“Come here,” said I. And I waited until she reluctantly joined me at the window. I pointed to the steeple of the church across the way. “You could as easily throw down that steeple by pushing against it with your bare hands,” I said to her, “as ‘they,’ whoever they are, could put me down. They might take away my money. But if they did, they would only be giving me a lesson that would teach me how more easily to get it back again. I am not a bundle of stock certificates or a bag of money. I am—here,” and I tapped my forehead.
She forced a faint, scornful smile. She did not wish me to see her belief of what I said.
“You think that is vanity,” I went on. “But you will learn, sooner or later, the difference between boasting and simple statement of fact. You will learn that I do not boast. What I said is no more a boast than for a man with legs to say, ‘I can walk.’ Because you have known only legless men, you exaggerate the difficulty of walking. It’s as easy for me to make money as it is for some people to spend it.”
It is hardly necessary for me to say I was not insinuating anything against her people. But she was just then supersensitive on the subject, though I did not suspect it. She flushed hotly. “You will not have any cause to sneer at my people on that account hereafter,” she said. “I settled that to-day.”
“I was not sneering at them,” I protested. “I wasn’t even thinking of them. And—you must know that it’s a favor to me for anybody to ask me to do anything that will please you.”
She made a gesture of impatience. “I see I’d better tell you why—part of the reason why—I did not go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken from you. And when they refused, I refused to go.”
“I don’t care why you refused,” said I. “I am content with the fact that you are here.”
“But you misunderstand it,” she said, coldly.
“I don’t understand it, I don’t misunderstand it,” was my reply. “I accept it.”
She looked depressed, discouraged. She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room. While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face. “What if ‘they’ should include Roebuck!” And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a lightweight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: “I’m going out for a few minutes—perhaps an hour—if anyone should ask.” A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck’s.