That was a sobering answer. One-third of her brick-stock, and bricks paid their assured twelve per cent. For a moment she trembled and was inclined to take refuge in Uncle Sebastian’s advice. Then her blood leapt again to her pulses. Some bars of Tristan surged through her, inciting her to venture, to play with the world somehow.
“Once in the saddle,” continued Wilbur, speciously, “and given a proper time for development, your fifty thousand ought to more than double.”
“And if I don’t do it,” her eyes questioned him.
“Why! I take my chances of finding somebody else who will,” he retaliated. His assurance in his own control of this world’s affairs made it impossible for him to realize the risk he was urging her to take.
“I’ll do it.” Miss Anthon caught her breath. “I will put fifty thousand in the company. I am of age, twenty-two. All my family are independent. I shall have enough left, in—in case—”
Wilbur looked puzzled at all this confession.
“And I do it because I believe in you. I want to share with you in your fight and feel that I count for something in this world.”
This was also a little vague and childish. Wilbur on his part showed no signs of obligation. He had treated her as openly as he would the best of his friends, and all at once they seemed to grow intimate. He unfolded swiftly his course of action, the reasons for his belief in the future. When the bell sounded, and they were back once more in the cramped loge, Miss Anthon felt indebted to him already for this chance of equality.
The next morning she announced her decision to her mother and uncle, almost indifferently, as they were eating breakfast in their private salon. Mrs. Anthon screamed. “Ada, you are crazed! Sebastian, she shan’t do it. There was my aunt’s husband—he sold his stock at 75 in the panic of eighty-three, against poor John’s advice—” It was a long story, this tale of the aunt’s husband—and well known in the family. Adela Anthon listened dreamily. She had always rather sympathized with Isaac Nash for daring to rebel against the autocrat.
Sebastian Anthon’s protest, backed up by business details, by unfavourable remarks on skyrocket companies, was more weighty. At last he said wearily: “Why do you want to bother with money matters? It’s a tiresome business at best, and when you are pleasantly out of it, all safe, why can’t you use your energies in some other way?”