Her Husband's Purse

by Helen Reimensnyder Martin

"I've said that I've surmised the facts I hold."

"Well, your 'surmises' are all wrong! Margaret would not set a lawyer to bringing suit against me! She's not quite a fool! She wouldn't deliberately disgrace the father of her children!"

"She would consider, rather, her children's shame in inheriting tainted money."

"I'll have her down here"—Daniel rose suddenly, though his knees shook under him—"and put it to her, and you'll see whether she is loyal to her husband or not!"

"Wait!" Walter checked him. "You will have her here of course if you like, but don't you think she's been subjected to about enough unpleasantness and nervous strain since yesterday afternoon? I can give you the answer she'd have for you: you will restore to your step-mother her third, or she will first institute a suit to make you do it and then (as so drastic a measure as that will make your living together rather unendurable) she will come home to Charleston with me."

"And the twins?"

"Would of course come with her."

"And you'd support them?" sneered Daniel.

"Margaret would be amply able to support them. She wanted to postpone telling you what it was that brought me North to see her just at this time, but I persuaded her this morning to let me tell you at once. It was this: a later will of her Uncle Osmond's has been found, in a volume of Kant's 'Critique,' giving Margaret an annual income of five thousand dollars. As the trustees of the estate had not yet begun the work of founding their free-thought college, the matter was easily adjusted. Uncle Osmond's change of heart, he states in a note, was brought about by a talk he had with Margaret one night in which he discussed his will with her and she pointed out to him that having given to him those years of her life in which a girl might prepare herself for a career, or at least for self-support, she would, if he left her dowerless, be stranded high and dry. So the old curmudgeon drew up a new will giving her a comfortable income, had it witnessed by two psychologists from two Western universities who called on him one day, stuck it into a damned old work on philosophy that no one would ever dream of looking into except by accident, and so two years and a half passed by before it was discovered."

Under the double shock of being threatened in one moment with a lawsuit that would rob him and his sisters and brother of a large part of their income from their coal lands, and in the next moment learning the joyful news that his wife was heiress to an annual income of five thousand dollars, Daniel felt weak, almost helpless.