“Tired or not, in a few months you will once more leave us. Otto, it will break your father’s heart.”
This prophecy Otto considered a decidedly doubtful one.
“I never understood why you first went,” continued the Baroness. “Gerard stays. Everybody I know stays. Fifteen years ago you must suddenly resolve to learn gentleman-farming in Germany. It sounds so silly, ‘gentleman-farming.’ They call it ‘economy’ over there—I suppose the name pleased you—and after a year or two you came back and said it couldn’t be done without plenty of money. A charming economy. It is as good as a farce!”
“That is true, Otto, is it not?” she added, petulantly, after a pause.
“Quite true,” he replied, helplessly, sitting forward on a little boudoir chair, his brown hands hanging joined between his heavy legs.
“Well, then, after that you must hurry away to plant tea in the Indies, as if there were not enough common people to do that! And doing it, too. I never heard of a break-down in the tea-supply. And now you have been busied there for a dozen years, and what’s the profit to you or to any one? You’re no richer, and tea’s not even cheaper. So you’ve benefited neither your neighbor nor yourself.” The Baroness sighed. Plush sighed also, her whole little pink-tinted body a sob of lethargic content.
“But I’ve been earning an honest living,” burst out Otto, desperately. It was all so useless; he had said it so often before! “At least I’ve not been droning through my whole life, spending father’s money, and knowing all the time that in fact there was no money to spend. Of course, I’d hoped to come back richer from India, but you can’t understand about the crisis in the tea-trade, mother.”
“No, indeed,” said the Baroness.
“At any rate, however, I’ve paid my way. I’ve not lived, as Gerard does, in a constant entanglement of bills and loans. I don’t depend for my daily bread on the mercy of the Jews.”
“Nor does Gerard, thank Heaven! though he may for his daily champagne!” cried the Baroness, her irrepressible sprightliness bubbling uppermost. “And the Jews, as your father always says, are a dispensation of Providence for the survival of the fittest. He doesn’t mean themselves. They keep the old families above water till smoother times work round again. Look at the Van Utrechts, for instance; the only son tried to commit suicide for want of a friendly Jew! And four months later he married a Rotterdam oil-merchant’s daughter. That’s what Gerard will do; only, in his case, I do hope and pray that the man who made the money will be a generation farther off. And on the mother’s side.” The Baroness sank back reflectively, and, for the hundredth time, a procession of ticketed young ladies passed before her pale blue eyes.