“Mr. Grant is different,” her daughter interrupted, lightly. “I found him wandering the streets and I just—retrieved him.”
“I think I AM different,” he admitted, as his eye took in the surroundings, which he appraised quickly as modest comfort, attained through many little economies and makeshifts. “You are very happy here,” he went on, frankly. “Much more so, I should say, than in many of the more pretentious homes. I have always contended that, beyond the margin necessary for decent living, the possession of money is a burden and a handicap, and I see no reason to change my opinion.”
“Phyllis is a great help to me—and Grace,” the mother observed. “I hope she is a good girl in the office.”
Grant was hurrying an assent but the girl interrupted, perhaps wishing to relieve him of the necessity of an answer.
“‘Decent living’ is a very elastic term,” she remarked. “There are so many standards. Some women think they must have maids and social status—whatever that is—and so on. It can’t be done on mother’s income.”
“That quality is not confined to women,” Grant said. “I know I am regarded as something of a freak because I prefer to live simply. They can’t understand my preference for a plain room to read and sleep in, for quiet walks by myself when I might be buzzing around in big motor cars or revelling with a bunch at the club. I suppose it’s a puzzle to them.”
Miss Bruce had seated herself near him. “They are beginning to offer explanations,” she said. “I hear them—such things always filter down. They say you are mean and niggardly—that you’re afraid to spend a dollar. The fact that you have raised the wages of your staff doesn’t seem to answer them; they rather hold that against you, because it has a tendency to make them do the same. Other office staffs are going to their heads and saying, ‘Grant is paying his help so much.’ That doesn’t popularize you. To be a good fellow you should hold your staff down to the lowest wages at which you can get service, and the money you save in this way should be spent with gusto and abandon at expensive hotels and other places designed to keep rich people from getting too rich.”
“I am afraid you are satirizing them a little, but there is a good deal in what you say. They think I’m mean because they don’t understand me, and they can’t understand my point of view. I believe that money was created as a medium for the exchange of value. I think they will all agree with me there. If that is so, then I have no right to money unless I have given value for it, and that is where they part company with me; but surely we can’t accept the one fact without the other.”
Grant found himself thumbing his pockets. “You may smoke, if you have tobacco,” said Mrs. Bruce. “My husband smoked, and although I did not approve of it then, I think I must have grown to like it.”
He lighted a cigarette, and continued. “Not all the moral law was given on Mount Sinai. It seems to me that the supernaturalism which has been introduced into the story of the Ten Commandments is most unfortunate. It seems to remove them out of the field of natural law, whereas they are, really, natural law itself. No social state can exist where they are habitually ignored. But of course these natural laws existed long before Moses. He did not make the law; he discovered it, just as Newton discovered the law of gravitation. Well—there must be many other natural laws, still undiscovered, or at least unaccepted. The thing is to discover them, to obey them, and, eventually, to compel others to obey them. I am no Moses, but I think I have the germ of the law which would cure our economic ills—that no person should be allowed to receive value without earning it. Because I believed in that I gave up a fortune and went to work as a laborer on a ranch, but Fate has forced wealth upon me, doubtless in order that I may prove out my own theories. Well, that is what I am doing.”