“There was a time,” Remsen, who was heavily interested in real estate, began sententiously, “when every one howled for anything in Chicago. You wouldn’t see a word of blame in the papers no matter what people might think. Nothing was too good to say about the city. It was the best place on earth to live and die in. Now if the papers keep this racket up, people will be afraid to put a dollar in the place. They’re just ruining it, damning everything and every one so. They’ve gone pious all of a sudden.”
“But you wouldn’t have them approve of Wrightington.” Mrs. Wilbur ventured into the conversation impulsively. There was a moment of silence in the room, as if some one had awkwardly spilled a glass of water. Wilbur looked annoyed.
“Well,” Tracey began again, defiantly, “Wrightington is a mighty clever man. This franchise business is misrepresented. He needs it to protect his properties and—”
“What’s more, he’ll get it, too, in one way or another.” Wren laughed at his own cynicism. “All this howling may make the price higher, but he’s bound to get it.”
“The bill passed the Senate yesterday,” Remsen explained. “There’s only the governor now.”
Wren laughed. The other men smiled and tacitly abandoned the topic. Just then, as Mrs. Wilbur turned back to the women, feeling reproved, she caught a look of intelligence which passed between Mrs. Tracey and Mrs. Stevans. The latter, who had taken no part in the talk, was smiling knowingly across to Mrs. Tracey. Mrs. Wilbur saw her lips moving in an inaudible whisper. She seemed to hear the words, “Did you have something in it?” And she noted Mrs. Tracey’s smile and affirmative nod. The pantomime was over in five seconds, but it gave her a vivid shock.
All these people were gambling on the chances of Wrightington’s having successfully bought the legislature and the governor. Perhaps the franchise was just enough, but to speculate on the chances of bribery struck Mrs. Wilbur as peculiarly sordid. She had a revulsion of feeling different in the case of each one. Little Wren, with his moth-eaten baldness, his fat, pudgy nose, and bleared eyelids, seemed like a pander. The newspapers had it, she remembered, that he had spent most of the winter in Springfield as one of Wrightington’s agents. His hands were really soiled with dirty money. And Mrs. Stevans, the ample Mrs. Stevans, of capacious bosom and highly coloured reputation! The champagne for her dinners came in this way. The Traceys were another kind: they had risen straight from the lumber-camp. One could hardly resent the expression of naive, peasant cunning on Mrs. Tracey’s hard little face. Twenty years ago, when she haggled with the company’s agent over tobacco and pork, that expression began to grow. And the Remsens—well, she liked them and respected them, yet it was commonly said that Remsen’s extra two millions came from a “tip” on the sugar schedule of the Wilson bill.
Her disgust was not excessively moral. To be sure, old John Anthon had taught her that the laws of commercial morality were none other than those of private uprightness. Yet the disgust she felt was more than moral; it was a loathing of the sordid, of the brutal, of the vulgar. Had she, Adela Anthon, with her high-strung ideals of man’s life, her wide-sweeping ambitions, come to be a party in such an affair? Had she exchanged her love of intellectual life, her longing for beauty, to share in a common swindle on the public, brought about by a dicker between a knave and a gang of venal country legislators?
She rose abruptly and escaped. On the drive home, Wilbur did not speak. He seemed disgusted with her, yet tolerant in consideration for her condition. At last she asked bitterly, “So we belong to that crew?”
“I thought you were a bigger woman, Adela, than to talk like that. If you mean, that I have put every dollar I could raise into traction stocks, yes,—three months ago. But it isn’t good for you to talk over such matters; it only disturbs you.”