“Indeed, Mrs. Blodgett,” you observed, “has not the day gone by for thinking dullness a sign of honesty? And certainly a business career is far more likely to corrupt and harden men’s natures than the higher professions, for its temptations and strifes are so much greater.”
Your opinion was so in accord with what my father had often preached that I could not but wonder if his teachings still colored your thoughts. To test this idea as well as to learn your present view, I recurred to another theory of his by saying, “Does not the broader and more sensitive nature of the scholar or artist involve defects fully as serious as the hardness and narrowness of the business man? Some one has said that ‘to marry a literary man is to domesticate a bundle of nerves.’”
“A nervous irritability,” you replied, “which came from fine mental exertion, would be as nothing compared to my own fretting over enforced companionship with an unsympathetic or sordid nature.” Then you laughed, and added, “I must have a very bad temper, for it is the only one which ever really annoys me.”
That last speech told me how thoroughly the woman of twenty-three was a development of the child of fourteen, for I remembered how little my mother’s anger used to disturb you, but how deeply and strongly your emotions affected you. I suppose it was absurd, but I felt happy to think that you had changed so little in character from the time when I knew you so well. And from that evening I never for an instant believed that you would marry Mr. Whitely, for I was sure that you could never love him. How could I dream that you, with beauty, social position, and wealth, would make a loveless marriage?
Good-night, my love.
XI
March 2. The truth of the difference of quality between the business man and the scholar was quickly brought home to me. On the last evening of my visit, Mr. Blodgett revealed the reason for his latest kindness. “I got you here,” he explained, “to look you over and see what you were fit for, thinking I might work you in somewhere. No,” he continued, as he saw the questioning hopefulness on my face, “you wouldn’t do in business. You’ve got a sight too much conscience and sympathy, and a sight too little drive. All business is getting the best of somebody else, and you’re the kind of chap who’d let a fellow up just because you’d got him down.” Seeing the sadness in my face, for I knew too well he had fathomed me, he added kindly, “Don’t get chicken-hearted over what I say. It’s easy enough to outwit a man; the hard thing is not to do it. I’d go out of the trade to-morrow, if it weren’t for the boss and Agnes, for I get tired of the meanness of the whole thing. But they want to cut a figure, and that isn’t to be done in this town for nothing. I’ll find something for you yet that sha’n’t make you sell your heart and your soul as well as your time.”
I was too full of my love and my purpose, however, for this to discourage me. The moment my determination to remain in New York was taken, I wrote to Jastrow, Humzel, and others of my German friends, telling them that for business reasons I had decided to be known as Rudolph Hartzmann, and asking if they would stretch friendship so far as to give me letters in that name to such American publishers and editors as they knew. Excepting Jastrow, they all responded with introductions so flattering that I was almost ashamed to present them, and he wrote me that he had not offered my books for sale, and begged me to reconsider my refusal of the professorship. He even offered, if I would accept the appointment, to divide with me his tuition fees, and suggested that his own advancing years were a pledge that his position would erelong be vacant for me to step into. It almost broke my heart to have to write him that I could not accept his generous offer. In July I received a second letter from him, most touching in its attempt to keep back the grief he felt, but yielding to my determination. He sent me many good introductions, and submitted a bid for my library from a bookseller; but knowing the books to be worth at least double the offer, I held the sale in abeyance.
My first six months in New York disheartened me greatly, though now I know that I succeeded far better than I could have expected to do, in the dullness of the summer. My work was the proof-reading of my book of travel in its varying polyglots, seeing through the press English versions of my two text-books, and writing a third in both English and German. Furthermore, my letters of introduction had made me known to a number of the professors of Columbia College, and by their influence I received an appointment to deliver a course of lectures on race movements the following winter; so I prepared my notes in this leisure time. But this work was far too little to fill my time, and I wrote all kinds of editorials, essays, and reviews, fairly wearing out the editors of the various magazines and newspapers with my frequent calls and articles. Finally I attempted to sell my books to several libraries; but though the tomes and the price both tempted several, none had the money to spend on such a collection.