“I am afraid so. Mr. Ruck is a broken-down man of business. He is broken down in health, and I suspect he is broken down in fortune. He has spent his whole life in buying and selling; he knows how to do nothing else. His wife and daughter have spent their lives, not in selling, but in buying; and they, on their side, know how to do nothing else. To get something in a shop that they can put on their backs—that is their one idea; they haven’t another in their heads. Of course they spend no end of money, and they do it with an implacable persistence, with a mixture of audacity and of cunning. They do it in his teeth and they do it behind his back; the mother protects the daughter, and the daughter eggs on the mother. Between them they are bleeding him to death.”
“Ah, what a picture!” murmured Mrs. Church. “I am afraid they are very-uncultivated.”
“I share your fears. They are perfectly ignorant; they have no resources. The vision of fine clothes occupies their whole imagination. They have not an idea—even a worse one—to compete with it. Poor Mr. Ruck, who is extremely good-natured and soft, seems to me a really tragic figure. He is getting bad news every day from home; his business is going to the dogs. He is unable to stop it; he has to stand and watch his fortunes ebb. He has been used to doing things in a big way, and he feels mean, if he makes a fuss about bills. So the ladies keep sending them in.”
“But haven’t they common sense? Don’t they know they are ruining themselves?”
“They don’t believe it. The duty of an American husband and father is to keep them going. If he asks them how, that’s his own affair. So, by way of not being mean, of being a good American husband and father, poor Ruck stands staring at bankruptcy.”
Mrs. Church looked at me a moment, in quickened meditation. “Why, if Aurora were to go to stay with them, she might not even be properly fed!”
“I don’t, on the whole, recommend,” I said, laughing, “that your daughter should pay a visit to Thirty-Seventh Street.”
“Why should I be subjected to such trials—so sadly éprouvée? Why should a daughter of mine like that dreadful girl?”
“Does she like her?”
“Pray, do you mean,” asked my companion, softly, “that Aurora is a hypocrite?”