The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other—a certain sign that he was thinking intently.
"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting. We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."
"Yes—there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.
"That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you know General Wilmot?"
"He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for all he had—honest work."
"And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money, because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr. Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes out of old bed linen. And the grass on their front lawns is three feet high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks. They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they borrowed from you?"
"I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much."
"I know better—and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old
Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the
Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with
either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about."
"There's John Dumont," mused Ranger.
"Yes—he is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep out of the penitentiary—'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd have been in jail long ago—no, he wouldn't—he'd have done differently. It was the money that started him wrong."