Aline told her the probable tragedy was that she had lost a brooch or had been spoken to crossly by somebody; but it also told her that such tragedies bulked very large on Aline's horizon.
Trouble, after all, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; and Aline was far less able to endure with fortitude the loss of a brooch than she herself to bear the loss of a position the emoluments of which meant the difference between having just enough to eat and starving.
'You're worried about something,' she said. 'Sit down and tell me all about it.'
Aline sat down and looked about her at the shabby room. By that curious process of the human mind which makes the spectacle of another's misfortune a palliative for one's own, she was feeling oddly comforted already. Her thoughts were not definite and she could not analyze them; but what they amounted to was that, though it was an unpleasant thing to be bullied by a dyspeptic father, the world manifestly held worse tribulations, which her father's other outstanding quality, besides dyspepsia--wealth, to wit--enabled her to avoid.
It was at this point the dim beginnings of philosophy began to invade her mind. The thing resolved itself almost into an equation. If father had not had indigestion he would not have bullied her. But, if father had not made a fortune he would not have had indigestion. Therefore, if father had not made a fortune he would not have bullied her. Practically, in fact, if father did not bully her he would not be rich. And if he were not rich--
She took in the faded carpet, the stained wall paper and the soiled curtains with a comprehensive glance. It certainly cut both ways. She began to be a little ashamed of her misery.
'It's nothing at all; really,' she said. 'I think I've been making rather a fuss about very little.'
Joan was relieved. The struggling life breeds moods of depression, and such a mood had come to her just before Aline's arrival. Life, at that moment, had seemed to stretch before her like a dusty, weary road, without hope. She was sick of fighting. She wanted money and ease, and a surcease from this perpetual race with the weekly bills. The mood had been the outcome partly of R. Jones' gentlemanly-veiled insinuations, but still more, though she did not realize it, of her yesterday's meeting with Aline.
Mr. Peters might be unguarded in his speech when conversing with his daughter--he might play the tyrant toward her in many ways; but he did not stint her in the matter of dress allowance, and, on the occasion when she met Joan, Aline had been wearing so Parisian a hat and a tailor-made suit of such obviously expensive simplicity that green-eyed envy had almost spoiled Joan's pleasure at meeting this friend of her opulent days.
She had suppressed the envy, and it had revenged itself by assaulting her afresh in the form of the worst fit of the blues she had had in two years.
She had been loyally ready to sink her depression in order to alleviate Aline's, but it was a distinct relief to find that the feat would not be necessary.
'Never mind,' she said. 'Tell me what the very little thing was.'
'It was only father,' said Aline simply.
Joan cast her mind back to the days of school and placed father as a rather irritable person, vaguely reputed to be something of an ogre in his home circle.
'Was he angry with you about something?' she asked.
'Not exactly angry with me; but--well, I was there.'
Joan's depression lifted slightly. She had forgotten, in the stunning anguish of the sudden spectacle of that hat and that tailor-made suit, that Paris hats and hundred-and-twenty-dollar suits not infrequently had what the vulgar term a string attached to them. After all, she was independent. She might have to murder her beauty with hats and frocks that had never been nearer Paris than the Tottenham Court Road; but at least no one bullied her because she happened to be at hand when tempers were short.
'What a shame!' she said. 'Tell me all about it.'
With a prefatory remark that it was all so ridiculous, really, Aline embarked on the narrative of the afternoon's events.
Joan heard her out, checking a strong disposition to giggle. Her viewpoint was that of the average person, and the average person cannot see the importance of the scarab in the scheme of things. The opinion she formed of Mr. Peters was of his being an eccentric old gentleman, making a great to-do about nothing at all. Losses had to have a concrete value before they could impress Joan. It was beyond her to grasp that Mr. Peters would sooner have lost a diamond necklace, if he had happened to possess one, than his Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty.
It was not until Aline, having concluded her tale, added one more strand to it that she found herself treating the matter seriously.
'Father says he would give five thousand dollars to anyone who would get it back for him.'
'What!'
The whole story took on a different complexion for Joan. Money talks. Mr. Peters' words might have been merely the rhetorical outburst of a heated moment; but, even discounting them, there seemed to remain a certain exciting substratum. A man who shouts that he will give five thousand dollars for a thing may very well mean he will give five hundred, and Joan's finances were perpetually in a condition which makes five hundred dollars a sum to be gasped at.
'He wasn't serious, surely!'
'I think he was,' said Aline.
'But five thousand dollars!'
'It isn't really very much to father, you know. He gave away a hundred thousand a year ago to a university.'
'But for a grubby little scarab!'
'You don't understand how father loves his scarabs. Since he retired from business, he has been simply wrapped up in them. You know collectors are like that. You read in the papers about men giving all sorts of money for funny things.'
Outside the door R. Jones, his ear close to the panel, drank in all these things greedily. He would have been
