Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the fine vows of their early love-making days.
Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even months of their first year together that later passed out of Sam’s memory entirely, leaving only a sense of completeness and well being. He could remember, perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen lake, or a visitor who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But at the end he had to come back to this: that something sang in his heart all day long and that the air tasted better, the stars shone more brightly, and the wind and the rain and the hail upon the window panes sang more sweetly in his ears. He and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and infinite delight in the presence and the persons of each other, and a great idea burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they travelled.
Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president was elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own city. In other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting, planning, working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue’s feet, dreaming and talking to her of the brood that under their care should grow into wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented sales manager of the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a Kansas City jobber, he smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that territory, and went for an afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely and wholly accepted Sue’s conception of life. “We have wealth for any emergency,” he said to himself, “and we will live our lives for service to mankind through the children that will presently come into our house.”
After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness and indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own little circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during the engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them for a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which Sue and Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought brought to them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone resplendent. In some indefinable way he thought they paid court to him and the thought flattered him immensely. The college professor who had talked brilliantly through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his conclusions, a writer of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over a difficulty in the stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid him the rare compliment of repeating one of Sam’s remarks as his own. It was as though, in spite of their talk, they thought him the most gifted of them all, and for a time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the dinner parties, and explained.
“You have got what they want and cannot get—the money,” he said.
After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner. It was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the people at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends of the table, lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other’s eyes, drank off the health of him who was to come, the first of the great family, the family that was to have two lives lived for its success.
At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his white, pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue’s side sat Jack Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the handsome New York girl at Sam’s end of the table or to puncture, with a flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist, who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling as the artist talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.
And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat eating among strange people at Freedom Smith’s table. He saw again the tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom’s hand in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this—this home with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head of it all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and bow his head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his wife, his country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of life on the earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some way the master and maker of it all.