“Maddie, when I say how long was it, I mean how long since I came back, since I was last here.”
“I have not gone mad, dear. I have only had a long talk with my father, and had the earth cut from under my feet. I don’t know where I am--floundering somewhere in mid-air.”
She grasped his hand, which was holding hers in a loose and languid clasp, tightly, suddenly, and said in a quick, almost imperative tone, “You are here, Gervase, by my side--tell me what you mean.”
“So I am,” he said, looking at her with a startled air; “a very definite place, which nobody but myself has any right to. Thank you, my dearest, for recalling me. I will tell you--not what I, but what my father means.”
He repeated to her the conversation which had terminated only half an hour before--or at least the gist of it--with tolerable faithfulness. He scarcely, perhaps, conveyed to her mind the sensation of astonishment with which it had burst upon his own, that to his father he was not all in all, or the possibility which had arisen that he might not get everything he wanted. He perhaps a little slurred over these revelations, but he said enough to reveal to her that his father had not been “kind,” that the conversation had not been a pleasant one, and that Gervase for the moment was not at all certain what might be going to happen--that he had, in short, received a check, which was a thing to which her existence as well as his recorded no parallel. Madeline was more surprised than alarmed.
“Of course,” she said, “he has always calculated on having you in the business. I don’t wonder that he was disappointed; even I,” she added with much gravity, “did not know that you were so set against it, Gervase--I wonder why?”
“You need not wonder, Madeline. I have told you often I loathe it from beginning to end. Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest is not an axiom for me. And I think, perhaps, I hate trade more since I have seen it on the other side. They don’t care there for our decent veils. Profit is the visible god. The means by which they pursue him and his rites, are more candid than among us. It was uncongenial before--it is antipathetic now.”
“And yet we have always been business people since we were--anybody,” she said. “Do you think we’ve been doing wrong all the time? All this comes of trade--every penny we have. If it is so bad that you will not follow it, shouldn’t we give up all that we have? for it has all been purchased in the same way.”