The overcoat had not belied its appearance as the harbinger of prosperity and the forerunner of large expenditures—of which the house on the hill was one. The typometer was having a boom, the orders for it were phenomenal; the factory was working night and day. Even with the principle of trying to be rigidly conservative in estimates, it was hard not to count on an unvaried continuance of the miraculous; everybody knows of instances when it has continued, or seemed to. In reality, there is no such continuous miracle; a succession of adapted conditions has to be keenly worked out to produce the effect of continuity. In a sense, the Typometer Company was aware of this, and was consequently assimilating gradually smaller ventures with the main one.
The state of mind in which Justin had gone to take possession of the factory that bright November morning was as different in graduation from that present with him now as the single simply clear notes of the flute are from the twanging strings and blended diversity of a whole orchestra. Everything hinged on something else, and there was nothing that did not hinge on money. Amid the immense daily complications of enlarging the business was the nagging daily complication of keeping enough of a balance in the bank in spite of the continual outgo. Money came in lavishly at times, but the outgo had to be enormous; it was as the essential bread upon the waters that insured its own return a hundredfold. Materials can be bought with a leeway of credit, but “hands” must be paid off on Saturday night; there had been one Saturday when there had been what Leverich called “tall hustling” by him and Martin and Alexander, before those hands could be paid. Justin had thought of his backers as men of millions—with that easy, assured confidence one has in regard to the superficially known; the millions were in the concrete, solid and golden—a bottomless store in reserve. He had gradually come to realize that the millions were a fluctuant quality, running like quicksilver from side to side, here in one place, there in another, as the various needs of corporations called them. Both Martin and Leverich were past masters in the art of making a little butter cover many slices of bread; to have to appropriate money to cover an emergency was a daily expedient—the ability to do so ranked as a part of one’s assets. Lois could not understand why, when such large sales were being made, there were not larger returns now; the “business” seemed to swallow up everything, and more than all else her husband. To his luminous, excited brain, the different phases of trade passed and repassed as pictures in a lighted transparency, riveting an exhilarated attention; all else was in blurred darkness and must wait until after the show for recognition. He felt it inexpressibly tiresome and unkind of Lois to wish to engross him, when he was laboring for her welfare and the children’s.
Lois Alexander, who had a household to look after, servants to keep in order, children to be attended to, who was subject to the claims of social functions, clubs, friends, and affairs generally, was through everything absorbed in her husband to a degree incredible to anyone but a woman. His attitude toward her had come to occupy the substrata of her thoughts morning, noon, and night. To have him leave with a shade less of affection for her in the morning farewell left her with a sick feeling throughout the day; everything done in those next hours was merely to fill up the time until his return, that she might see then if her exacting soul might be satisfied. Sometimes she reproached him tearfully before he left, and then it was not only with a sick feeling that she spent the day, but with an absolutely intolerant pain, because she must wait until night to set herself right with him again. At those times she could not derive any satisfaction even from her children—her only refuge from weeping herself into a sick-headache was to go to town and shop exhaustingly. One cannot well shed tears in the crowded streets, or before a clerk who is showing one goods over a counter. But when she went shopping too many days in succession the children showed the effects of it in the lawlessness which creeps in in a mother’s absence.
She could not understand why the morning reproach and the evening retraction had grown alike unimportant to her husband; after the first surprise and solicitude occasioned by this recurrent state, he had grown to regard it as something to be borne with like any other normal annoyance,—like fog, rain, or mosquitoes,—that measurably lessened the joy of the day, but upon which no action of his had any bearing. A man must have patience with his wife’s complainings, and try always to remember the delicacy of her bodily strength and the many calls upon it, which made little things a grievance to her. He himself never complained; complaint was in itself distasteful to him.
Lois, left alone now, with Dosia up-stairs, felt herself relapsing into the dark mood she dreaded, when there came the welcome sound of the door-bell. A moment later the maid took up a card to Dosia on which was inscribed the name of Mr. Angevin L. Cater. He was scrupulously attired in an old “dress suit,” the conventional lines of which, with the stiff expanse of shirt-front, seemed to make his yellow angularity of feature still more pronounced. He looked so oddly out of place in the little drawing-room, where he sat talking to Lois, his long limbs tucked back as far as possible under the small spindle-legged sofa, and one arm stretched out embracingly over the green cushions at his side, and yet he looked so oddly natural and homelike, too, that Dosia felt a swift pleasure in his presence. At her entrance, he disentangled himself from the sofa and stood up to take the two hands which she had extended to him before she knew it, regarding her the while with admiring earnestness.
“Well, you are all right,” he said, after the first greetings; “Miss Dosia, you certainly are all right. If I was back in the South I’d say just what I thought of you, but I’m afraid to up here; folks are too careful about complimentin’ for me. When I see a young lady like you,—or like Mrs. Alexander, here,—” he rose and bowed gallantly, “I want to get straight up and tell you just how handsome you look. There’s nothing so beautiful on God’s earth to me as a beautiful woman—unless it’s a mother. A mother doesn’t need to have a complexion if she’s got the mother spirit shinin’ out of her. I had a mother once—a better never lived. She’s dead.”
“That is very sad,” said Lois, in the pause that followed this announcement, keeping back an almost irresistible smile. Both she and Dosia felt the relief of light and impersonal conversation after painful communing.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the visitor, sitting, as before, with his long legs back under the little sofa and one long arm embracing the top of it.
“How is your wife?” asked Dosia. “Have you seen her lately?”
“I was home for a week around Christmas-time,” answered Mr. Cater. “It’s sort of unsettling, though, to go home for a short period—at least, I find it so. I don’t know as it pays, except as something to look forward to before you’ve done it; there’s a good deal in that. My wife lives with her family; they have a right smart amount of trouble, and it seems like it always saves up for a real spell when I get home.”