“It’s so large I lose myself,” he explained as his niece put her arm under his. “What do you do when you want to be at home and not in a hotel? Well, Adela, I didn’t think the explosion would end in this!”
She looked at him wistfully. “Nor I, Uncle Seb!”
“Not that it isn’t quite what you should do. But it doesn’t seem to suit you. Most things don’t suit in this world, Adela. We are a lot of misfits, a lot of misfits.”
She put her arms around his neck affectionately. “You should have married me, Uncle Seb! We would have exploded together.”
“Yes, that would have been fun. How splendid you are!” he exclaimed wearily as she turned on the electric lights in his suite of rooms. “Do you think of water-hoister and brick-stock and Bad Lands and all your other investments when you lie in those beds?” He noticed her sad eyes, and added, “You are splendid too, little girl.”
“No. I see Wrightington on the walls.”
“Who the devil is Wrightington?”
But she had hastily left the room. When she returned to the library, Mrs. Anthon went yawningly to her chamber, leaving husband and wife alone. Suddenly Mrs. Wilbur asked him, “Are you content with it?”
“Why, of course. Who would have thought four years ago in Paris that we should be sitting here!” He continued rather fatuously on the theme of their success. He was thirty-three, and he had done better than very well. To be sure, he had had his wife’s little capital as well as his own push in the Hoister Company, and he always paid full recognition to her share in their fortune. To-night he had demonstrated publicly what he could do. As he finished his cigar and rose to put out the lights, he observed casually,—
“Adela, I thought you toted that Erard round a good deal. Why can’t you let him do his own pushing? If he were a first-rate gun, a Whistler or a Sargent, or what is that fellow Mrs. Stevans had, Raf—Raffelly—it would be worth while. But we can’t shove him on our shoulders all the time. And I think you ought to drop supporting him. It would not be a very fine thing to have known around.”