“You don’t mean that you would let that Walters woman have the money?” the younger man demanded in astonishment.
“Farson, you don’t understand. I suppose it seems absurd to you—it does to me at times. But I have never for one moment considered myself the owner of Krutzmacht’s millions—never! I suppose that has given me my freedom of action, my feeling that I could do things like this theater,—not for myself. In my own mind I was always acting for some one else. It may be all imagination, but if it is, Melody just as an idea has helped me tremendously,—to keep my hands clear, not to be corrupted by the large sums of money at my disposal,—to make a man of me! It’s a mighty helpful thing to be in the position of trustee to some unknown person. It might solve some of our hardest economic problems if more of our wealth was held on the same terms. I can’t explain it all, but it makes you free really not to have a cent of your own!”
Farson murmured something that sounded like the term which Hollinger had twice used, by way of contempt, in describing Brainard.
“Well, you’d better get to bed,” Brainard laughed. “There’s nothing to worry about. That’s one happy result of my attitude. If it will make you feel any more sure of my sanity, I will see my lawyers in the morning. They are not likely to take sentimental views, I can tell you. I have been too profitable a client!”
After Farson had taken the hint and removed his bewildered person from the room, Brainard sat for another hour before the dead fire, in a sleepless revery. The unexpected visit of the stenographer and the fight-trust man had brought back vividly a long train of memories of what had constituted his active life for the last four years. The situation that had developed had again emphasized the dream quality of all living. It is the conventionally expected in life that makes what men ordinarily term reality. A slight turn from the ordinary course of events produces a sense of unreality. For four years there had come to Brainard, turn after turn, utterly unexpected and unforeseen, each one producing this sense of the essential unreality of life. But behind it all had grown the living reality of his own will and character that had been formed by meeting and dealing with the exigencies of each situation fairly according to the laws of his nature.