University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.

In due time John Vane took his lovely bride to
the national capital, and entered upon his triple
career as a social magnate, a lawgiver, and a reformer.

He was a bloomingly happy man at the period
of that advent, and he could surely allege satisfactory
reasons for his beatitude. He had attained
eminence early in life; there were few younger
Congressmen than himself. His fame as an incorruptible
soul had preceded him; and because
of it he had been received by his brother legislators
with a deference which spoke well for them:
as if they also were honest or admired probity
theoretically, or at the very least bowed to popular
prejudice on the subject. He had, as he supposed,
a sure entry into the hitherto unvisited
region which he called high society, and by his
side walked a being who seemed to him perfectly

fitted to guide him among those Delectable Mountains.
Finally, his wife was the object of his robust,
undivided affection, and, to the best of his
knowledge and belief, returned it with interest.

But, however pure and abundant may be the
sources of earthly joy, some turbid stream will
ever and anon rile them, bubbling up no doubt
from the internal regions. Before long Vane discovered,
or rather had it borne in upon him, that
Olympia was not pleased with her architectural
surroundings, nor with their upholstery attributes.
His apartments, it must be conceded, were not
fine; they were just that kind of tarnished,
frowsy lodgings which Congressmen of moderate
means grumble at, but perforce put up with; such
lodgings as one is sure to find abundantly in any
city which is crowded during one half of the
year and deserted during the other half. Even
Vane, whose self-made career had not left him a
sybarite, was obliged to admit that the bedroom
smelt unpleasantly of a neighboring stable, and
that the parlor was dingy and scantily furnished.

“O, this shabby Washington!” Olympia soon
began to sigh. “What mean, musty, vile rooms!
I don't see how we came to take them. I'm sure
nobody but poorhouse people will visit us twice
here.”

“But, my dear petsy posy, what can be done?”
gently replied John. “They are the best we
could find at the figger, and the figger is as high
as my pocket-book measures. Just look at the
whole thing now,” he continued, patiently recommencing
an argument which he had already been
driven to state more than once. “I'll show you
exactly how I stand. As a source of income the
refrigerator business don't count at present. I
had to take in a partner to carry on the shop;
and whether there'll be any profits or not I can't
yet say. It won't be safe, at least not for the first
year, to estimate my receipts at anything more
than my Congressional salary. What I have to
live on, then, is just five thousand dollars, and no
more.”

“But that is a great deal,” interrupted Olympia,

who had never had anything whatever to do with
the boarding-house responsibilities, and was consequently
as ignorant of the cost of living as
Queen Victoria, and probably a great deal more
so.

“Well, that depends on the rate of outgo,”
smiled the husband, hoping vainly to render his
logic palatable by sugaring it with meekness.
“Now, what are our expenses? First, there are
the two children. I wanted to make things easy
for your mother, and so I put their board at
twenty-four dollars per week, which, with other
bills, such as clothing, schooling, doctoring, etc.,
will foot up to eighteen hundred a year. It's
awful, but I wanted to make it light on the old
lady.”

He smiled again, not noting how this reference
to the maternal poverty jarred on Olympia.

“Then our board and rooms here,” he continued,
“cost forty dollars a week, and won't fall
greatly below that while we are in Slowburgh, besides
which you want a trip to Saratoga. So

there goes another payment of two thousand and
eighty dollars. That makes three thousand eight
hundred and eighty, you see. All we have left
for everything else—wardrobe, washing, servants,
street-cars, hack-hire, and sundries—is only eleven
hundred and twenty dollars. Can we fetch the
twelve months round on that? I don't know yet.
But I'm sure, we ought to wait and see, before we
branch out any wider. Just look at it, my dear
petsy posy, for yourself.”

“I hate arithmetic,” was the answer which dear
petsy posy accorded to this painstaking exposition
of weighty facts; “I always did hate it and always
shall.”

There are some persons so constituted that
they will get furious with a thermometer for proving
that a room is warm after they have pronounced
it cold. Olympia, who already felt discontented
with her husband for bringing her into
these commonplace rooms, was little less than
angry at him because his arguments in favor of
retaining them were unanswerable. She did not

care one straw for his reasons, except to hate
them for controverting her wishes.

“I did think that I should be allowed to live in
some style while I was in Washington,” she continued
to pout. “This kind of thing,” with a
disdainful glance at her furnishings, “I suppose
I can bear it, if I must, but I do say that it is a
very great disappointment to me.”

Having been married before, John Vane was
not much astonished at this persistence, but he
could not help being grieved by it. It did seem
to him rather hard that a wife whom he had taken
out of the enforced frugality of a boarding-house
should be just as eager for grandeur and as hostile
to saving as if she had been reared in the lap of
luxury and had brought him a fortune. Furthermore,
a sad doubt, which has dolorously surprised
many a husband beside him, now sprang upon
him for the first time. “Is it possible,” he asked
himself, “that she is not going to be satisfied with
succeeding through my success, but means to
make her own glory the centre of our life?”

The first Mrs. Vane, whatever her shortcomings
in other respects, had been content with
such an abode as he could pay for, and had taken
a pride in his growing business. But here was a
new style of helpmeet; a helpmeet who apparently
did not propose to live for him; who, on
the contrary, intended that he should live for her,
and that without regard to balancing his bank
account. She had got a Congressman; but that
almost continental fact did not satisfy her: she
must have her own separate empire and glory.
In short, Vane began dimly to suspect (although
he did not at all know how to phrase the matter
to himself) that he had married a “girl of the
period,” that fairest and greediest of all vampires.
Being love-bewitched, however, he did not really
believe in his calamity, and much less burst forth
in wrath or lamentation.

“Well, my dear, we'll see about it,” he said,
cheeringly. “We'll keep our eyes open for some
better shanty than this, and if the dollars seem
plenty we'll pop into it.”

This conditional promise of finer surroundings
Olympia tacitly accepted as a positive agreement
to provide the same, and went out that very day
in search of first-class apartments, returning
much annoyed at finding none vacant. To soothe
her disappointment she got fifty dollars from her
husband, purchased such damask curtains as
could be had therefor, and so embellished her
parlor. Vane winced a little; as a business man he
saw that this was a poor way to prepare for getting
into better lodgings; as a business man also he
hated to spend money in lending attractions to
another person's property. But he tried to persuade
himself that he had got off tolerably cheap,
and that his wife would learn economy and self-control
in the course of time. Then, like many
another Congressman who cannot rule his own
expenditures, he turned his attention to reforming
those of the nation.

The first thing to be done was to get in his bill
for the abolition of the franking privilege. He
had written it out months ago, and touched it up

ever so many times since. After pulling aside
those damask curtains in order to give himself
some light, he took his well-scratched manuscript
out of his trunk, and read it to himself aloud.
As is frequently the case with persons little accustomed
to composition, the sound of his own
periods was agreeable to him, and the sense impressive,
not to say sublime. It seemed to him
that it was a good bill; that it was, all over its
face and down its back, an honest man's bill; that
every respectable fellow in the House would have
to vote for it. He decided to make a clean copy
of it just as it was, without another syllable of
useless alteration. He had just squared himself
and spread out his legs and put his head on one
side for this “chore,” and was in the very act of
flourishing his right hand over the foolscap preparatory
to executing a fine opening capital, when
he was arrested by a ring at his door-bell. Presently
in stamped his old acquaintance and most
adroit wire-puller, Mr. Darius Dorman, followed
by a stranger.