“I prefer not to discuss this question.” She rose to close the interview, relying upon the frigid dignity that she could throw into her smallest action, to restrain this earnest, vulgar man.
“It is my duty to warn you, to counsel you, to say that in abandoning this mighty world of opportunity to which God has called you, the help of these millions of souls,—” he stretched out his arms in his favourite gesture of immensity and numbers.
Mrs. Wilbur asked with a wicked smile,—“Suppose, Dr. Driver, I have no interest in ‘millions,’ that I believe it is a foolish labour to advance the masses and thus help create more ‘millions’? Suppose I believe it is morally wrong to make humanity all a common dull level, and that we ought to strive to produce quality, beauty, single great lives of distinction?”
This wholesale tossing aside the axiom of his life staggered the doctor. “Not long to bring to God all these souls?” He laboured in search of an argumentative basis.
“Mere size, mere numbers, mere collections of human beings who may be made industrious, neat, thrifty, and happy—that picture doesn’t stir my enthusiasm any more than mere miles of dwellings or mere millions of bushels of wheat!”
She was becoming tangled in an argument, when Molly Parker dashed in to take her away to a reception. Dr. Driver left at once, and to his wife that night he confided his belief that poor Wilbur had a heavy cross in his misguided wife. She was a proud, haughty, self-interested, and intellectually vain creature, and if she left her home to indulge her conceit in “European salons” she would be lost. It is needless to add that in a few days it was reported quite openly, “Jack Wilbur’s wife is going to leave him”; or, as some put it with an additional touch of imagination, “going to cut off with that painter-fellow.”
Mrs. Wilbur chatted with her friend as the carriage carried them swiftly to the Remsens’ that afternoon, strangely at peace with herself, and determined. Her attention was preternaturally keen, as if her mind was eager to gather last impressions, to fortify itself. She ran across Erard in her first assault on the crowded rooms at the Remsens’, and she lingered to talk with him alone for the benefit of a roomful of curious people, well aware that she was adding powder to her husband’s guns.
“I called on you the other evening,” Erard remarked with intention.
“Yes?” Mrs. Wilbur’s voice expressed no concern.
“And you were out. I shall not call again.”