How should I know whether you were going to succeed,
when I didn't even know what it was you were at? Certainly
you hadn't succeeded here in London--but elsewhere you
might or you might not--how could I tell? And moreover,
I don't feel that I know you very well; you've grown
into something very different from the boy Joel that left
the shop--it must be twenty years ago. I can only know
about you and your affairs what you tell me."
"But my point is," pursued Thorpe, watching her face with
a curiously intent glance, "you never said to yourself:
'I KNOW he's going to succeed. I KNOW he'll be a rich
man before he dies.'"
She shook her head dispassionately. Her manner expressed
fatigued failure to comprehend why he was making so much
of this purposeless point.
"No--I don't remember ever having said that to myself,"
she admitted, listlessly. Then a comment upon his words
occurred to her, and she spoke with more animation:
"You don't seem to understand, Joel, that what was very
important to you, didn't occupy me at all. You were
always talking about getting rich; you kept the idea
before you of sometime, at a stroke, finding yourself
a millionaire. That's been the idea of your life.
But what do I know about all that? My work has been
to keep a roof over my head--to keep the little business
from disappearing altogether.
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