Do you suppose I'd do this if you were the kind
of pink-and-white idiot he ought to have married? It's because I see
you're alive, as I was, tingling with beliefs, ambitions, energies,
as I was--that I can't see you walled up alive, as I was, without
stretching out a hand to save you!" She sat gazing rigidly forward,
her eyes on the pictures, speaking in the low precipitate tone of
one who tries to press the meaning of a lifetime into a few
breathless sentences.
"When I met Alan's father," she went on, "I knew nothing of his--his
work. We met abroad, where I had been living with my mother. That
was twenty-six years ago, when the _Radiator_ was less--less
notorious than it is now. I knew my husband owned a newspaper--a
great newspaper--and nothing more. I had never seen a copy of the
_Radiator_; I had no notion what it stood for, in politics--or in
other ways. We were married in Europe, and a few months afterward we
came to live here. People were already beginning to talk about the
_Radiator_. My husband, on leaving college, had bought it with some
money an old uncle had left him, and the public at first was merely
curious to see what an ambitious, stirring young man without any
experience of journalism was going to make out of his experiment.
They found first of all that he was going to make a great deal of
money out of it. I found that out too. I was so happy in other ways
that it didn't make much difference at first; though it was pleasant
to be able to help my mother, to be generous and charitable, to live
in a nice house, and wear the handsome gowns he liked to see me in.
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