"They've lost money?"
"Everybody has lost money—everybody, the General says. Ben, do you know," she added, "I've never cared truly about money in my heart."
In some vague woman's way she meant it, I suppose, yet as I looked at her, where she sat beyond the bowl of jonquils, in one of her old Paris gowns, which she had told me she was wearing out, I broke into a short, mirthless laugh. She held her head high, with its wreath of plaits that made a charming frame for her arched black eyebrows and her full red mouth. On her bare throat, round and white as a marble column, there was an old-fashioned necklace of wrought gold, which had belonged to some ancestress, who was doubtless the belle and beauty of her generation. Was it possible to picture her in a common gown, with her sleeves rolled up and the perplexed and anxious look that poverty brings in her eyes? For the first time in my life I was afraid to face the moment before me.
The roast was removed, the dessert served, and played with in silence. The footfalls of old Esdras, the butler, sounded softer on the carpet, as he carried away the untasted pudding and brought coffee and an apricot brandy, which he placed before me with a persuasive air. I lit a cigar at the flame of the little silver lamp he offered me, drank my coffee hurriedly, and rose from the table.
"Are you going to work, Ben?" asked Sally, following me to the door of the library.
"Yes, I am going to work."
Without a word she raised her lips to mine, and when I had kissed her, she turned slowly away, and went up the staircase, with the branching lights in the hall shining upon her head.
I closed the door, lowered the wick of the oil lamp on my desk, and began walking up and down the length of the room, between the black oak bookcases filled with rows of calf-bound volumes. I tried to think, but between my thoughts and myself there obtruded always, like some small, malignant devil, the face of the old woman on the pavement before the bank, with her distorted and twisted mouth. "This will have to go—everything will have to go—when I've sold every last stick I have in the world, I shall still owe a debt of some cool hundreds of thousands. I'll pay that, too, some day. Of course, of course, but when? Meanwhile, we've got to live somewhere, somehow. There's the child, too—and there's Sally. I always said I'd only money to give her, and now I haven't that. We'll have to go into some cheap place, and I'll begin over again, with the disadvantages of a failure behind me, and a burden of debt on my shoulders. She's got to know—I've got to tell her. Confound that old woman! Why can't I keep her out of my thoughts?"
The hours went by, and still I walked up and down between the black oak bookcases, driven by some demon of torture to follow the same line in the Turkish rug, to turn always at the same point, to measure always the same number of steps.
"Well, she got her money—they all got their money," I said at last. "I am the only one who is ruined—no, not the only one—there is Sally and there is the child. I'd feel easier," I added, echoing the words of the old woman aloud, "I'd feel easier if I were the only one."