“I didn’t know just what your father’s ideas were,” he said; and she went on:
“Yes; he thinks all you’ve got to do is to have patience. But it seems to me you’ve got to have money too, or you’ll starve to death before your patience gives out.”
Mrs. Denton laughed, and Ray sat looking at her with a curious mixture of liking and misgiving: he would have liked to laugh with her from the poet in him, but his civic man could not approve of her irresponsibility. In her quality of married woman, she was more reprehensible than she would have been as a girl; as a girl, she might well have been merely funny. Still, she was a woman, and her voice, if it expressed an irresponsible nature, was sweet to hear. She seemed not to dislike hearing it herself, and she let it run lightly on. “The hardest thing for us, though, has been getting used to money, and the care of it. It seems to be just as bad with a little as a great deal—the care does; and you have to be thinking about it all the time; we never had to think of it at all in the Family. Most of us never saw it, or touched it; only the few that went out and sold and bought things.”
“That’s very odd,” said Ray, trying the notion if it would not work somewhere into literature; at the same time he felt the charm of this pretty young woman, and wondered why her sister did not come back. He heard her talking with Kane in the other room; now and then her voice, gentle and clear and somewhat high, was lost in Kane’s laugh, or the hoarse plunge of her father’s bass.
“Yes,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think I feel it more than my husband or my sister does; they just have to earn the money, but I have to take care of it, and see how far I can make it go. It’s perfectly distracting; and sometimes when I forget, and do something careless!” She let an impressive silence follow, and Ray laughed.
“Yes, that’s an anxious time for us, even if we’re brought up with the advantages of worldly experience.”
“Anxious!” Mrs. Denton repeated; and her tongue ran on. “Why, the day I went out to New Jersey with my sister to settle up our ‘estate’ out there, we each of us had a baby to carry—my children are twins, and we couldn’t leave them here with father; it was bad enough to leave him! and my husband was at work; and on the train coming home I forgot and gave the twins my pocket-book to play with; and just then a kind old gentleman put up the car window for me, and the first thing I knew they threw it out into the water—we were crossing that piece of water before you get to Jersey City. It had every cent of my money in it; and I was so scared when they threw my pocket-book away—we always say they, because they’re so much alike we never can remember which did a thing—I was so scared that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just screamed out all about it.” Ray listened restively; he felt as if he were eavesdropping; but he did not know quite how, or when, or whether, after all, to tell her that he had witnessed the whole affair; he decided that he had better not; and she went on: “My sister said it was just as if I had begged of the whole carful; and I suppose it was. I don’t suppose that a person who was more used to money would have given it to a baby to play with.”
She stopped, and Ray suddenly changed his mind; he thought he ought not to let her go on as if he knew nothing about it; that was hardly fair.
“The conductor,” he said, “appeared to think any woman would have done it.”
Mrs. Denton laughed out her delight. “It was you, then. My sister was sure it was, as soon as she saw you at Mr. Chapley’s.”