“Or leave us.”
CHAPTER III
The glamour of the “partnership” plan of marriage was fading away in Adela Wilbur’s mind. She had found money-getting exciting enough, while it was a matter of large chances in which she took part. Now that she was forced to accept the usual interests of women, she tried to invest her new home, her clubs and acquaintances, with importance. This form of excitement, however, was not what she had planned. And her husband seemed to be getting away from her rapidly. The Water-Hoister Company was a thing of the past. Two bad seasons in Kansas and Nebraska had crippled the concern. Wilbur had insisted on “getting out” in due season. The first division between them had come over his plan of selling their large holdings, with the idea of buying in later on a low market. To her this familiar device was like a sneaky trading of your home. Their partnership was based upon faith in the idea of the Water-Hoister. To step out and let other people bear the burden of its hard days was, if not dishonesty, cowardice. Wilbur’s sagacity, however, had been proved convincingly. Hoister stock fell steadily, until now it was kicked about for purely speculative purposes.
What Wilbur had done with the sums realized from their Hoister stock, she knew only vaguely. He was so much in the thick of the fight that she could not follow his rapid movements. She inferred that he was one of a group of young capitalists, of whom the newspapers asserted Wrightington was the master-mind.
The great Wrightington! This name hawked about ever since she had known anything of Chicago, filled her with a kind of terror. He was an unscrupulous adventurer, who had “gone broke” several times, yet was always triumphant; a man received nowhere, of no respectable affiliations, yet a power to be followed. Many of the respectable element secretly admired his audacity, half excused his reputation, and covertly followed his lead. He was brazen, impudent, cynical, and inevitable. Of late the papers had been frantic over Wrightington; they teemed with the usual charges of scandalous corruption and bribery which his transactions periodically aroused. Wilbur had shown unusual irritation, when his wife had approached the subject of the protest before the legislature by the Civic Association.
“Don’t mix us up in that tomfoolery,” he had blurted out. “Your nice people are keeping quiet to escape the mud the papers are throwing, but you will see fast enough what side they are on six months hence.”
Mrs. Wilbur was confused by these words, and unable to ravel out this question complicated by prejudices. She tried to put it out of her mind, to believe that her husband was right: “it was not a matter for amateurs.” But every morning the question stared her in the face in the columns of the newspapers, and was dinned in her ears even in the gossip of the women’s clubs. She could not escape a perpetual query: “What has John to do with it?”
Little things, quickly noted and interpreted, indicated to her that he had much to do with this “deal,” and a few days brought greater certainty. The Sunday following her talk with her husband, they had visited their new house, which was now nearly ready for the decorators. On their return Wilbur proposed that they should call on the Remsens, who were to be near neighbours. There they met Mr. and Mrs. Israel Tracey, also neighbours in the Chicago sense. Presently Mrs. Stevans, an important and wealthy widow, came in with a young broker (who was also a “society man”), named Wren. The men drawing to one side of the large library fell to talking confidentially among themselves. Mrs. Wilbur listened apprehensively to the earnest tones. Israel Tracey, a short, squat, powerfully built man of fifty, was speaking his mind freely to a sympathetic audience.
“The papers are all humbug. Squires in the Courant is down on it because Wrightington froze him out once years ago. He hasn’t said a word in his paper about the omnibus electric ordinance, which was a sight more shady. He had a hand in that pie. The papers are all rotten; it’s straight blackmail and intimidation.” His face puffed out redly.
“It’s a shame, the way the papers lead people by the nose,” Wren put in.