“My dear,” I said gently, “it is possible to survive a quarrel.”
“No, you don’t understand! We should never make it up again, I know—I saw it in his words, in his face. He will never change to please me, no, not even a simple thing like the business-methods of the van Tuiver estates.”
I could not help smiling. “My dear Sylvia! A simple thing!”
She came and sat beside me. “That’s what I want to talk about. It is time I was growing up. It it time that I knew about these things. Tell me about them.”
“What, my dear?”
“About the methods of the van Tuiver estates, that can’t be changed to please me. I made out one thing, we had recently paid a fine for some infraction of the law in one of those buildings, and my husband said it was because we had refused to pay more money to a tenement-house inspector. I asked him: ‘Why should we pay any money at all to a tenement-house inspector? Isn’t it bribery?’ He answered: ‘It’s a custom—the same as you give a tip to a hotel waiter.’ Is that true?”
I could not help smiling. “Your husband ought to know, my dear,” I said.
I saw her compress her lips. “What is the tip for?”
“I suppose it is to keep out of trouble with him.”
“But why can’t we keep out of trouble by obeying the law?”