"No," she said, shaking her head with a pleasant pretence of melancholy, "I was presumptuous. I did not realize how little my poor hands could do toward untangling the tangled web of life." Eudoxia, talking to a literary man, was faithfully striving to take the literary tone. She had waited for a year now, but the tone was here and time had not impaired its quality. "There was a period when I felt the strongest impulse toward the Higher Things; but now—now my husband's growing success needs my attending step. I must walk beside him and try to find my satisfactions in the simple duties of a wife." She dropped her head in the proud humility of welcome defeat.
Yes, Abner had brought down, one after another, all the pillars of the temple. But he had dealt out his own fate along with the fate of the rest: crushed yet complacent, he lay among the ruins. The glamour of success and of association with the successful was dazzling him. The pomp and luxury of plutocracy inwrapped him, and he had a sudden sweet shuddering vision of himself dining with still others of the wealthy just because they were wealthy, and prominent, and successful. Yes, Abner had made his compromise with the world. He had conformed. He had reached an understanding with the children of Mammon. He—a great, original genius—had become just like other people. His downfall was complete.
* * * * *
LITTLE O'GRADY vs. THE GRINDSTONE
* * * * *
LITTLE O'GRADY vs. THE GRINDSTONE
I
Mrs. Palmer Pence was a stock-holder in any number of banks—twenty shares here, fifty there, a hundred elsewhere; but she was a stock-holder and nothing more, while what she most desired was to be a director: to act on the board of one at least of these grandiose institutions would have given her a great deal of comfort. She was clever, she was forceful, she was ambitious,—but she was a woman; and however keen her desire, her fellow stockholders seemed bound by the ancient prejudice that barred woman from such a position of power and honour and left the whole flagrant monopoly with man.
"Such discrimination is miserably unjust," she would remonstrate.
Amongst her other holdings, Mrs. Pence had forty-five shares in the Grindstone National. This was her favourite bank. Her accounts with the great retail houses along Broad Street were always settled by checks on the Grindstone, as well as her obligations to the insatiable cormorants that trafficked in "robes and manteaux" farther up town. The bank was close to the shopping centre, and the paying-teller of the Grindstone was never happier than on those occasions when Eudoxia Pence would roll in voluminous and majestic and ask him to break a hundred-dollar bill.