“Aunt Dagon,” said May, who sat by, looking at the old lady, “we are now poor people. We shall sell this house, and go and live in a small way out of sight.”
“Fiddle, diddle! my dear,” returned Mrs. Dagon, warmly; “you’ll do no such thing. Poor people, indeed! Why, May, you know nothing about these things. Failing, failing; why, my dear, that’s nothing. A New York merchant expects to fail, just as an English lord expects to have the gout. It isn’t exactly a pleasant thing, but it’s extremely respectable. Every body fails. It’s understood.”
“What’s understood?” asked May.
“Why, that business is a kind of game, and that every body runs for luck. Oh, I know all about it, my dear! It’s all a string of cards—as Colonel Burr used to say; and I think if any body knew the world he did—it’s all a string of blocks. B trusts A, C trusts B, D trusts C, and so on. A tumbles over, and down go B, and C, and D. That’s the whole of it, my dear. Colonel Burr used to say that his rule was to keep himself just out of reach of any other block. If they knock me over, my dear Miss Bunley, he once said to me—ah! May, what a voice he said it in, what an eye!—if they knock me over, I shall be so busy picking myself up that I shall be forced to be selfish, and can’t help them, so I had better keep away, and then I can be of some service. That was Colonel Burr’s principle. He declared it was the only way in which you could be sure of helping others. People talk about Colonel Burr. My dear, Colonel Burr was a man who minded his own business.”
May Newt held her tongue. She felt instinctively that a woman of sixty-five, who had been trained by Colonel Burr, was not very likely to accept the opinions of a girl of her years. Mrs. Newt was feebly rocking herself during the conversation between her daughter and aunt; and when they had finished said, despairingly,
“Dear me! what will people say? Oh! I can’t go and live poor. I’m not used to it. I don’t know how.”
“Live poor!” sniffed Mrs. Dagon; “of course you won’t live poor. I’ve heard Boniface say often enough that it was too bad, but it was a world of good-for-nothing people; and you don’t think he’s going to let good-for-nothing people drive him from a becoming style of living? Fiddle! I’d like to see him undertake to live poor.”
“Do you think people will come to see us?” gasped Mrs. Newt.
“Come? Of course they will. They’ll all rush, the first thing, to see how you take it. Why, such a thing as this is a godsend to ‘em. They’ll have something to talk about for a week. And they’ll all try to discover if you mean to sell out at auction. Oh, they will be so sorry!” said the old lady, imitating imaginary callers; “‘and, my dear Mrs. Newt, what are you going to do? And to think of your being obliged to leave this lovely house!’ Come?—did you ever know the vultures not to come to a carcass?”
Mrs. Nancy Newt looked appalled; and so energetic was Mrs. Dagon in her allusion to vultures and carcass, that her niece unconsciously put to her nose the smelling-bottle she held in her hand.