She felt the candor of his speech and replied in like kind, smiling slowly. "No use my lying," she said. "You know I'm not happy. And, yes, I know you'll not talk. Who is happy? We all just get on just the best we can. I can take my joy in making other women envy me. Isn't that about what all women want? Isn't that the height and limit of their ambition? Isn't that success, so far as a woman is concerned? Don't they cling to it, all of them—till they get old? I suppose so, but I know it isn't happiness. Yes, I'll admit to you I do miss something." His eyes rested upon her, searching.
Unconsciously she looked down at her wrists. The red mark of his fingers still lingered there. "I'll have to ask Ann Sullivan some time," she laughed.
"One thing," answered Halsey. "She'd tell you that she isn't trying to get the envy of her neighbors. I don't believe she'd be happy in that!"
"Oh, but she's fresh over—she's not American yet, don't you see? She hasn't had a chance—you can't tell what she would do if she were rich."
IV
"There are two ways of looking at it," said Halsey musingly, his anger passing, now leaving him meditative, relaxed. They were talking now as though there were not two others, unhappy, waiting on the gallery near by. "I'll tell you something, if you'll let me talk about myself, Mrs. Rawn."
"Go on; I'm glad!"
"I don't suppose you care for things that interest me. You called me a Socialist. I'll admit that I studied a lot about that, attended their meetings, all that sort of thing. Maybe that made me think. It seems to me that money is rolling up too fast in this country now—we're all mad about money. It's like the big apple with no taste to it. I had it offered me to choose between those two, and I took the little apple that to me seemed sweeter.
"Now, I've perfected that invention. It'll make somebody rich any time I say the word—any time I like that big apple and not the little one—any time I like that success which comes from outside and not from inside. But I've figured that that doesn't mean happiness. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Somehow I believe that Abraham Lincoln, or John Ruskin, or Jim Sullivan, or Tim, or Ann, or Sir Isaac Newton—any thinking person—any philosopher—would come in with me about this. I broke up the machines."
"Why—where it meant ruin?"