Carlisle, having so lately risen, ate but a déjeuner. Mr. Heth, on the contrary, attacked the viands with relish, restoring waste tissues from two directors' meetings, a meeting of the Convention Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, and an hour in his office at the bank. He was a full-bodied, good-looking, amiable-mannered man, of sound stock and excellent digestion, and wore white waistcoats the year round, and fine blond mustaches, also the year round. He certainly did not look to the casual eye like a shameless homicide, but rather like an English country gentleman given to dogs. He was fifty-four years old, a hard worker for all his indolent eye, and his favorite diversion was about twelve holes of golf on Sunday morning, and his next favorite one table of bridge by night in the library across the hall.
Greetings over, Mr. Heth said "Catch!" to his wife and daughter, referring to the ten-dollar goldpieces from the directors, and remarked that he hadn't been near the Works for two mornings, and that money made the mare go. A sober look touched his fresh-colored face as he voiced these observations, but then he was tired and hungry, and nobody noticed the look anyway. This fashion of the 1.30 luncheon had been one of the earliest of their Yankee innovations which had caused the rising Heths to be viewed with alleged alarm by ante-bellum critics, dear old poorhouse Tories who pretended that they wanted only to live as their grandsires had lived. The Heths, unterrified, and secure from the afternoon torpor inflicted on up-to-date in'ards by slave-time régime, dispatched the exotic meal with the cheerfulness of Property.
"Effete, Cally,--that's what this age is," said Mr. Heth, pushing back his chair, and producing his gold toothpick. "Everybody looking for somebody else's neck to hang on to. And makin' a lot of grafters out of our poor class. Look at this Labor Commissioner and his new-fangled nonsense. Nagging me to spend Lord knows how many thousands, making the plant pretty and attractive for the hands. Voted for the fellow, too."
"I never heard of such a thing. What sort of things does he want you to do, papa?"
"Turkish baths and manicures and chicken sandwiches, I guess. I don't listen to his rot. Law's good enough for me. Point I make is that's the spirit of the poor nowadays. I pay 'em wages that would have been thought enormous a hundred years ago, but are they satisfied? Not on your life!..."
Winter sunshine, filtering in through cream-colored curtains, touched upon those refinements with which the prosperous civilize and decorate the brutal need: upon silver, growing flowers, glittering glass, agreeable open spaces, and fine old mahogany. It was an exceptionally pleasant room. The Heths might be "improbable people," as Mrs. Berkeley Page was known to have said on a certain occasion and gone unrebuked, but their material taste was clearly above reproach. And all this was to their credit, proving efficiency in the supreme art, that of living. For the Heths, of course, were not rich at all as the word means nowadays: they were far indeed from being the richest people in that town. Their merit it was that they spent all they had, and sometimes a little more; and few persons lived who could surpass Mrs. Heth in getting a dollar's worth of results for each dollar expended....
Carlisle and her father chatted pleasantly about the remarkable spirit of the poor, and the world's maudlin sentiment towards it and them. The lovely maid professed herself completely puzzled by these problems.
"We're always giving them money," she pointed out, spooning a light dessert in a tall glass, "or getting up bazaars for them, or sending them clothes that have lots more wear in them. And what do they do in return, besides grumble and riot and strike and always ask for more? And they stay poor just the same. What is going to happen, papa?"
Mr. Heth lit a cigar--not one of the famous Heth Plantation Cheroots. He requested Cally not to ask him.
"Never be satisfied," said he, "till they strip us of everything we've worked our lives away earning. They'll ride in our motor-cars and we'll sit in their workhouse. That'll be nice, won't it? How'll plain little girls like that, eh?"