"As for us, we'll move up to Chicago first, in all likelihood; maybe later to New York, for I suppose business will take us there a great deal of the time. As to where we'll make our home eventually, I hardly know. Sometimes I think we'll come back here and build a real house, just to show these people who we were all the time. Wherever we build, we'll furnish, too. I'm going to be a spender. Oh, I've longed for it all my life—the feel of money going out between my fingers! Not all for ourselves, mind you. Maybe you don't quite understand about that—I couldn't expect you to. But after I've done something for the common people, I want to build something—churches, monuments, something that will stick and stay after you and I are gone, and tell them who John Rawn was. I want them to say, most of all, that he was a modest man, that he was a kind man, and not a selfish one—not a selfish man, Laura."
III
She nodded, looking at him fixedly, large-natured enough to be just in the assembling of these crude and unformulated ambitions which she knew tormented him. "Yes, John," she said quietly.
The next instant his mood changed.
"But one thing they'll have to do!" he said, smiting a fist into his palm. "They'll have to admit that I was John Rawn! They'll have to realize that success comes where it belongs. My brain, my energy, my point of view, my ability to command men, my instinct for leadership—they'll have to recognize all that. I'll make them see who we were all the time. Why, Laura, we've just been walking along a flat floor, more than twenty years, and now we're going to take the elevator. We'll go up now, straight and fast.
"I'm going to make you happy now," he mused. "You've been a good enough wife. I always said that to myself—'She's been a good wife.' I'm going to show you that you didn't make any mistake that night when you took me, only a railway clerk, with a salary of forty a month."
She did not remind him that, so far as she knew, he was still a railway clerk, with a salary which in twenty years had not grown abnormally. But now her own ambitions began to vault: first of all, the ambition of a mother for her child. She accepted all these vague statements as convincing truths; for where we hope we are easily convinced.
"But how soon, John? You see, there is Grace, our girl."
"She'll wear diamonds and real clothes."
"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of her education. Grace ought to go to some good girls' college in the East. You see, you and I didn't have so very much education, John," she smiled.