II


On Saturday morning Lee telephoned to his office, found nothing that
required his immediate attention there and, the brief-case again in
evidence, stayed at Eastlake. Fanny, too, with her hair severely plain
and an air of practical accomplishment, was occupied with her day book.
She kept this faithfully; but Lee couldn't decide whether the obvious
labor or her pleasure in the accomplishment were uppermost. She
addressed the day book with a frowning concentration, supplementary
additions and subtractions on stray fragments of paper, which at times
brought him with an offer of assistance to her shoulder. But this she
resolutely declined--she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation
along with his. However, Fanny, like all other women, he thought, was
entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a
symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an
actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing
gold and crisp currency.

However, Fanny had always been accustomed to the ease of its
possession, familiar with it; and that had stamped her with its
superiority of finish. How necessary, he continued, money was to women;
or, rather, to the women who engaged his imagination; and women were
usually the first consideration, the jewelled rewards, of wealth. As he
visualized, dwelt on, them, their magnetic grace of feeling and body
was uppermost: sturdy utilitarian women in the kitchen, red-faced maids
dusting his stairs, heavily breasted nurses, mothers, wives at their
petty accounts--he ended abruptly a mental period escaping from the