CHAPTER V

TREATS OF THE POVERTY OF RICHES

On the morning of Connie’s death, Gerty, dropping in shortly before luncheon, brought the news to Laura.

“Do you know for once in my life my social instinct has failed me,” she confessed in her first breath, “I am perfectly at a loss as to how the situation should be met.  Ought one to ignore her death or ought one not to?”

“Do you mean,” asked Laura, “that you can’t decide whether to write to him or not?”

“Of course that’s a part of it, but, the main thing is to know in one’s own mind whether one ought to regard it as an affliction or a blessing.  It really isn’t just to Providence to be so undecided about the character of its actions—­particularly when in this case it appears to have arranged things so beautifully to suit everybody who is concerned.”

“It was, to say the least, considerate,” remarked Laura, with the cynical flavour she adopted occasionally from Kemper or from Gerty, “and it is certainly a merciful solution of the problem, but does it ever occur to you,” she added more earnestly, “to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t died?”

“Oh, she simply had to die,” said Gerty, “there was nothing else that she could do in decency—­not that she would have been greatly influenced by such a necessity,” she commented blandly.

“I’d like all the same to know how he would have met the difficulty, for that he would have met it, I am perfectly assured.”

“Well, I, for one, can afford to leave my curiosity unsatisfied,” responded Gerty; then she added in a voice that was almost serious.  “Do you know there’s really something strangely loveable about the man.  I sometimes think,” she concluded with her fantastic humour, “that I might have married him myself with very little effort on either side.”

“And lived happily forever after on the International Review?”

“Oh, I don’t know but what it would be quite as easy as to live on clothes.  I don’t believe poverty, after all, is a bit worse than boredom.  What one wants is to be interested, and if one isn’t, life is pretty much the same in a surface car or in an automobile.  I don’t believe I should have minded surface cars the least bit,” she finished pensively.

“Wait till you’ve tried them—­I have.”

“What really matters is the one great thing,” pursued Gerty with a positive philosophy, “and money has about as much relation to happiness as the frame has to the finished picture—­all it does is to show it off to the world.  Now I like being shown off, I admit—­but I’d like it all the better if there were a little more of the stuff upon the canvas.”

“If you were only as happy as I am!” said Laura softly.

For a moment Gerty looked at her with a sweetness in which there was an almost maternal understanding.  “I wish I were, darling,” was what she answered.