She knew what she was doing. Her steps were scrupulously calculated.
One day Lorm complained of the disorganization in his life, the frightful waste of his substance. It was at table, and he was answered by empty phrases. But Judith, when she succeeded in having him to herself later, took up the subject again. She persuaded him to describe the persons whom he held responsible, and expressed doubts of their trustworthiness. She disapproved of arrangements that he had made, gave him advice that he found excellent, and reproached him with the neglect of which he confessed himself guilty. “I wade in money and suffocate in debt,” he sighed. “In twenty years I’ll be an old man and a poor devil.”
Her practical insight filled him with naïve admiration. He said to her: “I’ve been told once in a while that there are such women in the world as you, but I never believed in their existence. All I’ve ever seen were full of empty exactions and florid emotions.”
“You’re unjust,” she replied and smiled. “Every woman has some field in which she has character and firmness, but the world pays no attention. Then, too, our relation to the world is usually a false one.”
“That is a wise remark,” said Lorm in a satisfied voice. He was a miser of praise.
From now on he loved to have her draw him into talk concerning his little needs and worries. She examined him in detail, and he was glad to submit. He brought her the bills rendered him by his tradespeople. “They capitalize your inexperience, and cheat you,” was Judith’s judgment of the situation. It made him feel ashamed.
“Have you been lending money?” she asked. It appeared that he had. For years and years he had loaned considerable sums to numerous parasites. Judith shrugged her shoulders. “You might just as well have thrown the money away.”
Lorm answered: “It’s such a bother when they come and beg, and their faces are so unappetizing. I give them what they ask just to be rid of them.”
In this wise their conversations moved wholly within the circle of the prosaic things of daily life. But it was precisely this that Edgar Lorm had missed and needed. It was as new and as moving to him, as the discovery of a rapt and ecstatic soul to a bourgeois becoming aware of poetry and passion.