“But,” she tried, “you have told me that I do not understand business.”
“And you did not believe me.”
He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. “I do not understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It’s the name for half the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see, women do know something about business to-day. It isn’t their fault that they are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that business is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine intellect can rise. It’s your fault, the men’s. You wanted cheap clerks, and you raised the veil so that women have seen business at close quarters, and the only thing they do not understand is how men continued for so long to magnify its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a cult which deceived them.”
Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered from hysteria, but she must be answered. “Well,” he said, “you don’t think much of business. But you came into it.”
“I needed money,” she defended that.
“So did I,” he said dryly. “We’re birds of a feather.”
“You hate it, too?” she asked hopefully.
“Honestly,” he said, “I like it. But,” he went on with mischief in his eye, “I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the novel series. You think they degrade. You don’t think the Classics degrade?”
“No.”
“I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels.”