The Rise of Silas Lapham

Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they had not got on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they were a year behind in graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they had got education enough. His wife was of a different mind; she would have liked them to go to some private school for their finishing. But Irene did not care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the sisters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a different sort from the girls of the grammar-school… ended in their going part of a year. But the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading, and she took some private lessons, and read books out of the circulating library.

“Well, Silas Lapham, if you can’t see now that he’s after Irene, I don’t know what ever can open your eyes. That’s all.”

“Oh! it’s in regard to the paint, and not the princess, that he’s made up his mind. Well, I think you were wise to let him alone, Anna. We represent a faded tradition. We don’t really care what business a man is in, so it is large enough, and he doesn’t advertise offensively; but we think it fine to affect reluctance.”

He bent forward and picked up from the floor the shaving with which they had been playing, and put it to his nose. “It’s like a flower. May I offer it to you?” he asked, as if it had been one.

“Oh, it was a splendid call! I didn’t suppose I could make it go off so well. We talked nearly the whole time about you!”

Finally, all that dress-making in the house began to scare him with vague apprehensions in regard to his own dress. As soon as he had determined to go, an ideal of the figure in which he should go presented itself to his mind.

“But it wasn’t self-sacrifice—or not self-sacrifice alone. She was sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn’t appreciate him half as much as she could. I’m provoked with myself when I think how I cried over that book—for I did cry. It’s silly—it’s wicked for any one to do what that girl did. Why can’t they let people have a chance to behave reasonably in stories?”

“If I could give him to her, I would. But he isn’t mine to give.” She added in a burst of despair, “He isn’t mine to keep!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Lapham, “she has got to bear it. I don’t know what’s to come of it all. But she’s got to bear her share of it.”

“One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?” suggested Sewell. “That’s sense, and that’s justice. It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality.”

“Oh! Never! Never for an instant! How could you think such a thing? It was impossible! I never thought of her. But I see—I see! I can explain—no, there’s nothing to explain! I have never knowingly done or said a thing from first to last to make you think that. I see how terrible it is!” he said; but he still smiled, as if he could not take it seriously. “I admired her beauty—who could help doing that?—and I thought her very good and sensible.”

One of the papers had slipped through the crevice of the lid, and lay upon the floor. Mrs. Lapham kept on at her sewing, but after a while she picked the paper up to lay it on the desk. Then she glanced at it, and saw that it was a long column of dates and figures, recording successive sums, never large ones, paid regularly to “Wm. M.” The dates covered a year, and the sum amounted at least to several hundreds.

“We never cared for the money,” said Mrs. Corey. “You know that.”