“Yes,” she replied, well knowing the track her husband’s mind was on, and shaping her answer to meet it. “Yes, he’s a sensible, though a coarse man.”
Mr. Harrington’s countenance changed.
“I am sorry,” she continued, “that he is unwilling to give Francis the best advantages; but I presume he cannot afford it very well. He has a large family. And though he did not like to acknowledge it, the terms are an object to him.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Harrington, in a tone of approbation that alarmed her.
“I am satisfied,” she continued, “that the ‘Institute’ is the best place for Arthur. The Howards, and the Harpers, and the Astleys and Langdons all speak of it in the highest manner, and their boys have been there several years.”
Mr. Harrington could not withstand this. The names his wife had mentioned, and purposely mentioned, were those of some of the wealthiest men in the community. They were men after whose names he took pride in placing his on a subscription list—or seeing them lovingly associated in the papers as bank directors, or as trustees for life, fire, trust, or any other monied institutions, and so, on the same principle, he relaxed at once, and saw with complacency his Arthur placed among the select few, the dimes fresh from the mint of “good society.”
Mrs. Harrington, satisfied of having gained her point, never stopped to question herself as to the means. She never paused to inquire as to whether she had done her part, as woman and wife, when she roused her husband’s weakness to take advantage of the failing. She never asked whether it was womanly or wise—if she could only “put her finger on fortune’s pipe, and sound what stop she pleased,” she did not look much higher.
And yet Mrs. Harrington was a woman of fine theories, exalted views, rather a transcendentalist—till it came to action, and then what she wanted she must have—if she could get it.
With some imagination, considerable enthusiasm, and a something mixed of the two, that she called romance, she had yet married Mr. Harrington, who was the opposite of every thing to her taste. And why? Because, though she would have been glad to have united the ideal with the real in her choice, she had yet no idea of sacrificing luxury to feeling. And with all her poetry she had an intense appreciation of well being. She found she could not gratify romance, ambition, and ease, too, and so between the body and soul she preferred the body. But the love and ambition she had sacrificed in her marriage she now centered in her son. The wife was nothing, the mother all in all.
——