The Morrell Twins were among the newer powers. They had rolled up a
surprisingly big fortune--if it _was_ a fortune--in a surprisingly short
time, and were looked up to as very perfect gentle knights by all the
ambitious young fry of the "street." They were the head and front of the
Pin-and-Needle Combine. They did not deal with the Grindstone only; they
had made their business the business of half the banks of the town,--for
how could these institutions be expected to stand out when all the
investors and speculators of the street were pressing forward eager to
add to their collections a few good specimens of the admirably engraved
and printed certificates of the Combine, and more than willing to pay any
price that anybody might ask? Some of the banks--the more fortunate among
them--were attending to this business during business hours; others of
them worked on it overtime, and one or two were beginning to work on it
all night as well as all day. They worried. The Twins were not worrying
nearly so much,--they knew they must be seen through.
The Twins had been grinding pins and needles for a year or two with
striking acumen and dexterity. Sometimes Richard would turn the handle
and Robin would hold the poor dull pins to the stone; and then again they
would change places. Whichever arrangement happened to be in force,
people said the work had never been done more neatly, more precisely. And
now the Twins had enlarged their field and had begun to grind noses. They
were showing themselves past masters in the art. They had all the
legislation of nose-grinding at their fingers' ends; the lack of
legislation, too, as well as the probabilities of legislation yet to
come. They knew just how fast the wheel might be turned in this State,
and just how close the nose might be held in that, and just how loud the
victim must cry out before the Rescue Band might be moved to issue from
some Committee Room to stop the treatment. They knew where nose-grinding
was prohibited altogether, and they knew where enactments against it had
thus far completely failed. They knew where the penalty was likely to be
enforced, and they knew where it might be evaded. "Learn familiarly the
whole body of legislative enactment, state by state, and then keep a
little in advance of it,"--such was their simple rule.
No man is to be denied the right to profit by his own discovery, and so,
though the glory of the Twins was envied, their right to luxuriate in it
was seldom questioned. They were seen in all sorts of prominent and
expensive places--at the opera, at the horse-show, on the golf links, and
were very much envied and admired,--envied by other young men that were
trying to do as they had done, but not succeeding; admired by multitudes
of young women who felt pretty sure that to "have things," and to have
them with great abundance and promptness and conspicuousness, was all
that made life worth living. In this environment Richard Morrell could
hardly fail to be fairly well satisfied with himself. To ask and to
receive would come to the same thing. And so he spoke to Virgilia one
crisp October morning, between the fifth and sixth holes in Smoky Hollow,
and awaited in all confidence her reply. But Virgilia quickly made it
plain that he would not do--not for her, at least. She was by no means
one of the kind to be impressed by tally-ho coaches, however loudly and
discordantly the grooms might trumpet, nor to be brought round by
country-club dinners, however deafening the chatter or however
preponderant the phalanx of long-necked bottles. So his raw, red face
turned a shade redder still; and as he sat, later, on the club veranda,
hectoring the waiter and scowling into his empty glass, he growled to
himself in a thick undertone:
"What's the matter with the girl, anyway? If she doesn't want me, who
does she want?"
Virgilia wanted, in a general way, an intimate and equal companionship, a
trafficking in the things that interested her--the higher things, she
sometimes called them to herself. She wanted a gentleman; she wanted
cultivation, refinement--even to its last debilitating excess. What she
wanted least of all was a "provider," a steward, an agent, a business
machine. "We must _live_," she would say, looking forward toward her
matrimonial ideal; "we mustn't let our whole life run out in a mere
stupid endeavour to accumulate the means of living, and then find
ourselves only beginning when at the finish:"--an idea held substantially
by so different a young person as Preciosa McNulty, who was preparing to
set aside her mother's careful ambitions and to take a step forward on
her own account. Only, Preciosa was looking less for cultivation and
gentility than for "temperament." Less the dry specialist, however
successful in the accumulation of this world's goods, than the resonant
adventurer that would bring her full chance at all the manifold haps and
mishaps of life as it runs.
"Nothing more tedious than a set programme," declared Preciosa. "If my
whole future were to be arranged for me to-morrow, I should want to die
the day after. A whole play"--Preciosa was a most persevering little
theatre-goer--"carried through with one stage-setting--how tiresome that
would be!"