The Rise of Silas Lapham | Page 8

the head of a half-barrel of the paint, which he was
reluctant to leave. But he rose and followed the vigorous lead of
Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a long summer afternoon
was just beginning to glare in at the window. On shelves opposite
Lapham's desk were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering
cylinders, and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward the top, the
same label borne by the casks and barrels in the wareroom. Lapham
merely waved his hand toward these; but when Bartley, after a
comprehensive glance at them, gave his whole attention to a row of
clean, smooth jars, where different tints of the paint showed through
flawless glass, Lapham smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.
"Hello!" said Bartley. "That's pretty!"
"Yes," assented Lapham, "it is rather nice. It's our latest thing, and we
find it takes with customers first-rate. Look here!" he said, taking down
one of the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.
Bartley read, "THE PERSIS BRAND," and then he looked at Lapham
and smiled.
"After HER, of course," said Lapham. "Got it up and put the first of it
on the market her last birthday. She was pleased."
"I should think she might have been," said Bartley, while he made a
note of the appearance of the jars.
"I don't know about your mentioning it in your interview," said Lapham
dubiously.
"That's going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing else does. Got
a wife myself, and I know just how you feel." It was in the dawn of
Bartley's prosperity on the Boston Events, before his troubles with

Marcia had seriously begun.
"Is that so?" said Lapham, recognising with a smile another of the vast
majority of married Americans; a few underrate their wives, but the rest
think them supernal in intelligence and capability. "Well," he added,
"we must see about that. Where'd you say you lived?"
"We don't live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place."
"Well, we've all got to commence that way," suggested Lapham
consolingly.
"Yes; but we've about got to the end of our string. I expect to be under
a roof of my own on Clover Street before long. I suppose," said Bartley,
returning to business, "that you didn't let the grass grow under your feet
much after you found out what was in your paint-mine?"
"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long stare at
Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a young man again, in the
first days of his married life. "I went right back to Lumberville and sold
out everything, and put all I could rake and scrape together into paint.
And Mis' Lapham was with me every time. No hang back about HER. I
tell you she was a WOMAN!"
Bartley laughed. "That's the sort most of us marry."
"No, we don't," said Lapham. "Most of us marry silly little girls grown
up to LOOK like women."
"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley, as if upon second
thought.
"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham, "the paint wouldn't have
come to anything. I used to tell her it wa'n't the seventy-five per cent. of
purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it was the
seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER."
"Good!" cried Bartley. "I'll tell Marcia that."

"In less'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence, nor a bridge-girder, nor
a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face of rock in that whole region that
didn't have 'Lapham's Mineral Paint--Specimen' on it in the three
colours we begun by making." Bartley had taken his seat on the
window-sill, and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge
foot close to Bartley's thigh; neither of them minded that.
"I've heard a good deal of talk about that S.T.--1860-- X. man, and the
stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man, because they advertised
in that way; and I've read articles about it in the papers; but I don't see
where the joke comes in, exactly. So long as the people that own the
barns and fences don't object, I don't see what the public has got to do
with it. And I never saw anything so very sacred about a big rock,
along a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn't do to put mineral paint on
it in three colours. I wish some of the people that talk about the
landscape, and WRITE about it, had to bu'st one of them rocks OUT of
the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in, as we used to
have to do up on the farm; I guess they'd sing a little different tune
about the profanation of scenery.