LAPHAM had the pride which comes of self-making, and he would not
openly lower his crest to the young fellow he had taken into his
business. He was going to be obviously master in his own place to
every one; and during the hours of business he did nothing to
distinguish Corey from the half-dozen other clerks and book-keepers in
the outer office, but he was not silent about the fact that Bromfield
Corey's son had taken a fancy to come to him. "Did you notice that
fellow at the desk facing my type-writer girl? Well, sir, that's the
son of Bromfield Corey--old Phillips Corey's grandson. And I'll say
this for him, that there isn't a man in the office that looks after his
work better. There isn't anything he's too good for. He's right here
at nine every morning, before the clock gets in the word. I guess it's
his grandfather coming out in him. He's got charge of the foreign
correspondence. We're pushing the paint everywhere." He flattered
himself that he did not lug the matter in. He had been warned against
that by his wife, but he had the right to do Corey justice, and his
brag took the form of illustration. "Talk about training for
business--I tell you it's all in the man himself! I used to believe in
what old Horace Greeley said about college graduates being the poorest
kind of horned cattle; but I've changed my mind a little. You take
that fellow Corey. He's been through Harvard, and he's had about every
advantage that a fellow could have. Been everywhere, and talks half a
dozen languages like English. I suppose he's got money enough to live
without lifting a hand, any more than his father does; son of Bromfield
Corey, you know. But the thing was in him. He's a natural-born
business man; and I've had many a fellow with me that had come up out
of the street, and worked hard all his life, without ever losing his
original opposition to the thing. But Corey likes it. I believe the
fellow would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don't
know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old Phillips
Corey; it often skips a generation, you know. But what I say is, a
thing has got to be born in a man; and if it ain't born in him, all the
privations in the world won't put it there, and if it is, all the
college training won't take it out."
Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table, to a guest whom
he had brought to Nantasket for the night. Then he suffered exposure
and ridicule at the hands of his wife, when opportunity offered. She
would not let him bring Corey down to Nantasket at all.
"No, indeed!" she said. "I am not going to have them think we're
running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of
doing it for himself."
"Who wants him to see Irene?" retorted the Colonel angrily.
"I do," said Mrs. Lapham. "And I want him to see her without any of
your connivance, Silas. I'm not going to have it said that I put my
girls at anybody. Why don't you invite some of your other clerks?"
"He ain't just like the other clerks. He's going to take charge of a
part of the business. It's quite another thing."
"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. "Then you ARE going to
take a partner."
"I shall ask him down if I choose!" returned the Colonel, disdaining
her insinuation.
His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.
"But you won't choose when you've thought it over, Si." Then she
applied an emollient to his chafed surface. "Don't you suppose I feel
as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I'm not going to
have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You
just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he's going to
find out some way of seeing her; and if he don't, all the plotting and
planning in the world isn't going to make him."
"Who's plotting?" again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the
utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a
woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a
milliner's bill.
"Oh, not you!" exulted his wife. "I understand what you want. You
want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to
talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at
the office."
The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was
to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the
Mill-dam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he
liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a
little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a
passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when
obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with
the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate
American nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social
difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his
traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted
from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel
wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not
many other topics; and if he had a choice between the mare and the
edifice on the water side of Beacon Street, it was just now the latter.
Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made
Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it
happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up
with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the
carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast
anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the
carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bow-window on a trestle, and
looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and
bowed and blushed. Her father went on up-stairs to find her mother,
and Corey pulled up another trestle which he found in the back part of
the room. The first floorings had been laid throughout the house, and
the partitions had been lathed so that one could realise the shape of
the interior.
"I suppose you will sit at this window a good deal," said the young man.
"Yes, I think it will be very nice. There's so much more going on than
there is in the Square."
"It must be very interesting to you to see the house grow."
"It is. Only it doesn't seem to grow so fast as I expected."
"Why, I'm amazed at the progress your carpenter has made every time I
come."
The girl looked down, and then lifting her eyes she said, with a sort
of timorous appeal--
"I've been reading that book since you were down at Nantasket."
"Book?" repeated Corey, while she reddened with disappointment. "Oh
yes. Middlemarch. Did you like it?"
"I haven't got through with it yet. Pen has finished it."
"What does she think of it?"
"Oh, I think she likes it very well. I haven't heard her talk about it
much. Do you like it?"
"Yes; I liked it immensely. But it's several years since I read it."
"I didn't know it was so old. It's just got into the Seaside Library,"
she urged, with a little sense of injury in her tone.
"Oh, it hasn't been out such a very great while," said Corey politely.
"It came a little before DANIEL DERONDA."
The girl was again silent. She followed the curl of a shaving on the
floor with the point of her parasol.
"Do you like that Rosamond Vincy?" she asked, without looking up.
Corey smiled in his kind way.
"I didn't suppose she was expected to have any friends. I can't say I
liked her. But I don't think I disliked her so much as the author
does. She's pretty hard on her good-looking"--he was going to say
girls, but as if that might have been rather personal, he
said--"people."
"Yes, that's what Pen says. She says she doesn't give her any chance
to be good. She says she should have been just as bad as Rosamond if
she had been in her place."