“Don’t you see what I’m trying to get at?” he insisted. “Won’t you try to see? Just try––put yourself in my place, make yourself think with my viewpoint as a starting place. Suppose you had been a dreamer of a boy with a pirate’s daring and a poet’s unreal delusions, and you combined the two to produce a fortune, a fortune everyone marvelled at, the lucky turn of the wheel. Suppose you used that fortune with the same daring and fancy, loving someone with all your heart, to make money in a regular business and under the guidance of a well-trained merchant like your father––and then you married the person you loved and saw her deliberately belittle your manhood by going to her father’s house to live, spending her father’s money, and leaving you quite alone and without the joyous and needed responsibility of supporting your wife. Now what would you do?”
“I’d start right in spending my own money for things I wanted,” she decided, glibly.
“But suppose you did not want things––cluttery, everlasting things, glaring, upholstered, painted, carved, what not––lugged from the four corners of 225 the earth, not harmonizing with your own aims or interests? Suppose you wanted to create an individual and representative home and take care of it and the guardian angel who presided therein––then what would you do?”
“Oh––you mean you want another style of house? Then let’s buy a country tract––and I promise to let you build and furnish just as you wish. That’s a bully idea, dear, to have an abrupt contrast to this house––old-English manor type would be wonderful!”
The dinner gong brought a merciful release. Beatrice danced through the archway throwing him a kiss as the rest of her decision.
It was at this identical moment that Steve concluded it was too late for his wife ever to develop anything more than a double chin or so.
CHAPTER XVI
During Beatrice’s house party, at which twenty or so equally Gorgeous Girls and their husbands were quartered in the Villa Rosa, while a string orchestra danced them further along the road toward nervous prostration each night, a fire ignited in the offices of the O’Valley Leather Company.