“Well, if there were only Wrightingtons and Traceys and such like. But the others—you? After all there would be merely a row, some shooting, and back again to the old game of grab.”
She reflected after he had gone that Wren had called him a socialist, a meddler. “They think he should be a clergyman!” She was glad that he left before her husband should come in and find her with her “eastern puppy, the young agitator.” She did not wish to have any extra prejudices to contend with. For her feeling was high:—she must express herself somehow, must struggle to draw herself and her husband out of this situation. Wilbur found her walking nervously back and forth, crushing in her hot hands the evening paper with its “story” of the hearing.
Mrs. Wilbur was too excited to use any finesse. She outlined her plan rapidly:—they must sell the investments made with her money, and use that for the new house. In this way she thought to induce her husband to drop the traction stocks. For, she concluded, “then our home won’t always be a sore between us.”
Wilbur looked at her disgustedly. “That’s the woman in business! I don’t care to let go my hold in the Alaska company, nor in the other things. As far as your conscience is concerned,—well, I have already made eighty thousand in this deal. What would you like me to do with that?”
He spoke coolly, almost good-naturedly, but with contempt. Mrs. Wilbur rose quickly and walked up and down the room, speaking passionately.
“Do! Let us get rid of it all and keep just what I had from my father and leave this place, this prison. We can go to Europe and live quietly and decently and think of other things. If this goes on, we shall be like the others, like the Traceys, all of them, ploughing the mud for swill. This isn’t life,—this is—”
Pausing for the word, she caught herself, and grew calm again. Her fury, which had made her speak out for once, appeared childish, ineffective. Her desire was the old, womanish desire—to run away from the present, to elude the tangle.
Wilbur looked at her in astonishment. Then as if recollecting that allowances should be made for her, he spoke again calmly.
“Well, you wouldn’t like that kind of thing long. I shouldn’t, I can tell you. That isn’t life, doing nothing but just dawdling around and being respectable. You’re all twisted up and nervous, Ada, and the best thing is for us not to talk business until you are better. Then you’ll feel differently.”
She looked over at him critically. He certainly would never “feel differently.” He stood alert, keenly alive, self-reliant, quite assured,—one who had fitted into fate admirably. Her passion for business, for the stir and contest of affairs, ended there, that night. The papers were torn, the partnership dissolved.