The Rise of Silas Lapham

and yet the father had never said a witty thing to a more sympathetic listener than his own son. The clear mind which produced nothing but practical results reflected everything with charming lucidity; and it must have been this which endeared Tom Corey to everyone who spoke ten words with him. In a city where people have good reason for liking to shine, a man who did not care to shine must be little short of universally acceptable without any other effort for popularity; and those who admired and enjoyed Bromfield Corey loved his son. Yet, when it came to accounting for Tom Corey, as it often did in a community where everyone’s generation is known to the remotest degrees of cousinship, they could not trace his sweetness to his mother, for neither Anna Bellingham nor any of her family, though they were so many blocks of Wenham ice for purity and rectangularity, had ever had any such savour; and, in fact, it was to his father, whose habit of talk wronged it in himself, that they had to turn for this quality of the son’s. They traced to the mother the traits of practicality and common sense in which he bordered upon the commonplace, and which, when they had dwelt upon them, made him seem hardly worth the close inquiry they had given him.

While the summer wore away he came and went methodically about his business, as if it had been the business of his life, sharing his father’s bachelor liberty and solitude, and expecting with equal patience the return of his mother and sisters in the autumn. Once or twice he found time to run down to Mt. Desert and see them; and then he heard how the Philadelphia and New York people were getting in everywhere, and was given reason to regret the house at Nahant which he had urged to be sold. He came back and applied himself to his desk with a devotion that was exemplary rather than necessary; for Lapham made no difficulty about the brief absences which he asked, and set no term to the apprenticeship that Corey was serving in the office before setting off upon that mission to South America in the early winter, for which no date had yet been fixed.

The summer was a dull season for the paint as well as for everything else. Till things should brisk up, as Lapham said, in the fall, he was letting the new house take a great deal of his time. Aesthetic ideas had never been intelligibly presented to him before, and he found a delight in apprehending them that was very grateful to his imaginative architect. At the beginning, the architect had foreboded a series of mortifying defeats and disastrous victories in his encounters with his client; but he had never had a client who could be more reasonably led on from one outlay to another. It appeared that Lapham required but to understand or feel the beautiful effect intended, and he was ready to pay for it. His bullheaded pride was concerned in a thing which the architect made him see, and then he believed that he had seen it himself, perhaps conceived it. In some measure the architect seemed to share his delusion, and freely said that Lapham was very suggestive. Together they blocked out windows here, and bricked them up there; they changed doors and passages; pulled down cornices and replaced them with others of different design; experimented with costly devices of decoration, and went to extravagant lengths in novelties of finish. Mrs. Lapham, beginning with a woman’s adventurousness in the unknown region, took fright at the reckless outlay at last, and refused to let her husband pass a certain limit. He tried to make her believe that a farseeing economy dictated the expense; and that if he put the money into the house, he could get it out any time by selling it. She would not be persuaded.

“I don’t want you should sell it. And you’ve put more money into it now than you’ll ever get out again, unless you can find as big a goose to buy it, and that isn’t likely. No, sir! You just stop at a hundred thousand, and don’t you let him get you a cent beyond. Why, you’re perfectly bewitched with that fellow! You’ve lost your head, Silas Lapham, and if you don’t look out you’ll lose your money too.”

The Colonel laughed; he liked her to talk that way, and promised he would hold up a while.

“But there’s no call to feel anxious, Pert. It’s only a question what to do with the money. I can reinvest it; but I never had so much of it to spend before.”

“Spend it, then,” said his wife; “don’t throw it away! And how came you to have so much more money than you know what to do with, Silas Lapham?” she added.

“Oh, I’ve made a very good thing in stocks lately.”

“In stocks? When did you take up gambling for a living?”

“Gambling? Stuff! What gambling? Who said it was gambling?”

“You have; many a time.”

“Oh yes, buying and selling on a margin. But this was a bona fide transaction. I bought at forty-three for an investment, and I sold at a hundred and seven; and the money passed both times.”

“Well, you better let stocks alone,” said his wife, with the conservatism of her sex. “Next time you’ll buy at a hundred and seven and sell at forty-three. Then where’ll you be?”

“Left,” admitted the Colonel.

“You better stick to paint a while yet.”

The Colonel enjoyed this too, and laughed again with the ease of a man who knows what he is about. A few days after that he came down to Nantasket with the radiant air which he wore when he had done a good thing in business and wanted his wife’s sympathy. He did not say anything of what had happened till he was alone with her in their own room; but he was very gay the whole