"There's but one thing to do, Sally. You must go away. What do you say to Europe?"
"With you?"
"I wish to heaven it could be with me, but if I shirk this deal now, I'm done for, and if I stick it out, it may mean future millions. Why not ask Bessy Dandridge?"
"I don't think I want to go with Bessy Dandridge."
Her tone troubled me, it was so gentle, so reserved, and walking to the window, I stood gazing out upon the April rain that dripped softly through the budding sycamores. I felt that I ought to go, and yet I knew that unless I gave up my career, it was out of the question. The railroad deal was, as I had said, very important, and if I were to withdraw from it now, it would probably collapse and bring down on me the odium of my associates. After my desperate failure of less than five years ago, I was just recovering my ground, and the incidents of that disaster were still too recent to permit me to breathe freely. My name had suffered little because my personal tragedy had been regarded as a part of the general panic, and I had, in the words of George Bolingbroke, "gone to smashes with honour." Yet I was not secure now; I had not reached the top of the ladder, but was merely mounting. "It's for Sally's sake that I'm doing it," I said to myself, suddenly comforted by the reflection; "without Sally the whole thing might go to ruin and I wouldn't hold up my hand. But I must make her proud of me. I must justify her choice in the eyes of her friends." And the balm of this thought seemed to lighten my weight of trouble and to appease my conscience. "It isn't as if I were doing it for myself, or my own ambition. I am really doing it for her—everything is for her. If I can hold on now, in a few years I'll give her millions to spend." Then I remembered that the last time I had gone motoring with her it had appeared to do her good, and that she had remarked she preferred a car with a red lining.
"I tell you what, sweetheart," I said, going back to her, "as I can't take you away, I'll buy you a new motor car with a red lining and I'll take you out every blessed afternoon I can get off from the office. You'll like that, won't you?" I asked eagerly.
"Yes, I'll like that," she replied, with an effort at animation, while she bent her face over the rose in her hand.
A week later I bought the motor car, the handsomest I could find, with the softest red lining; and when May came, I went out with her whenever I could break away from my work. But the pressure was great, the General was failing and leaned on me, and I was over head and ears in a dozen outside schemes that needed only my amazing energy to push them to success. Never had my financial insight appeared so infallible, never had my "genius" for affairs shone so brilliantly. The years of poverty had increased, not dissipated, my influence, and I had come up all the stronger for the experience that had sent me down. The lesson that a weaker man might have succumbed beneath, I had absorbed into myself, and was now making use of as I had made use of every incident, bad or good, in my life. I passed on, I accumulated, but I did not squander. Little things, as well as great things, served me for material, and during those first years of my recovery, I became by far the most brilliant figure in my world of finance. "Pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on his shoulders, and he'll still come out on top," chuckled the General. "The best thing that ever happened to you, Ben, barring the toting of potatoes, was the blow on the head that sent you under water. A little fellow would have drowned, but you knew how to float."
"I'd agree with you about its being the best thing, except—except for Sally."
"What's the matter with Sally? Is she going cracked? You know I always said she was the image of her aunt—Miss Matoaca Bland."