“Curiously enough he has never spoken with me, even indirectly, about having taken charge of your mother’s business,” replied Reuben, slowly. “But he is a competent man, with a considerable talent for detail, and a good knowledge of business, as well as of legal forms. I should say you might be perfectly easy about his capacity to guard your interests; oh, yes, entirely easy.”
“It isn’t his capacity that I was thinking about,” said the young woman, hesitatingly. “I wanted to ask you about him himself—about the man.”
Reuben smiled in an involuntary effort to conceal his uneasiness. “They say that no man is a hero to his valet, you know,” he made answer. “In the same way business men ought not to be cross-examined on the opinions which the community at large may have concerning their partners. Boyce and I occupy, in a remote kind of way, the relations of husband and wife. We maintain a public attitude toward each other of great respect and admiration, and are bound to do so by the same rules which govern the heads of a family. And we mustn’t talk about each other. You never would go to one of a married couple for an opinion about the other. If the opinion were all praise, you would set it down to prejudice; if it were censure, the fact of its source would shock you. Oh, no, partners mustn’t discuss each other. That would be letting all the bars down with a vengeance.”
He had said all this with an effort at lightness, and ended, as he had begun, with a smile. Kate, looking intently into his face, did not smile in response. He thought her expression was one of disappointment.
“Perhaps I was wrong to ask you,” she answered, after a little pause, and in a colder tone. “You men do stand by each other so splendidly. It is the secret of your strength. It is why your sex possesses the earth, and the fulness thereof.”
It was easier for Reuben to smile naturally this time. “But I illustrated my position by an example of a still finer reticence,” he said; “the finest one can imagine—that of husband and wife.”
“You are not married, I believe, Mr. Tracy,” was her comment, and its edge was apparent.
“No,” he said, and stopped short. No other words came to his tongue, and his thoughts seemed to have gone away into somebody else’s mind, leaving only a formless blank, over which hung, like a canopy of cloud, a depressing uneasiness lest his visit should not, after all, turn out a success.
“Then you think I have needlessly worried myself,” she was saying when he came back into mental life again.
“Not altogether that, either,” he replied, moving in his seat, and sitting upright like a man who has shaken himself out of a disposition to doze. “So far as you have described them, the transactions may easily be all right. Everything depends upon details which you cannot give. The sum seems a large one to raise for the purchase of machinery, and it might be well to inquire into the exact nature and validity of the purchase. As for the terms upon which you lend the money to the company, of course Mr. Boyce has secured those. In the matter of the trust, I cannot speak at all. The idea is hateful to me, personally. All such combinations excite my anger. But as a business operation it may improve your property; always assuming that you are capably and fairly represented in the control of the trust. I suppose Mr. Boyce has attended to that.”