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He recognized Hilmer's words, but he swept on. "If you were in a real flesh-and-blood business you'd have felt the force of things ... you'd have had men with guts to deal with ... you'd have had a brick or two heaved into your plate-glass window. A friend of mine said last night that potting clerks was as sickening as a rabbit drive. He was right, it is sickening!" Mr. Ford raised his hand.
The next morning he went early to Hilmer's office. The cashier took him aside. "Hilmer has authorized me to sign checks," he explained. "But I understand you're in wrong with the Exchange... I think I'll make out checks direct to the different companies. That's always the safest thing to do in a jam." Fred was too furious even to protest. "I don't quite get the idea," he returned.
"Don't deceive yourself," he found himself saying, coldly; "whatever else my wife is, she's no fool... Remember, she wrote me a letter every week. She looks over her cards before she plays them...A few months more or less don't " He broke off, suddenly amazed at his cruelty. Mrs. Hilmer's expression changed from arrested exultation to fretful appeal. "I have only six months to live," she wailed.
"Handle the business? You heard what I said, didn't you?" "Yes, I heard," she said, wearily, and she went on with her orange. He did not say anything further, but the next morning a telephone message put to rout his resolve to return Hilmer's insurance forms in person. "I've got to go up Market Street to see a man about some workmen's compensation," he explained to Helen.
Hilmer gave a silent assent and Fred followed him. There didn't seem to be anything else to do. On the way out they met Hilmer's office boy in the corridor. Hilmer was wanted on a matter of importance at the office. He waved a brief farewell to Fred and left. Fred went back to his wife. She had abandoned the forms and was lolling in her chair, sucking at an orange.
Was it better to reap a whirlwind than to see a shallow yield of unbroken content wither to its sterile end? He found Ginger's lodgings that night, in a questionable quarter of the town, but she did not respond to his knock upon the door. "Why don't you try the streets, then?" Mrs. Hilmer's sneer recurred with all its covert bitterness. The suggestion made him sick.
If she had had one quarter of Hilmer's income she would have evolved a husband that any woman could have been proud of, instead of one that most women would have found merely satisfactory... This was the way she had argued before her absurd dinner party. She had to admit, after it was all over, that her husband had managed to make her thoroughly ashamed of him.
So far, he was nothing but the product of Hilmer's puzzling benevolence. One jam in the wheel and everything halted. He thought the whole matter out. He was still what Hilmer had intimated on the night of that disturbing dinner party a creature with a back bent by continual bowing and scraping a full-grown man with standards inherited instead of acquired.
He felt almost as if an insult had been hurled at him. He searched Mrs. Hilmer's face. Something more than physical pain had harrowed the woman before him to such deliberate mockery. "You, too!" he cried. "How you must have suffered!" She gave a little cackling laugh that made him shudder. "What about yourself?" she queried. "You do not look like a happy man."
A record-breaking launching was to be achieved at Hilmer's shipyard within the week. The article ended with a boastful fling from Hilmer to the effect that his plant was running to full capacity in spite of strikes and lockouts. Fred threw the paper to the floor. A chill enveloped him.
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