Kendrick, who could not imagine for a moment that the count was serious, was disposed to take the matter as a good joke. “If your knightly passion is the adoption of bastards, why have you never adopted any before? I think this is the first. Isn’t it?”
“Yes; because I have never known a case where the mother, being poor and uneducated, rose out of her disgrace so nobly. The doctor tells me she is a great student—reads and studies regularly, while working like a martyr to get the flower business on a safe footing. I mean to go and see her to-morrow, and if she wants capital, I’m her man. It is just as safe an investment as your insurance business, though it won’t pay so high a rate of interest.” Kendrick could have strangled him. Burnham and his wife retired with sufficient discomfiture for any amount of conjugal infelicity. Burnham declared, as soon as the door closed behind the happy pair, that but for her “gabble about those women, Frauenstein would not have made such a fool of himself.” Mrs. Burnham assumed the silent air of the martyred wife. So they went home to their grand house, second only in cost to the Kendrick mansion, and laid their heads to rest on two contiguous pillows, with as much justification for the proximity as the law allows. Meanwhile a very similar conjugal harmony expressed itself in the grander home of the Kendricks; but Mrs. Kendrick did not play the rôle of the silent victim as Mrs. Burnham did. As her husband was removing his cravat, she said, “Now here’s a fine mess you’ve got into with the count.”
“I! Well, that’s cool. What do you mean?” asked Mr. Kendrick, not for information, as his wife knew; so she answered somewhat impatiently:
“You ought to know Frauenstein well enough to see that he would never sympathize with any narrow social distinctions. He’s seen Clara Forest, thinks her unjustly treated, and so he has gone over to the enemy.”
“Seen Clara? I should say he had seen the other, by the way he talked. Shouldn’t wonder if he fell in love with that brat, and the mother too.”
“That’s as much as you know. Men never see anything. I’m perfectly sure that he is smitten with Clara. That’s the way it will end. You’ll see,” said Mrs. Kendrick, bitterly. She had long cherished the hope that Louise might win the count; but she spoke very despairingly about it now.
“Oh, I always told you that would never work. Men like that, know too well what a woman is. Louise has arms and legs like spermaceti candles.”
“Well, I must say, for a father to speak like that, is shameful,” answered Mrs. Kendrick.
“It’s all your own fault; you took her away from the high-school because she got hurt a little in the gymnasium, and sent her to that namby-pamby seminary of half idiots at Worcester. Didn’t I always want her to work in the garden and in the hot-house, and develop her muscles? She’ll always be sickly, just as she is now.”
“I’m sure she has had a great deal of exercise, and her health is as good as mine was at her age, and she is not a bit thinner in flesh.” Mr. Kendrick made no denial, and his wife continued: “Working in the garden spreads out a girl’s hands, and makes them red; and what man, I should like to know, ever likes hands and arms like a washer-woman’s? You were always praising the smallness and whiteness of mine. I mean before we were married, of course.” Still Kendrick was silent, but his thoughts were very busy. Someway the world was out of joint, and he was wondering if, after all, these radicals, with their talk about making women free and teaching them to depend on themselves, were not pretty near the truth. Here was Frauenstein, for example, rich enough to put a wife in a palace, and surround her with attendants, and he was always admiring women who worked. This he expressed to Mrs. Kendrick, and said that it certainly was commendable in Clara, since she would be a fool and throw away her rights as Delano’s wife, to take care of herself, instead of coming home and living on her father.