They sink into silliness and moral and mental sloth.
They pass the time at foolish purposeless games indoors and out; or they wander aimlessly about the earth chattering with similar mental decrepits, much like monkeys adrift in the boughs of a tropical forest. But Norman had the tenacity and strength to concentrate upon achievement all the powers emancipated by the use of menials wherever menials could be used. He employed to advantage the time saved in putting in shirt buttons and lacing shoes and carrying books to and from shelves. In this lay one of the important secrets of his success. "Never do for yourself what you can get some one else to do for you as well. Save yourself for the things only YOU can do."
In his household there were three persons, and sixteen servants to wait upon them. His sister--she and her husband, Clayton Fitzhugh, were the other two persons--his sister was always complaining that there were not enough servants, and Frederick, the most indulgent of brothers, was always letting her add to the number.
It seemed to him that the more help there was, the less smoothly the household ran. But that did not concern him; his mind was saved for more important matters.
There was no reason why it should concern him; could he not compel the dollars to flood in faster than she could bail them out?
This brother and sister had come to New York fifteen years before, when he was twenty-two and she nineteen. They were from Albany, where their family had possessed some wealth and much social position for many generations. There was the usual "queer streak" in the Norman family--an intermittent but fixed habit of some one of them making a "low marriage." One view of this aberration might have been that there was in the Norman blood a tenacious instinct of sturdy and self-respecting independence that caused a Norman occasionally to do as he pleased instead of as he conven-tionally ought. Each time the thing occurred there was a mighty and horrified hubbub throughout the connection. But in the broad, as the custom is, the Normans were complacent about the "queer streak."
They thought it kept the family from rotting out and running to seed. "Nothing like an occasional infusion of common blood," Aunt Ursula Van Bruyten (born Norman) used to say. For her Norman's sister was named.
Norman's father had developed the "queer streak."
Their mother was the daughter of a small farmer and, when she met their father, was chambermaid in a Troy hotel, Troy then being a largish village. As soon as she found herself married and in a position with whose duties she was unfamiliar, she set about fitting herself for them with the same diligence and thoroughness which she had shown in learning chamber work in a village hotel. She educated herself, selected not without shrewdness and carefully put on an assortment of genteel airs, finally contrived to make a most creditable appearance--was more aristocratic in tastes and in talk than the high mightiest of her relatives by marriage. But her son Fred was a Pinkey in character. In boyhood he was noted for his rough and low associates. His bosom friends were the son of a Jewish junk dealer, the son of a colored wash-woman, and the son of an Irish day laborer. Also, the commonness persisted as he grew up. Instead of seeking aristocratic ease, he aspired to a career. He had choice of several rich and well-born girls; but he developed a strong distaste for marriage of any sort and especially for a rich marriage. A fortune he was resolved to have, but it should be one that belonged to him. When he was about ready to enter a law office, his father and mother died leaving less than ten thousand dollars in all for his sister and himself. His sister hesitated, half inclined to marry a stupid second cousin who had thirty thousand a year.
"Don't do it, Ursula," Fred advised. "If you must sell out, sell for something worth while." He laughed in his frank, ironical way. "Fact is, we've both made up our minds to sell. Let's go to the best market--New York. If you don't like it, you can come back and marry that fat-wit any time you please."
Ursula inspected herself in the glass, saw a face and form exceeding fair to look upon; she decided to take her brother's advice. At twenty she threw over a multi-millionaire and married Clayton Fitzhugh for love--Clayton with only seventeen thousand a year. Of course, from the standpoint of fashionable ambition, seventeen thousand a year in New York is but one remove from tenement house poverty. As Clayton had no more ability at making money than had Ursula herself, there was nothing to do but live with Norman and "take care of him." But for this self-sacrifice of sisterly affection Norman would have been rich at thirty-seven. As he had to make her rich as well as himself, progress toward luxurious independence was slower--and there was the house, costing nearly fifty thousand a year to keep up.
There had been a time in Norman's career--a brief and very early time--when, with the maternal peasant blood hot in his veins, he had entertained the quixotic idea of going into politics on the poor or people's side and fighting for glory only. The pressure of expensive living had soon driven this notion clean off. Norman had almost forgotten that he ever had it, was no longer aware how strong it had been in the last year at law school. Young men of high intelligence and ardent temperament always pass through this period. With some--a few--its glory lingers long after the fire has flickered out before the cool, steady breath of worldliness.
All this time Norman has been dressing for dinner.
He now leaves the third floor and descends toward the library, as it still lacks twenty minutes of the dinner hour.
As he walked along the hall of the second floor a woman's voice called to him, "That you, Fred?"
