“He’s keeping bad company just now,” said Anne, “and I doubt you’ve been too clever for him.”
Sam chose to be offended. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked.
“That you’re clever. Aye. I think that all right. I’ve known it since the time when you tricked a parcel of schoolboys out of a house of furniture and put George Chappie into it. You’re clever in the wrong places, Sam. When you were at school, you were clever out of school. You’re at business now and you ought; to be clever in honesty, and I’ve the notion that you’re being clever in dishonesty.”
“Of course,” he said, “this only shows how right I was not to tell you. It’s the old story. Women don’t understand business.”
“I know. Business is a pair of spectacles that makes black into white, but I don’t wear spectacles myself. Are you going to tell me what you’re doing with that thousand pounds?”
“I told you it isn’t decided yet. But if the sales of that pamphlet go up this week as they did last, I’m going into the publishing business with it.”
“So that you can publish more of the same sort?”
“If I can get them. There’s a lot of money in it.”
“Sam,” she said earnestly, “is that all you’re caring about?”
“You told me yourself that Ada was not the wife for a poor man.” He considered that a very neat score, to seem to make Anne responsible, but Anne was not to be deceived by any such seeming. As she saw it, Ada had corrupted Sam, Ada was the motive of this misuse of his cleverness; and the bitterness for Anne was doubly poignant. She believed in Sam, with a faith which had never swerved in spite of her disappointment in his school career; but she realized now that he had been marking time in Travers’ office, that it was Ada and not she who had quickened his energies to rapid action. Ada had quickened them, where under Anne they had lain dormant but the quickening had been corrupt. It came from Ada, poisoned at the source, and took to poisonous ways.