“Knowing where it comes from, Douglas,” she went on, lowering her voice. He made no comment, and she added, with a change of tone: “I had hoped things might be different this morning.”
He looked mystified. “Different?” he repeated.
“I hoped that you wouldn’t have to go back to Washington—except for the rest of your present term.”
“That I shouldn’t get the nomination, do you mean?” Then he laughed. “You’re a nice wife. I wonder how you’d feel if you knew what the loss of that nomination would mean to me?”
“If it meant poverty or humiliation I should have been glad to share it with you, Douglas.”
He turned away from her with the impatient movement of his head that she had so often seen Jack make. “Now, please don’t waste any heroics on me. But let me tell you one thing, Helen. If I hadn’t been re-nominated last night I should be a ruined man. Just at present I haven’t five thousand dollars in the world. I told you last Spring how much it cost us to live. True, last year I made twice as much as I’d made the year before; but during the past few months I’ve lost every cent of it.”
Helen looked incredulous. Of late she often assumed an expression of mistrust at his statements that secretly enraged him. “How have you lost it?” she asked, fixing her eyes on him.
Briggs shrugged his shoulders. “By trying to make a fortune quick, just as many another man has done. I took greater risks—that’s all. Perhaps you’d like to know why I did that? I did it in order to make myself independent of those men in Washington—the men you’re so down on. I hoped that I could throw them off and go to you and say that I was straight.”
“And you thought that would please me?” Helen asked, in a tone of deep reproach.
He drew a long breath. “Well, I don’t know that anything will please you nowadays, Helen, but I thought it might.”