Shortly after delivering his blow, Mr. Smith took his hat and left the studio without shaking hands with Archie, although he smiled frostily on the trust company's ward and "hoped all would go well with her in her new life." All the way back to his hotel he congratulated himself for his dispatch, finesse, eloquence, and wisdom in handling a deplorable and difficult situation. Yet it is hard to see just what he had accomplished by crossing the ocean. He washed his hands of "the Clark girl" before he left Paris for his return voyage, and, like so many persons with whom the young heiress had dealings, never again actively entered her life.
When the studio door closed upon the emissary of the trust company, the young couple looked at each other a little ruefully. Archie kicked over a chair or two and expressed himself volubly, now that it was safe, upon the priggishness and meanness of such folks as Mr. Solomon Smith. Adelle might wish that he had expressed himself in these vigorous terms earlier, when there could have been discussion and a chance of modifying Mr. Smith's decision. But she realized how raw he was feeling from the old gentleman's contempt and sweetly put her arms around her husband's strong shoulders and kissed him tenderly.
"It won't be so bad, Archie," she said hopefully. "We'll get on somehow, I expect, and it isn't forever--not two years." She could recall much graver crises in life than being compelled to live for eighteen months with an adored companion on seventy-five hundred dollars, and people somehow survived them.
"It isn't just the money," Archie protested, a little shamed, but still grumpy. "It's his rotten talk. A feller doesn't like being called all sorts of names."
"Well, he's gone now and he won't come back," Adelle remarked soothingly, with another effort to caress her young lord into amiability and resignation to fate. That proved more difficult than usual: Archie felt the sting of the older man's taunts, especially the horrid word "adventurer" rankled in his subconsciousness. He saw himself reflected in the opinion of other men,--at least of stodgy, middle-aged men like Mr. Smith, who worked hard for what they got and had families,--and it ruffled him seriously. He was not in a happy temper otherwise. A fortnight of conjugal picnicking in the perpetual society of Adelle, whose conversational powers were limited, had chafed him. So Adelle had her first experience in that woman's pathetic task of endeavoring to soothe and harmonize the disturbed soul of her lord, who, she is aware, has only himself to blame for his state of spiritual discomfiture. But Adelle, like all her sisters who love, since the world began, rose nobly to her part.