After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's high-pitched,thin,sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field which her sister's voice seemed to cover,made its way into the old man's consciousness,and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs.Mandel about it,and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant and mistaken comment.He agreed with Christine,and silently took her view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.
There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money seemed admirable to him.He had once respected himself for the hard-headed,practical common sense which first gave him standing among his country neighbors;which made him supervisor,school trustee,justice of the peace,county commissioner,secretary of the Moffitt County Agricultural Society.In those days he had served the public with disinterested zeal and proud ability;he used to write to the Lake Shore Farmer on agricultural topics;he took part in opposing,through the Moffitt papers,the legislative waste of the people's money;on the question of selling a local canal to the railroad company,which killed that fine old State work,and let the dry ditch grow up to grass,he might have gone to the Legislature,but he contented himself with defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job.If he opposed some measures for the general good,like high schools and school libraries,it was because he lacked perspective,in his intense individualism,and suspected all expense of being spendthrift.He believed in good district schools,and he had a fondness,crude but genuine,for some kinds of reading--history,and forensics of an elementary sort.
With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers;he thought lawyers were all rascals,but he respected them for their ability;he was not himself litigious,but he enjoyed the intellectual encounters of a difficult lawsuit,and he often attended a sitting of the fall term of court,when he went to town,for the pleasure of hearing the speeches.He was a good citizen,and a good husband.As a good father,he was rather severe with his children,and used to whip them,especially the gentle Conrad,who somehow crossed him most,till the twins died.
After that he never struck any of them;and from the sight of a blow dealt a horse he turned as if sick.It was a long time before he lifted himself up from his sorrow,and then the will of the man seemed to have been breached through his affections.He let the girls do as they pleased--the twins had been girls;he let them go away to school,and got them a piano.It was they who made him sell the farm.If Conrad had only had their spirit he could have made him keep it,he felt;and he resented the want of support he might have found in a less yielding spirit than his son's.
His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making money quickly and abundantly,which offered itself to him after he sold his farm.He awoke to it slowly,from a desolation in which he tasted the last bitter of homesickness,the utter misery of idleness and listlessness.When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,wholesome life he had lost,he was near the end of this season of despair,but he was also near the end of what was best in himself.
He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizenship,which had been his chief moral experience:the money he had already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love in him;he began to honor money,especially money that had been won suddenly and in large sums;for money that had been earned painfully,slowly,and in little amounts,he had only pity and contempt.The poison of that ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local speculators had instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect;he rejected Europe as the proper field for his expansion;he rejected Washington;he preferred New York,whither the men who have made money and do not yet know that money has made them,all instinctively turn.He came where he could watch his money breed more money,and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour of luck than the toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year.He called it speculation,stocks,the Street;and his pride,his faith in himself,mounted with his luck.He expected,when he had sated his greed,to begin to spend,and he had formulated an intention to build a great house,to add another to the palaces of the country-bred millionaires who have come to adorn the great city.In the mean time he made little account of the things that occupied his children,except to fret at the ungrateful indifference of his son to the interests that could alone make a man of him.He did not know whether his daughters were in society or not;with people coming and going in the house he would have supposed they must be so,no matter who the people were;in some vague way he felt that he had hired society in Mrs.Mandel,at so much a year.He never met a superior himself except now and then a man of twenty or thirty millions to his one or two,and then he felt his soul creep within him,without a sense of social inferiority;it was a question of financial inferiority;and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself and crawled,it was with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck.Other men said these many-millioned millionaires were smart,and got their money by sharp practices to which lesser men could not attain;but Dryfoos believed that he could compass the same ends,by the same means,with the same chances;he respected their money,not them.
When he now heard Mrs.Mandel and his daughters talking of that person,whoever she was,that Mrs.Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls by coming to see them,his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was galled.
