“Billy,” said Jadwin, to the old man at the conclusion of the whole matter, “you’re an old fool.”
And the gardener thereupon had bridled and stammered as though Jadwin had conferred a gift.
“Now if I had called him ‘an old fool,’ ” observed Laura, “he would have sulked the rest of the week.”
The happiest time of the day for Laura was the evening. In the daytime she was variously occupied, but her thoughts continually ran forward to the end of the day, when her husband would be with her. Jadwin breakfasted early, and Laura bore him company no matter how late she had stayed up the night before. By half-past eight he was out of the house, driving down to his office in his buggy behind Nip and Tuck. By nine Laura’s own saddle horse was brought to the carriage porch, and until eleven she rode in the park. At twelve she lunched with Page, and in the afternoon—in the “upstairs sitting-room” read her Browning or her Meredith, the latter one of her newest discoveries, till three or four. Sometimes after that she went out in her carriage. If it was to shop she drove to the Rookery, in La Salle Street, after her purchases were made, and sent the footman up to her husband’s office to say that she would take him home. Or as often as not she called for Mrs. Cressler or Aunt Wess’ or Mrs. Gretry, and carried them off to some exhibit of painting, or flowers, or more rarely—for she had not the least interest in social affairs—to teas or receptions.
But in the evenings, after dinner, she had her husband to herself. Page was almost invariably occupied by one or more of her young men in the drawing-room, but Laura and Jadwin shut themselves in the library, a lofty panelled room—a place of deep leather chairs, tall bookcases, etchings, and sombre brasses—and there, while Jadwin lay stretched out upon the broad sofa, smoking cigars, one hand behind his head, Laura read aloud to him.
His tastes in fiction were very positive. Laura at first had tried to introduce him to her beloved Meredith. But after three chapters, when he had exclaimed, “What’s the fool talking about?” she had given over and begun again from another starting-point. Left to himself, his wife sorrowfully admitted that he would have gravitated to The Mysterious Island and Michael Strogoff, or even to Mr. Potter of Texas and Mr. Barnes of New York. But she had set herself to accomplish his literary education, so, Meredith failing, she took up Treasure Island and The Wrecker. Much of these he made her skip.
“Oh, let’s get on with the story,” he urged. But Pinkerton for long remained for him an ideal, because he was “smart” and “alive.”
“I’m not long very many of art,” he announced. “But I believe that any art that don’t make the world better and happier is no art at all, and is only fit for the dump heap.”
But at last Laura found his abiding affinity in Howells.
“Nothing much happens,” he said. “But I know all those people.” He never could rid himself of a surreptitious admiration for Bartley Hubbard. He, too, was “smart” and “alive.” He had the “get there” to him. “Why,” he would say, “I know fifty boys just like him down there in La Salle Street.” Lapham he loved as a brother. Never a point in the development of his character that he missed or failed to chuckle over. Bromfield Cory was poohed and boshed quite out of consideration as a “loafer,” a “dilletanty,” but Lapham had all his sympathy.
“Yes, sir,” he would exclaim, interrupting the narrative, “that’s just it. That’s just what I would have done if I had been in his place. Come, this chap knows what he’s writing about—not like that Middleton ass, with his Dianas and Amazing Marriages.”
Occasionally the Jadwins entertained. Laura’s husband was proud of his house, and never tired of showing his friends about it. Laura gave Page a “coming-out” dance, and nearly every Sunday the Cresslers came to dinner. But Aunt Wess’ could, at first, rarely be induced to pay the household a visit. So much grandeur made the little widow uneasy, even a little suspicious. She would shake her head at Laura, murmuring:
“My word, it’s all very fine, but, dear me, Laura, I hope you do pay for everything on the nail, and don’t run up any bills. I don’t know what your dear father would say to it all, no, I don’t.” And she would spend hours in counting the electric bulbs, which she insisted were only devices for some newfangled gas.
“Thirty-three in this one room alone,” she would say. “I’d like to see your dear husband’s face when he gets his gas bill. And a dressmaker that lives in the house. … Well—I don’t want to say anything.”
Thus three years had gone by. The new household settled to a regime. Continually Jadwin grew richer. His real estate appreciated in value; rents went up. Every time he speculated in wheat, it was upon a larger scale, and every time he won. He was a Bear always, and on those rare occasions when he referred
