“They’re enormous devourers of newspapers, and theatregoers; and they go a great deal to lectures. The Colonel prefers them with the stereopticon.”
“They might get a something in that way,” said the elder thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose one must take those things into account—especially the newspapers and the lectures. I doubt if the theatre is a factor in civilisation among us. I dare say it doesn’t deprave a great deal, but from what I’ve seen of it I should say that it was intellectually degrading. Perhaps they might get some sort of lift from it; I don’t know. Tom!” he added, after a moment’s reflection. “I really think I ought to see this patron of yours. Don’t you think it would be rather decent in me to make his acquaintance?”
“Well, if you have the fancy, sir,” said the young man. “But there’s no sort of obligation. Colonel Lapham would be the last man in the world to want to give our relation any sort of social character. The meeting will come about in the natural course of things.”
“Ah, I didn’t intend to propose anything immediate,” said the father. “One can’t do anything in the summer, and I should prefer your mother’s superintendence. Still, I can’t rid myself of the idea of a dinner. It appears to me that there ought to be a dinner.”
“Oh, pray don’t feel that there’s any necessity.”
“Well,” said the elder, with easy resignation, “there’s at least no hurry.”
“There is one thing I don’t like,” said Lapham, in the course of one of those talks which came up between his wife and himself concerning Corey, “or at least I don’t understand it; and that’s the way his father behaves. I don’t want to force myself on any man; but it seems to me pretty queer the way he holds off. I should think he would take enough interest in his son to want to know something about his business. What is he afraid of?” demanded Lapham angrily. “Does he think I’m going to jump at a chance to get in with him, if he gives me one? He’s mightily mistaken if he does. I don’t want to know him.”
“Silas,” said his wife, making a wife’s free version of her husband’s words, and replying to their spirit rather than their letter, “I hope you never said a word to Mr. Corey to let him know the way you feel.”
“I never mentioned his father to him!” roared the Colonel. “That’s the way I feel about it!”
“Because it would spoil everything. I wouldn’t have them think we cared the least thing in the world for their acquaintance. We shouldn’t be a bit better off. We don’t know the same people they do, and we don’t care for the same kind of things.”
Lapham was breathless with resentment of his wife’s implication. “Don’t I tell you,” he gasped, “that I don’t want to know them? Who began it? They’re friends of yours if they’re anybody’s.”
“They’re distant acquaintances of mine,” returned Mrs. Lapham quietly; “and this young Corey is a clerk of yours. And I want we should hold ourselves so that when they get ready to make the advances we can meet them halfway or not, just as we choose.”
“That’s what grinds me,” cried her husband. “Why should we wait for them to make the advances? Why shouldn’t we make ’em? Are they any better than we are? My note of hand would be worth ten times what Bromfield Corey’s is on the street today. And I made my money. I haven’t loafed my life away.”
“Oh, it isn’t what you’ve got, and it isn’t what you’ve done exactly. It’s what you are.”
“Well, then, what’s the difference?”
“None that really amounts to anything, or that need give you any trouble, if you don’t think of it. But he’s been all his life in society, and he knows just what to say and what to do, and he can talk about the things that society people like to talk about, and you—can’t.”
Lapham gave a furious snort. “And does that make him any better?”
“No. But it puts him where he can make the advances without demeaning himself, and it puts you where you can’t. Now, look here, Silas Lapham! You understand this thing as well as I do. You know that I appreciate you, and that I’d sooner die than have you humble yourself to a living soul. But I’m not going to have you coming to me, and pretending that you can meet Bromfield Corey as an equal on his own ground. You can’t. He’s got a better education than you, and if he hasn’t got more brains than you, he’s got different. And he and his wife, and their fathers and grandfathers before ’em, have always had a high position, and you can’t help it. If you want to know them, you’ve got to let them make the advances. If you don’t, all well and good.”
“I guess,” said the chafed and vanquished Colonel, after a moment for swallowing the pill, “that they’d have been in a pretty fix if you’d waited to let them make the advances last summer.”
“That was a different thing altogether. I didn’t know who they were, or may be I should have waited. But all I say now is that if you’ve got young Corey into business with you, in hopes of our getting into society with his father, you better ship him at once. For I ain’t going to have it on that basis.”
“Who wants to have it on that basis?” retorted her husband.
“Nobody, if you don’t,” said Mrs. Lapham tranquilly.
Irene had come home with the shaving in her belt, unnoticed by her father, and unquestioned by her mother. But her sister saw it
