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Santos was a small man, born in Guam, and had been ten years in Taaoa, having deserted from a ship. He and I talked on the veranda in Spanish, and he explained the desperate plight into which love had dragged him. He adored Tahaiupehe, the belle of Taaoa. For months he had poured at her feet all his earnings, and faithfully he had labored at copra-making to gain money for her.
Bel fetched home little presents of her own to her aunt, making a pet of her: ice-cream in a paper cone, horehound candy, once, a tumbler of black currant jelly. But that last was very dear. If Aunt Blin had eaten much of other things, they could not have afforded it, for there were only half earnings now. To-morrow kept coming, but Miss Bree kept on not getting any better.
I was happy to know that, owing to the provision made for her, Aunt Patience enjoyed all the comforts of life. Since her removal to Massachusetts we had not often corresponded; but, as often as I did write, I enclosed a small sum from my own earnings, lest the interest of the deposit should prove insufficient for all her wants.
She was instantly jerked up by the younger woman, whose expression of intense disgust we shall not soon forget. As the old lady got on her feet again, her unsteadiness revealed the cause of her singular conduct she was drunk. There is a depth of misery in New York which those who have not seen it, cannot conceive of. It exists among the poorer classes, who spend their earnings in drink.
Kit's former experience had been sufficient on this score, and he had become impressed with the highly important fact that there existed a much wiser course to be pursued. With his characteristic consistency, Kit acted upon this conviction and wisely saved his hard earnings.
All that may be a good ground for divorce, the outside world will say; but the plea should be put in by the sober wife, not by the intemperate husband. But what if the husband takes himself off without any divorce, and takes with him also his wife's property, her earnings, that on which he has lived and his children?
One of the most perfect poets in Paris had amused himself with drawing up a "list of the workers in contemporary French poetry, with their talents, their productions, and their earnings": and he enumerated "the crystals, the Oriental fabrics, the gold and bronze medals, the lace for dowagers, the polychromatic sculpture, the painted porcelain," which had been produced in the workshops of his various colleagues.
And out of this changed situation came, unconsciously to herself, a deep contempt for her father and her brother, a sense that she was indeed as alien as the Wilmots so often alleged, in scorn of her and her shop; Verbena's income went to buy adornments for herself, dresses that would give the hands a fitting background; Estelle's earnings went to her mother, who distributed them, the old gentleman and Arden ignoring whence and how the money came.
The room assigned to him, in the second story of the barn, was a finer apartment than he had ever slept in; and the salary attached to the situation was greater than the combined monthly earnings of himself and aunt Milly in their Southern home. Surely, he thought, his lines had fallen in pleasant places.
In the present instance the fee is as small as it possibly could be, and the bench-woman ekes out her income by selling cakes, oranges and candies. Curiosity to know her earnings elicits the frank reply that she often makes as much as thirty sous a night in her sphere of labor.
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