“I’m only the dog, my dear. Do you know any Greek? There’s a connection between being a dog and being a cynic. In certain circumstances, I’d have thought with you to the crack of doom, but your brother’s a cynic.”
“I see,” said Effie sadly. “But he will always be my brother, Dubby.”
“Thanks, Effie,” he said. “That will keep me on the sweeter side of currishness. But a dog wants meat. You’ll tell Sam I’m to have the first refusal of that business. I’ll scrape a syndicate together in a week.”
So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to tell Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously small, she had refused to be impressed.
“It’s not the means of life that matters, Sam. It’s living: it’s the quality of life: it’s what we do with life,” she said, and Ada got the means.
“She’ll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool,” said Dubby, when he heard.
“Why Liverpool?” asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought Sam’s question stupid.
“By the way, Sam,” Dubby said, “have you and Effie any plans?”
“No,” said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother’s curiosity was not to be stifled like that, and Sam’s face told her, too, how he had hung on her reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not dropped his calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of plans because she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam, she thought, deserved a little punishment for thinking otherwise. “I suppose,” she went on, “we shall stay in Manchester and face the music.”
“Oh!” said Sam blankly.