The couple pricked up their ears with relief at the mention of property.
"You have shown yourself to be prodigal in expenditure," Mr. Smith remarked, pulling from his pocket a card with a list of figures. "This past year you drew very nearly if not quite thirty-eight thousand dollars,—altogether too much money, I should say, for a young woman to spend safely."
"It was the cars and the Nile trip," Adelle murmured.
"Fortunately it happens to be well within the income of your estate, and so I suppose I cannot raise objections except upon moral grounds. It is too much money for any woman to spend wisely!"
Mr. Smith apparently had positive convictions on this subject. Adelle did not seem to care what he thought a woman could spend wisely.
"And so I propose that for the remainder of the time while you are nominally under our guardianship the trust company shall allow you—" He paused as if debating the figure with himself, and Archie unconsciously walked a couple of steps nearer the others. Alas! It drew Mr. Smith's attention from Adelle, for whom he was sorry, to the cause, as he thought, of her misfortune. Whatever had been in his mind he said curtly, looking at Archie, "Five thousand dollars a year, to be paid in quarterly installments on your personal order, Mrs. Davis."
The young people looked at him aghast. As a matter of fact, five thousand dollars a year was not penury, at least to Archie, who had rarely seen a clear twelve hundred from January to January. Even Adelle, after her training in the Church Street house, might at a pinch hold herself in for eighteen months, all the more as after that period of probation she could not be prevented by the trust company from indulging herself to the full extent of her income. Adelle, indeed, who was still somewhat vague about the limitations and possibilities of money, was not as much annoyed as Archie. But she knew that she was being punished for her conduct in running away with Archie by this disagreeable old man, and she resented punishment as a child might resent it. Mr. Smith, observing the signs of discontent with his announcement, remarked with increased decision and satisfaction:—
"I am sure that will be best for both of you. Especially for you, Mrs. Davis! It will give you an opportunity to find out how much you care for each other, without the luxuries that wealth brings. And it will protect you, my dear, from—er—the indiscretions of a young husband, who has not been accustomed to the use of much money, I gather."
Undoubtedly Mr. Smith thought he was acting wisely towards them,—"Just as I would if it had been my own daughter," according to his report to President West. As a matter of fact, he acted precisely as parents are only too prone to act, with one third desire for the best interests of the parties concerned and two thirds desire to have them punished for their folly. The punitive motive was large in Mr. Smith's decision to put the couple on short rations as long as he had the power to do so. He would have liked to tie up Adelle's fortune indefinitely, so that the young scamp who had married her for her money (as he was convinced) might get as little of it as possible. Unfortunately the trust company had no control after Adelle's twenty-first birthday, unless by that time experience should teach her the wisdom of voluntarily putting her fortune beyond her husband's reach; but, at any rate, for the next few months it could arbitrarily and tyrannically disappoint his hungry appetite, and that is what Mr. Smith meant to do. His psychology, unfortunately, was faulty. It was perhaps the poorest way of securing Adelle's happiness in the end, as he might have foreseen if he had been less conscientious and more human....
Shortly after delivering his blow, Mr. Smith took his hat and left the studio without shaking hands with Archie, although he smiled frostily on the trust company's ward and "hoped all would go well with her in her new life." All the way back to his hotel he congratulated himself for his dispatch, finesse, eloquence, and wisdom in handling a deplorable and difficult situation. Yet it is hard to see just what he had accomplished by crossing the ocean. He washed his hands of "the Clark girl" before he left Paris for his return voyage, and, like so many persons with whom the young heiress had dealings, never again actively entered her life.