The Brimming Cup

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Marise and the others came out of a door at the far-end of the building now, and advanced towards them slowly. Neale and Mr. Welles watched them.

Neale was struck again by Marsh's appearance. As far away as you could see him, he held the eye. "An unusual man, your friend Mr. Marsh," he remarked. "Mrs. Crittenden tells me that he is one of the people who have been everywhere and done everything and seen everybody. He looks the part."

Mr. Welles made no comment on this for a moment, his eyes on the advancing group. Marise had raised her parasol of yellow silk. It made a shimmering halo for her dark, gleaming hair, as she turned her head towards Marsh, her eyes narrowed and shining as she laughed at something he said.

Then the old man remarked, "Yes, he's unusual, all right, Vincent is. He has his father's energy and push." He added in a final characterization, "I've known him ever since he was a little boy, and I never knew him not to get what he went after."

II
How the Same Thing Looked to Mr. Welles

As they walked along towards the mill, Mr. Welles had a distinct impression that he was going to dislike the mill-owner, and as distinct a certainty as to where that impression came from. He had received too many by the same route not to recognize the shipping label. Not that Vincent had ever said a single slighting word about Mr. Crittenden. He couldn't have, very well, since they neither of them had ever laid eyes on him. But Vincent never needed words to convey impressions into other people's minds. He had a thousand other ways better than words. Vincent could be silent, knock off the ashes from his cigarette, recross his legs, and lean back in his chair in a manner that slammed an impression into your head as though he had yelled it at you.

But to be fair to Vincent, Mr. Welles thought probably he had been more than ready to soak up an impression like the one he felt. They'd had such an awfully good time with Mrs. Crittenden and the children, it stood to reason the head of the house would seem to them like a butter-in and an outsider in a happy-family group.

More than this, too. As they came within hearing of the industrial activity of the mill, and he felt his heart sink and turn sore and bitter, Mr. Welles realized that Vincent had very little to do with his dread of meeting the mill-owner. It was not Mr. Crittenden he shrank from, it was the mill-owner, the business man . . . business itself.

Mr. Welles hated and feared the sound of the word and knew that it had him cowed, because in his long life he had known it to be the only reality in the world of men. And in that world he had known the only reality to be that if you didn't cut the other fellow's throat first he would cut yours. There wasn't any other reality. He had heard impractical, womanish men say there was, and try to prove it, only to have their economic throats cut considerably more promptly than any others. He had done his little indirect share of the throat-cutting always. He was not denying the need to do it. Only he had never found it a very cheerful atmosphere in which to pass one's life. And now he had escaped, to the only other reality, the pleasant, gentle, slightly unreal world of women, nice women, and children and gardens. He was so old now that there was no shame in his sinking into that for what time he had left, as other old fellows sank into an easy-chair. Only he wished that he could have got along without being reminded so vividly, as he would be by this trip to the business-world, of what paid for the arm-chair, supported the nice women and children. He wished he hadn't had to come here, to be forced to remember again that the inevitable foundation for all that was pleasant and livable in private life was the grim determination on the part of a strong man to give his strength to "taking it out of the hide" of his competitors, his workmen, and the public. He'd had a vacation from that, and it made him appallingly depressed to take another dose of it now. He sincerely wished that sweet Mrs. Crittenden were a widow with a small income from some impersonal source with no uncomfortable human associations with it. He recalled with a sad cynicism the story Mrs. Crittenden had told them about the clever and forceful lawyer who had played the dirty trick on the farmer here in Ashley, and done him out of his wood-land. She had been very much wrought up about that, the poor lady, without having the least idea that probably her husband's business-life was full of such knifings-in-the-back, all with the purpose of making a quiet life for her and the children.

Well, there was nothing for it but to go on. It wouldn't last long, and Mr. Welles' back was practised in bowing to weather he didn't like but which passed if you waited a while.