurora had been sending home the newspapers of every town in which they had stopped, so we had a pretty good idea of the ovation they had received. But as soon as she was alone with us she went over it all—and we were as proud as was she. “I don’t think Horton liked it particularly, but there wasn’t a place where they didn’t know more about me than about him,” said she. “You noticed, didn’t you, that the papers often said, ‘James Galloway’s daughter and her husband’? Horton was awfully funny about the excitement over us. At first he kept up the pretence with me that he thought it vulgar. But he soon cut that out and fairly devoured the newspapers. Of course we didn’t drop our exclusiveness before people—everywhere they talked about how anxious we were to avoid notoriety. Whenever the reporters came near us, my! but didn’t Horton sit on them.”
She made only one criticism of him—and that a laughing one. “You thought,” said she, “that we started in a private car. Well, we didn’t. When I got to Jersey City he put me into a stuffy old regular Pullman with all sorts of people. And he said, with the grandest air, ‘I took the drawing-room, as I thought you’d like privacy.’ I saw that it was my time to assert myself.” She laughed. “We had a little talk,” she went on, “and at Philadelphia he rushed round and got a private car.”
She soon brought his mother to terms. Mrs. Kirkby called on my wife three days after they got back, and took her driving the following afternoon. That drive is one of the important events in my career. It marks the completion of my conquest of New York. Thinking it over, I decided to double Aurora’s portion under my will. Next to Judson, she has been the most useful person to me—no, not next to Judson, but without exception. I should have got my million-dollar start somehow, if I had never seen him; but I should have had some difficulty in reaching my climax if I had not had Aurora.
My flood-tide of luck held through one more event—the settlement with Natalie.
Naturally, I had put a good deal of thought upon this problem. The longer I considered it the more clearly I realised that to give her anything at all would be an act of sheer generosity, perhaps of dangerous generosity. As I have said before, it did not take me long to absolve myself from the impossible letter of my promise. If I had been capable of keeping a promise to give six million dollars—the sum necessary to produce “an income of a quarter of a million”—to a person whom it was absolutely vital to have financially dependent upon me, I should have accomplished very little in the world. At first my decision to keep the spirit of my promise by giving “the income of a quarter of a million” seemed as fair as it was liberal. But now that she was safely married to my son, I began to see that to give her anything would be to strike a blow at his domestic happiness, and that would mean striking a blow at her own happiness. It could not fail to unsettle her mind to find herself with an independent income of ten or twelve thousand a year in addition to the five or six thousand she already had. Nothing else is so certain to destroy a husband’s influence or to unfit a wife contentedly to fill her proper place in the family as for her to be financially independent.
I have never been lacking in the courage to do right, no matter what moral quibble or personal unpleasantness has stood in the way. I resolved not to give her anything outright, but, instead, to provide for her in my will—the income of a quarter of a million, to be hers for life, unless Walter should die and she marry again.
There now remained only the comparatively simple matter of reconciling her to this arrangement when she was expecting at once to receive the equivalent of six millions, free from conditions.