“I replied, ‘Mrs. Lawrence herself told me of three parties which her eight-year-old Gladys attended within a single week, and she afterwards remarked incidentally that the child had a tendency to insomnia and dyspepsia and was taking medicine all the time. Moreover, your older daughter privately informed me that she had begun a diet of vinegar and slate-pencils to reduce her plumpness.
“‘No,’ I said, ‘I shall not presume to dictate to you as to the methods which you are to pursue with your children. But I have seen them several times and have an interest in them, and I believe that their character will receive a permanent injury from the irregular life which they are living and the false notions they have imbibed in regard to keeping up a style which they cannot afford. So for their sake, and in addition to paying all your debts, I am willing to send the oldest to good boarding-schools where simple diet, regular hours, and systematic work can help to make of them a stronger man and woman than there is prospect of their becoming now.’
“I could see that it was terribly galling for him to have me sit there and arraign him, as it were, for his conduct; but he clenched his teeth, kept silence, and heard me to the end. Then he cleared his throat, and after a moment said, hoarsely, without looking up:
“‘Miss Brewster, you are very kind. With your permission I will call on you to-morrow at eleven.’”
The next morning, a half hour after the time appointed, General Lawrence and his wife appeared, both looking as if they had passed a restless night. Mrs. Lawrence, clad in an elegant gown, quite outshone Mildred, who wore a quiet street costume of gray serge. That costly dress and the queenly air of its owner nettled me.
“Mildred,” I whispered, as she came back for a pencil, “do think twice before you squander your thousands on saving those people from the just penalty of their folly and sin.”
“I am not thinking of them so much as of their children,” said she gravely; “and it is far more folly than sin. Mrs. Lawrence is a Southern woman, sweet-tempered and charming, but despising little economies as petty Yankee meanness, and she will have to submit to receiving instruction from me on that score, or else I shall let the sheriff come.”
But Mildred certainly did seem somewhat disconcerted when she learned that the ten-thousand-dollar loan which had been asked for was less than half of General Lawrence’s indebtedness. He confessed, she told me afterward, that his expenses last year were over five thousand dollars, while his receipts from his literary work, his sole income, were only twenty-eight hundred. “We were obliged, actually obliged, to go into society more or less on account of the General’s position,” said his wife, apologetically. “General Lawrence is continually meeting important people in the literary and political world, and can’t you see, my dear Miss Brewster, how essential this is for his writing? And, of course, if we are always well entertained ourselves, we have to treat people decently when they come to see us. I have been my own seamstress, and have economized in every way, but it is absolutely impossible for us to live on three thousand a year. My husband’s writings would bring us three times that if he could get what he deserves. But it is always so with men of genius; their own generation never appreciates them,” she added bitterly, while her husband fidgeted and took a turn around the room.
“Well, and what did you say to such rubbish as that?” I inquired of Mildred.
“I said,” answered she, “that Emerson and many others had found ‘plain living and high thinking’ quite compatible, and that I thought a residence in some suburban town would obviate the burdens of society, and allow them to live within their income. At all events,” I said, “although I stood ready to offer, as a gift, their entire immunity from debt, this could not be done except by a strict construction of the conditions which I had laid down. However, I offered General Lawrence an opportunity to lay up a little money, telling him that I had various projects in view, and should need the assistance of the pen of a ready writer in carrying out many of them. I told him that I would put to his credit in the bank ten dollars for every newspaper column which he would write on subjects that I should give him: at the end of three years this amount should be turned over to him, and meanwhile he must ‘cut his coat according to his cloth,’ and manage in some way to live strictly within his income.”