The Lovely Lady | Page 5

too much and took too little. I remember
his saying once that no one who loved his fellowman very much, could
get rich."
"Do you wish he had?"
"I don't know that either. No, not if he was happier the way he was.
And we were happy. Things would have come out all right if it hadn't
been for the accident when the thresher broke, and his being ill so long
afterward. And my people weren't so kind as they might have been.
You see, they always thought him a little queer. Before we were
married, before we were even engaged, he had had a little money. It
had been left him, and instead of investing it as anybody in Bloombury
would, he spent it in travel. I remember his saying that his memories of
Italy were the best investment he could have made. But afterward,
when he was in trouble, they threw it up to him. We had never got in
debt before ... and then just as he was getting round, he took bronchitis
and died."
She wiped her eyes quietly for a while, and the kettle on the stove

began to sing soothingly, and presently Peter ventured:
"Do you wish I would get rich?"
"Yes, Peter, I do. We are all like that, I suppose, we grown-ups. Things
we manage to get along without ourselves, we want for our children. I
hope you will be a rich man some day; but, Peter, I don't want you to
think it a reflection on your father that he wasn't. He had what he
thought was best. He might have left me with more money and fewer
happy memories--and that is what women value most, Peter;--the right
sort of women. There are some who can't get along without things:
clothes, and furniture, and carriages. Ada Brown is that kind;
sometimes I'm afraid Ellen is a little. She takes after my family."
"It is partly on account of Ellen that I want to get rich."
"You mustn't take it too hard, Peter; we've always got along somehow,
and nobody in Bloombury is very rich."
Peter turned that over in his mind the whole of a raw and sleety
February. And one day when nobody came into the store from ten till
four, and loose winds went in a pack about the village streets, casting
up dry, icy dust where now and then some sharp muzzle reared out of
the press as they turned the corners, he spoke to Mr. Greenslet about it.
It was so cold that day that neither the red apples in the barrels nor the
crimson cranberries nor the yellowing hams on the rafters could
contribute any appearance of warmth to the interior of the grocery. A
kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned goods;
the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked
coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the
glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted
panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of
chilblains, roughed by the wind.
A kind of arctic stillness pervaded the place, out of which the two men
hailed each other at intervals as from immeasurable deeps of space.
"Mr. Greenslet," ventured Peter at last, "are you a rich man?"

"Not by a long sight."
"Why?" questioned Peter.
"Not built that way."
The grocer lapsed back into the silence and seemed to lean against it
meditatively. The wolf wind howled about the corners and cast snow
like powdered glass upon the windows contemptuously, and time went
by with a large deliberate movement like a fat man turning over, before
Peter hailed again.
"Did you ever want to be?"
Mr. Greenslet reached out for the damper of the stove ostensibly to
shake down the ashes, but really to pull himself up out of the soundless
spaces of thought.
"When I was your age, yes. Thought I was going to be." The shaking of
the damper seemed to loosen the springs of speech in him. "I was up in
the city working for Siegel Brothers; began as a bundle boy and meant
to be one of the partners. But by the time I worked up to fancy goods I
realized that I would have to be as old as Methuselah to make it at that
rate. And Mrs. Greenslet didn't like the city; she was a Bloombury girl.
It wasn't any place for the children."
"So you came back?"
"We had saved a little. I bought out this place and put in a few notions
I'd got from Siegel's. I'm comfortably off, but I'm not rich."
"Would you like to be?"
"I don' know, I don' know. I'd like to give the boys