human
Alice, I struck the table a blow that made the inkstands jump. My eye-glasses went with a crash. Nelson and McCrea came running in; MacBirney turned white. He tried to stretch his lips in a smile; it was ghastly. Everybody was looking at me. I got up without a word to any one and left the room.
gpt
Robert, I am proud of you! How much better you struck than you knew! Oh, she cried,
human
Do you love me?
gpt
I would give my life for you.
human
Don’t give it for me; keep it for me. You will marry me; won’t you? What did the cur mean by saying what he did, Alice?
gpt
He meant to taunt me; to remind me of how long I tried to live in some measure up to the religion that he used every means to drive me from--and did drive me from.
human
We will restore all that.
gpt
He meant I must come to you without its blessing.
human
Should you be happier with its blessing?
gpt
Ah, Robert.
human
But should you?
gpt
It is a happiness I have lost.
human
Then you shall have it again.
gpt
I will trust to God for _some_ escape from my difficulties. What else can I do? My husband! she exclaimed bitterly--
human
I am going to look into this matter of where you stand as a wife. I am going to know why you can’t have a chance to live your life with me. If I give you back what he has robbed you of, our happiness will be doubled.
gpt
How is Uncle John to-day, Francis?
human
Always the same. It is an astonishing vitality in your family, Robert.
gpt
They need all they have.
human
But all that need strength do not have it. How is your market to-day?
gpt
Bad,
human
I am sorry that you are worried.
gpt
More than the market worries me, Francis. But the market is getting worse and worse. We met again to-day and reduced prices. The outsiders are cutting. We retaliate to protect our customers. When _we_ cut, the cut is universal. Their warfare is guerilla. They are here to-day, there to-morrow.
human
I have thought of what you said last night. Cutting you say, has failed. Try something else. To-morrow advance all of your standard brands one quarter. Be bold; cut with your own outside refineries. The profit from the one hand pays the cost of the war on the other.
gpt
How childish of you to waste your life in a shabby black gown, nursing people! Absolutely childish! If you will go into the sugar business, I tell you again, Francis, I will pay you twenty thousand dollars a year for ten years and set aside as much more preferred stock for you.
human
Nonsense, Robert.
gpt
You are a merchant. You could make a name for yourself. The world would respect you. There are enough to do the nursing, and too few brains in the sugar business. To-night I will give the orders and the advance shall be made when the market opens.
human
But your directors?
gpt
We will direct the directors. They have had two months to figure how to fight the scalpers; you show me in twenty-four hours. Some monks were in to see me this morning; I was too busy. They told my secretary they were building an asylum for old men. I told him to say, not a dollar for old men; to come to me when they were building an asylum for old women. What do you say to my offer, Francis?
human
What do I say? Ah, Robert, although you are a very big paymaster, I am working for a Paymaster much bigger than you. What do I say? I say to you, give up this sugar business and come with me to the nursing. I will give you rags in place of riches, fasting in place of fine dinners, toil in place of repose, but my Paymaster--He will reward you there for all you endure here.
gpt
Always deferred dividends. Besides, I should make a poor nurse, Francis, and you would make a good sugar man. And you seem to imply I am a bad man in the sugar business. I am not; I am a very excellent man, but you don’t seem to know it.
human
I hope so; I hope you are. God has given you splendid talents--he has given you more reason, more heart, more judgment than he has given to these men around you. If you waste, you are in danger of the greater punishment.
gpt
But I don’t waste. I build up. What can a man do in this world without power? He must have the sinews of empire to make himself felt. Francis, what would Cromwell, Frederick, Napoleon have been without power?
human
Ah! These are your heroes; they are not mine. I give glory to no man that overcomes by force, violence, and worse--fraud, broken faith, misrule, falsehood. What is more detestable than the triumph of mere brains? Your heroes, do they not tax, extort, pillage, slaughter, and burn for their own glory? Do they not ride over law, morality, and justice, your world’s heroes? They are not my heroes. When men shrink at nothing to gain their success--what shall we say of them? But to hold law, morality, and justice inviolable; to conquer strength but only by weakness, to vanquish with pity, to crush with mercy--that alone is moving greatness.
gpt
Where do you find it?
human
Never where you look for your heroes; often where I look for mine--among the saints of God. Not in men of bronze but in men of clay. It is only Christ who puts the souls of heroes into hearts of flesh and blood.
gpt
But you have, along with your saints, some very foolish rules in your church, Francis. Take the case of Mrs. MacBirney. There is a woman who has done evil to no one and good to every one. She finds herself married to a man who thenceforth devotes himself to but one object in life--the piling up of money. She is forgotten and neglected. That is not the worst; he, with no religion of his own, makes it his business to harass and worry her in the practice of hers. He is filled with insane jealousies, and moved by equally insane hatreds of whatever she desires. I come into their lives. I see this proud and unhappy woman struggling to keep her trials hidden. I break down the barriers of her reserve--not easily, not without being repulsed and humiliated as I never before have been by a woman--and at last make her, unwillingly, tell me the truth. Meantime her husband, after a scene--of which I have never yet learned the real facts--has left her. I say such a woman has the right to free herself from a brute such as this; your church says ’no.’
human
Robert, I see what you are coming to. But do not make the case harder than it is. She may free herself from him if she cannot live in peace with him; she may leave him under intolerable conditions. But not marry again.
gpt
Precisely. And I offer her my devotion and a home and only ask to make her truly my wife and restore to her the religion he has robbed her of. And this very religion that he has trampled on and throttled, what does it say? ’No.’
human
You state a hard case. Your reasoning is very plausible; you plead for the individual. There is no law, human or divine, against which the individual might not show a case of hardship. The law that you find a hardship protects society. But to-day, society is nothing, the individual everything. And while society perishes we praise the tolerant anarchism that destroys it.
gpt
Francis, you invoke cruelty. What do I care for society? What has society done for me?
human
No, I invoke responsibility, which none of us can forever escape. You seek remarriage. Your care is for the body; but there is also the soul.
gpt
Your law is intolerant.