REINFORCEMENTS
And though idle as scholars we stand,
Where they pilfer and swarm in our home,
The honey of power waits the hand
But daring to pilfer the comb.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Siren City."
A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a
grain of salt.--"The Silver Poppy."
To Cordelia over her coffee-cup Mrs. Spaulding confided a remarkable
example of her husband's perversity.
Their talk had drifted round to this point because of a scene, of which
Cordelia had been an unfortunate witness, the night before. A flurry of
unexpected bills had come in at the first of the month. After looking
them over, the alert and ever-keen business instinct of Alfred Spaulding
had at first gently and then quite vigorously rebelled against what
seemed to him nothing but wanton extravagance. A florist's bill in
particular--it was for eight hundred dollars--had startled him into
indignation, though Mrs. Spaulding remained heroically silent as to the
fact that the great bulk of that bill had been due to the unconsidered
visits of Cordelia, and had been quite as much a surprise to her as it
now was to her husband.
It was not often that his equable temper showed the effect of the storm
and stress through which his tired nerves went day by day. Nor was it
often that to his wife he spoke in anything stronger than an accent of
mild protest. But on rare occasions his patience became exhausted, and
at such times she was given to understand--with a display of great
anger, always ultimately atoned for by the arrival of significant little
boxes from the Spauldings' jeweler--that her husband was not altogether
the pliant and passive man which more than one of her friends, and even
she herself at times, had been led to believe him.
Mrs. Spaulding sighed heavily.
"And Alfred _makes_ his money so easily!" she said.
"Why does he work so hard, anyway?" asked Cordelia.
"Oh, he says he's got the working habit, and can't shake it off. He gets
lonely and restless when he's not busy. He always says it's too late for
him to try to change now. But I can't see why he is always fussing about
things this way," she went on fretfully, pushing back the little cluster
of tradesmen's bills with a dimpled but disdainfully indignant hand, on
which glittered not a few heavily jeweled rings. "He understands the
market, and all he has to do is invest, and then just watch things,
and--er--all that; and then take his money out again. That oughtn't to
be such hard work, ought it?"
"And doesn't he ever lose?" Cordelia asked.
"Of course, my dear, sometimes. But Mrs. Herrington--her husband is in
Wall Street, too--told me they never _have_ to lose unless they like;
unless they want to lead the others on, and that sort of thing, you see.
But I never bother about business. Alfred doesn't seem to like it."
"It must take years to understand it all," Cordelia ventured, toying
absent-mindedly with the sugar-tongs.
"I think some men are born businesslike, my dear, the same as they're
born bow-legged, or with big feet."
She wondered why Cordelia smiled, and then went on: "Why, only a little
over a month ago Alfred's brother Louis, you know, sent him three
thousand dollars from Milwaukee, to invest. Alfred was going to send it
back, but I just _made_ him do it. He put it in some kind of steel. Then
he worried so much about it that he took it all out again in less than a
week. Even then he made over eight hundred dollars for poor Louis. Just
think what it might have been if he'd only left it in right along."
It was this innocent and quite accidental piece of information which
gave a new turn to the tide of Cordelia's thoughts.
In her own little yellow-covered bank-book she had a balance of some
nineteen hundred dollars. Why should not this, she asked herself, be
sent to that mysterious land of magic, Wall Street, and in time come
back to her doubled, perhaps trebled? For many months of late she had
indefinitely felt the need of more substantial resource than that
already at her command.
Why, indeed, could not Mr. Spaulding do for her what he had already done
for his brother out in Milwaukee?
She said nothing of her plans, but little by little resumed her regular
morning drives with Mr. Alfred Spaulding down to his office, a matter in
which she had been more or less remiss of late. Alfred Spaulding, in
fact, objected to taking his carriages into Wall Street at all, and had
forsworn the elevated railway only because his more practical wife--more
practical in this thing, at any rate--insisted that he should get at
least half an hour's open air each day.
Cordelia greatly surprised that absent-minded gentleman one morning by
timidly putting a little cut-glass vase on his desk, into which she
slipped an American Beauty rose. Although she had talked to him a great
deal, and about many things, it was nearly a week before she approached
the matter that lay nearest her heart.
"Women sometimes--er--put their money into stocks, don't they?" Cordelia
asked tentatively, as they bowled briskly down Fifth Avenue one bright
morning.
"Yes, and nearly always lose it, too," was Mr. Spaulding's discouraging
and somewhat curt reply.
"But if they are certain about the right thing?"
"They never are. No one is."
"But if they have a friend in Wall Street, a friend who knows--"
ventured Cordelia.
"Then the friend never knows. My advice is for women to keep out of Wall
Street."
"But aren't there any stocks that are safe? I mean, aren't there any
good ones _you_ feel certain about, for instance?"
"Of course; but those are the kind you never make your money out of--at
least not at the rate women want to make it. They're slow and steady."
"But you've been in Wall Street so long! Surely there's something you
feel to be safe and yet going to go up, too?"
The ghost of a smile crept over his worn face.
"Miss Vaughan, if I had that delightful power, I'd make a million before
I came home for dinner to-night."
"But didn't you make nearly a thousand dollars for your brother Louis?"
she asked, after a pause.
"Yes, I did; and it caused me more bother and worry than making eighty
times that much out of my own money. Louis is a pretty poor man, you
know."
"Yes?" said Cordelia.
"It meant a good deal to him. If I hadn't carried him over on my own
shoulders he'd have been hard hit."
"I don't think I should mind the risk."
"One never does, till one tries it."
"I _want_ to try." Then after a moment's pause she said: "Mr.
Spaulding."
"Well?"
"Mr. Spaulding, I've two thousand dollars," she had not quite that sum,
but she knew that she could easily make it up by means of a loan from
his wife--"and I intend to speculate with it. Won't you invest it for
me?"
"Miss Vaughan, I've made it a rule, an inexorable rule, never to take a
woman's money in the Street."
"Please!"
"You know lessons there usually cost about a thousand dollars a second."
"I'd be sorry to go to some one I didn't know," she pouted girlishly,
and then she added, "or didn't trust."
"Yes, I think probably you would, afterward."
"But I shall," she said determinedly. As to this the man of business
made no reply.
The next morning she slipped a bunch of English violets into his little
cut-glass vase.
"Won't you?" she pleaded again in her softest voice.
He looked at the flowers, at his waiting mail, and then at the girl--or
was she not a woman?--herself.
"Yes, yes," he said wearily. She took his hand and fondled it as a child
might. With all his business he was a somewhat lonely man.
"We'll see what we can do with it," he added more cheerily, in a little
glow of latent gallantry that left him feeling uncomfortable and hot.
Then he touched an electric button and his private secretary appeared
with a bundle of notes and documents in his hand, and Cordelia slipped
away triumphant.
It was her one and only financial plunge. Although Alfred Spaulding
never confessed to her that the precariousness of his venture on her
behalf cost him two long nights of sleeplessness, it was more successful
than he or even she herself had hoped for. Out of it she made twenty-two
hundred dollars.
The man of Wall Street, not unnaturally, silently braced himself for
another scene with her, determined that this time she should not
prevail. Perhaps she saw this, or perhaps she realized that for once
sheer luck had gone with her. At any rate, to her host's surprise, and
not a little to his inner satisfaction, she placed the money in her own
bank and said nothing more of the matter.