“They changed the name in reorganizing the company,” Durland explained patiently in his colorless tone. “I had some loans the bank wouldn’t carry any longer; stock I put up as collateral had to be sold and Cummings bought it.”
“A man who will do a thing like that will be punished for it; he won’t prosper,” said Ethel in a curious, strained voice.
Durland frowned at his older daughter. Evidently her remark was distasteful to him; he found no consolation in the prediction that unseen powers would punish Cummings for his perfidy.
“I’d probably have done the same thing if I’d been in his place. Everything he turned down—my new ideas, I mean—proved to be no good when I put my own money into ’em on the side. You’ve got to be fair about it.”
It was clear that he set great store by the new shop. The fact that he still had a place to work preserved his self-respect. With a place in which to continue his experiments he was not utterly condemned to the scrap heap. He lifted his head and his jaws tightened. Grace noted with pity these manifestations of a resurgence of his courage. His laborious life, his few interests outside the shop or more accurately the private laboratory he had maintained for years in a corner of the Cummings-Durland plant; his evenings at home poring over scientific books and periodicals; his mild unquestioning assent to everything his wife proposed with reference to family affairs, all had their pathos. She had always been aware that he had a fondness for her that was not shared by Roy and Ethel. Grace imagined that it was a disappointment to her father that Roy had not manifested a mechanical bent. In his gentle, unassertive fashion, Durland had tried to curb the lad’s proneness to seek amusement, to skimp his lessons—this in Roy’s high school days; but Mrs. Durland had always been quick to defend Roy; in her eyes he could do no wrong.
Ethel and her father were almost equally out of sympathy. Ethel was intensely religious, zealous in attendance upon a down-town church, a teacher in its Sunday school and active in its young people’s society. While Mrs. Durland had long been a member of a West End church she was not particularly religious; she believed there was good in all churches; but she was proud of Ethel’s prominence in a church whose membership was recruited largely from the prosperous. Ethel was on important committees and she was now and then a delegate to conventions of church workers in other cities; the pastor called upon her frequently and she had been asked to dinner at the houses of wealthy members of the congregation, though usually some church business inspired the invitation. In a day when the frivolity of the new generation was a subject of general lamentation, Ethel could be pointed to as a pattern of sobriety and rectitude. Durland had ceased going to church shortly after his marriage and his wife had accounted to his children for his apostacy on the ground of his scientific learnings. He never discussed religion; indeed, he rarely debated any question that rose in the family.
Mrs. Durland came bustling in carrying an apron which she was hemstitching and the talk at once became more animated.
“The Cummings are in their new house on Washington Boulevard, Grace. They’ve left the house on Meridian they bought when they moved away from here. They haven’t sold their place; they’ve leased it for ninety-nine years to an automobile company. We’re the only people on this block who were here when your father bought this house.”
Ethel and her mother engaged in a long discussion of the Cummings family, not neglecting to abuse Isaac Cummings for his ungenerous conduct in dropping Durland from the business. Meanwhile Durland crossed and recrossed his short thin legs to express his impatience or disapproval. Nothing interested him less than the Cummings family history; and his elimination from the old company was a closed incident.
“Bob Cummings’s wife is certainly a pretty woman,” continued Ethel. “She’s very popular, too. You see her name nearly every day in the society column. Bob was always so quiet; I wonder how he likes being dragged about so much.”