prompt:
Chapter: THAT evening James Bellingham came to see Corey after dinner, and went
to find him in his own room.

"I've come at the instance of Colonel Lapham," said the uncle.  "He was
at my office to-day, and I had a long talk with him.  Did you know that
he was in difficulties?"

"I fancied that he was in some sort of trouble.  And I had the
book-keeper's conjectures--he doesn't really know much about it."

"Well, he thinks it time--on all accounts--that you should know how he
stands, and why he declined that proposition of yours.  I must say he
has behaved very well--like a gentleman."

"I'm not surprised."

"I am.  It's hard to behave like a gentleman where your interest is
vitally concerned.  And Lapham doesn't strike me as a man who's in the
habit of acting from the best in him always."

"Do any of us?" asked Corey.

"Not all of us, at any rate," said Bellingham.  "It must have cost him
something to say no to you, for he's just in that state when he
believes that this or that chance, however small, would save him."

Corey was silent.  "Is he really in such a bad way?"

"It's hard to tell just where he stands.  I suspect that a hopeful
temperament and fondness for round numbers have always caused him to
set his figures beyond his actual worth.  I don't say that he's been
dishonest about it, but he's had a loose way of estimating his assets;
he's reckoned his wealth on the basis of his capital, and some of his
capital is borrowed.  He's lost heavily by some of the recent failures,
and there's been a terrible shrinkage in his values.  I don't mean
merely in the stock of paint on hand, but in a kind of competition
which has become very threatening.  You know about that West Virginian
paint?"

Corey nodded.

"Well, he tells me that they've struck a vein of natural gas out there
which will enable them to make as good a paint as his own at a cost of
manufacturing so low that they can undersell him everywhere.  If this
proves to be the case, it will not only drive his paint out of the
market, but will reduce the value of his Works--the whole plant--at
Lapham to a merely nominal figure."

"I see," said Corey dejectedly.  "I've understood that he had put a
great deal of money into his Works."

"Yes, and he estimated his mine there at a high figure.  Of course it
will be worth little or nothing if the West Virginia paint drives his
out.  Then, besides, Lapham has been into several things outside of his
own business, and, like a good many other men who try outside things,
he's kept account of them himself; and he's all mixed up about them.
He's asked me to look into his affairs with him, and I've promised to
do so.  Whether he can be tided over his difficulties remains to be
seen.  I'm afraid it will take a good deal of money to do it--a great
deal more than he thinks, at least.  He believes comparatively little
would do it.  I think differently.  I think that anything less than a
great deal would be thrown away on him.  If it were merely a question
of a certain sum--even a large sum--to keep him going, it might be
managed; but it's much more complicated.  And, as I say, it must have
been a trial to him to refuse your offer."

This did not seem to be the way in which Bellingham had meant to
conclude.  But he said no more; and Corey made him no response.

He remained pondering the case, now hopefully, now doubtfully, and
wondering, whatever his mood was, whether Penelope knew anything of the
fact with which her mother went nearly at the same moment to acquaint
her.

"Of course, he's done it on your account," Mrs. Lapham could not help
saying.

"Then he was very silly.  Does he think I would let him give father
money? And if father lost it for him, does he suppose it would make it
any easier for me? I think father acted twice as well.  It was very
silly."

In repeating the censure, her look was not so severe as her tone; she
even smiled a little, and her mother reported to her father that she
acted more like herself than she had yet since Corey's offer.

"I think, if he was to repeat his offer, she would have him now," said
Mrs. Lapham.

"Well, I'll let her know if he does," said the Colonel.

"I guess he won't do it to you!" she cried.

"Who else will he do it to?" he demanded.

They perceived that they had each been talking of a different offer.

After Lapham went to his business in the morning the postman brought
another letter from Irene, which was full of pleasant things that were
happening to her; there was a great deal about her cousin Will, as she
called him.  At the end she had written, "Tell Pen I don't want she
should be foolish." "There!" said Mrs. Lapham.  "I guess it's going to
come out right, all round;" and it seemed as if even the Colonel's
difficulties were past.  "When your father gets through this, Pen," she
asked impulsively, "what shall you do?"

"What have you been telling Irene about me?"

"Nothing much.  What should you do?"

"It would be a good deal easier to say what I should do if father
didn't," said the girl.

"I know you think it was nice in him to make your father that offer,"
urged the mother.

"It was nice, yes; but it was silly," said the girl.  "Most nice things
are silly, I suppose," she added.

She went to her room and wrote a letter.  It was very long, and very
carefully written; and when she read it over, she tore it into small
pieces.  She wrote another one, short and hurried, and tore that up
too.  Then she went back to her mother, in the family room, and asked
to see Irene's letter, and read it over to herself.  "Yes, she seems to
be having a good time," she sighed.  "Mother, do you think I ought to
let Mr. Corey know that I know about it?"

"Well, I should think it would be a pleasure to him," said Mrs. Lapham
judicially.

"I'm not so sure of that the way I should have to tell him.  I should
begin by giving him a scolding.  Of course, he meant well by it, but
can't you see that it wasn't very flattering! How did he expect it
would change me?"

"I don't believe he ever thought of that."

"Don't you? Why?"

"Because you can see that he isn't one of that kind.  He might want to
please you without wanting to change you by what he did."

"Yes. He must have known that nothing would change me,--at least,
nothing that he could do.  I thought of that.  I shouldn't like him to
feel that I couldn't appreciate it, even if I did think it was silly.
Should you write to him?"

"I don't see why not."

"It would be too pointed.  No, I shall just let it go.  I wish he
hadn't done it."

"Well, he has done it." "And I've tried to write to him about it--two
letters: one so humble and grateful that it couldn't stand up on its
edge, and the other so pert and flippant.  Mother, I wish you could
have seen those two letters! I wish I had kept them to look at if I
ever got to thinking I had any sense again.  They would take the
conceit out of me."

"What's the reason he don't come here any more?"

"Doesn't he come?" asked Penelope in turn, as if it were something she
had not noticed particularly.

"You'd ought to know."

"Yes." She sat silent a while.  "If he doesn't come, I suppose it's
because he's offended at something I did."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing. I--wrote to him--a little while ago.  I suppose it was very
blunt, but I didn't believe he would be angry at it.  But this--this
that he's done shows he was angry, and that he wasn't just seizing the
first chance to get out of it."

"What have you done, Pen?" demanded her mother sharply.

"Oh, I don't know.  All the mischief in the world, I suppose.  I'll
tell you.  When you first told me that father was in trouble with his
business, I wrote to him not to come any more till I let him.  I said I
couldn't tell him why, and he hasn't been here since.  I'm sure I don't
know what it means."

Her mother looked at her with angry severity.  "Well, Penelope Lapham!
For a sensible child, you ARE the greatest goose I ever saw.  Did you
think he would come here and SEE if you wouldn't let him come?"

"He might have written," urged the girl.

Her mother made that despairing "Tchk!" with her tongue, and fell back
in her chair.  "I should have DESPISED him if he had written.  He's
acted just exactly right, and you--you've acted--I don't know HOW
you've acted.  I'm ashamed of you.  A girl that could be so sensible
for her sister, and always say and do just the right thing, and then
when it comes to herself to be such a DISGUSTING simpleton!"

"I thought I ought to break with him at once, and not let him suppose
that there was any hope for him or me if father was poor.  It was my
one chance, in this whole business, to do anything heroic, and I jumped
at it.  You mustn't think, because I can laugh at it now, that I wasn't
in earnest, mother! I WAS--dead! But the Colonel has gone to ruin so
gradually, that he's spoilt everything.  I expected that he would be
bankrupt the next day, and that then HE would understand what I meant.
But to have it drag along for a fortnight seems to take all the heroism
out of it, and leave it as flat!" She looked at her mother with a smile
that shone through her tears, and a pathos that quivered round her
jesting lips.  "It's easy enough to be sensible for other people.  But
when it comes to myself, there I am! Especially, when I want to do what
I oughtn't so much that it seems as if doing what I didn't want to do
MUST be doing what I ought! But it's been a great success one way,
mother.  It's helped me to keep up before the Colonel.  If it hadn't
been for Mr. Corey's staying away, and my feeling so indignant with him
for having been badly treated by me, I shouldn't have been worth
anything at all."

The tears started down her cheeks, but her mother said, "Well, now, go
along, and write to him.  It don't matter what you say, much; and don't
be so very particular."

Her third attempt at a letter pleased her scarcely better than the
rest, but she sent it, though it seemed so blunt and awkward.  She
wrote:--

DEAR FRIEND,--I expected when I sent you that note, that you would
understand, almost the next day, why I could not see you any more.  You
must know now, and you must not think that if anything happened to my
father, I should wish you to help him.  But that is no reason why I
should not thank you, and I do thank you, for offering.  It was like
you, I will say that.

Yours sincerely, PENELOPE LAPHAM.

She posted her letter, and he sent his reply in the evening, by hand:--

DEAREST,--What I did was nothing, till you praised it.  Everything I
have and am is yours.  Won't you send a line by the bearer, to say that
I may come to see you? I know how you feel; but I am sure that I can
make you think differently.  You must consider that I loved you without
a thought of your father's circumstances, and always shall.

T. C.

The generous words were blurred to her eyes by the tears that sprang
into them.  But she could only write in answer:--

"Please do not come; I have made up my mind.  As long as this trouble
is hanging over us, I cannot see you.  And if father is unfortunate,
all is over between us."

She brought his letter to her mother, and told her what she had written
in reply.  Her mother was thoughtful a while before she said, with a
sigh, "Well, I hope you've begun as you can carry out, Pen."

"Oh, I shall not have to carry out at all.  I shall not have to do
anything.  That's one comfort--the only comfort." She went away to her
own room, and when Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the affair, he was
silent at first, as she had been.  Then he said, "I don't know as I
should have wanted her to done differently; I don't know as she could.
If I ever come right again, she won't have anything to feel meeching
about; and if I don't, I don't want she should be beholden to anybody.
And I guess that's the way she feels."

The Coreys in their turn sat in judgment on the fact which their son
felt bound to bring to their knowledge.

"She has behaved very well," said Mrs. Corey, to whom her son had
spoken.

"My dear," said her husband, with his laugh, "she has behaved TOO well.
If she had studied the whole situation with the most artful eye to its
mastery, she could not possibly have behaved better."

The process of Lapham's financial disintegration was like the course of
some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself upon the constitution,
but advances with continual reliefs, with apparent amelioration, and at
times seems not to advance at all, when it gives hope of final recovery
not only to the sufferer, but to the eye of science itself.  There were
moments when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and that,
began to fancy that he might pull through altogether; and at these
moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and
probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with
courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household.  Our theory of
disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and
novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives
and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches
us that this is false.  The house of mourning is decorously darkened to
the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing.  Bursts
of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the
stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of
the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many
others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the
sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and
making it all up again with the conventional fitness of things.
Lapham's adversity had this quality in common with bereavement.  It was
not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments
of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it was continual, it
was not incessant.  Sometimes there was a week of repeated reverses,
when he had to keep his teeth set and to hold on hard to all his
hopefulness; and then days came of negative result or slight success,
when he was full of his jokes at the tea-table, and wanted to go to the
theatre, or to do something to cheer Penelope up.  In some miraculous
way, by some enormous stroke of success which should eclipse the
brightest of his past prosperity, he expected to do what would
reconcile all difficulties, not only in his own affairs, but in hers
too.  "You'll see," he said to his wife; "it's going to come out all
right.  Irene'll fix it up with Bill's boy, and then she'll be off
Pen's mind; and if things go on as they've been going for the last two
days, I'm going to be in a position to do the favours myself, and Pen
can feel that SHE'S makin' a sacrifice, and then I guess may be she'll
do it.  If things turn out as I expect now, and times ever do get any
better generally, I can show Corey that I appreciate his offer.  I can
offer him the partnership myself then."

Even in the other moods, which came when everything had been going
wrong, and there seemed no way out of the net, there were points of
consolation to Lapham and his wife.  They rejoiced that Irene was safe
beyond the range of their anxieties, and they had a proud satisfaction
that there had been no engagement between Corey and Penelope, and that
it was she who had forbidden it.  In the closeness of interest and
sympathy in which their troubles had reunited them, they confessed to
each other that nothing would have been more galling to their pride
than the idea that Lapham should not have been able to do everything
for his daughter that the Coreys might have expected.  Whatever
happened now, the Coreys could not have it to say that the Laphams had
tried to bring any such thing about.

Bellingham had lately suggested an assignment to Lapham, as the best
way out of his difficulties.  It was evident that he had not the money
to meet his liabilities at present, and that he could not raise it
without ruinous sacrifices, that might still end in ruin after all.  If
he made the assignment, Bellingham argued, he could gain time and make
terms; the state of things generally would probably improve, since it
could not be worse, and the market, which he had glutted with his
paint, might recover and he could start again.  Lapham had not agreed
with him.  When his reverses first began it had seemed easy for him to
give up everything, to let the people he owed take all, so only they
would let him go out with clean hands; and he had dramatised this
feeling in his talk with his wife, when they spoke together of the
mills on the G. L. & P. But ever since then it had been growing harder,
and he could not consent even to seem to do it now in the proposed
assignment.  He had not found other men so very liberal or faithful
with him; a good many of them appeared to have combined to hunt him
down; a sense of enmity towards all his creditors asserted itself in
him; he asked himself why they should not suffer a little too.  Above
all, he shrank from the publicity of the assignment.  It was open
confession that he had been a fool in some way; he could not bear to
have his family--his brother the judge, especially, to whom he had
always appeared the soul of business wisdom--think him imprudent or
stupid.  He would make any sacrifice before it came to that.  He
determined in parting with Bellingham to make the sacrifice which he
had oftenest in his mind, because it was the hardest, and to sell his
new house.  That would cause the least comment.  Most people would
simply think that he had got a splendid offer, and with his usual luck
had made a very good thing of it; others who knew a little more about
him would say that he was hauling in his horns, but they could not
blame him; a great many other men were doing the same in those hard
times--the shrewdest and safest men: it might even have a good effect.
He went straight from Bellingham's office to the real-estate broker in
whose hands he meant to put his house, for he was not the sort of man
to shilly-shally when he had once made up his mind.  But he found it
hard to get his voice up out of his throat, when he said he guessed he
would get the broker to sell that new house of his on the water side of
Beacon.  The broker answered cheerfully, yes; he supposed Colonel
Lapham knew it was a pretty dull time in real estate?  and Lapham said
yes, he knew that, but he should not sell at a sacrifice, and he did
not care to have the broker name him or describe the house definitely
unless parties meant business.  Again the broker said yes; and he
added, as a joke Lapham would appreciate, that he had half a dozen
houses on the water side of Beacon, on the same terms; that nobody
wanted to be named or to have his property described.

It did, in fact, comfort Lapham a little to find himself in the same
boat with so many others; he smiled grimly, and said in his turn, yes,
he guessed that was about the size of it with a good many people.  But
he had not the heart to tell his wife what he had done, and he sat
taciturn that whole evening, without even going over his accounts, and
went early to bed, where he lay tossing half the night before he fell
asleep.  He slept at last only upon the promise he made himself that he
would withdraw the house from the broker's hands; but he went heavily
to his own business in the morning without doing so.  There was no such
rush, anyhow, he reflected bitterly; there would be time to do that a
month later, probably.

It struck him with a sort of dismay when a boy came with a note from a
broker, saying that a party who had been over the house in the fall had
come to him to know whether it could be bought, and was willing to pay
the cost of the house up to the time he had seen it.  Lapham took
refuge in trying to think who the party could be; he concluded that it
must have been somebody who had gone over it with the architect, and he
did not like that; but he was aware that this was not an answer to the
broker, and he wrote that he would give him an answer in the morning.

Now that it had come to the point, it did not seem to him that he could
part with the house.  So much of his hope for himself and his children
had gone into it that the thought of selling it made him tremulous and
sick.  He could not keep about his work steadily, and with his nerves
shaken by want of sleep, and the shock of this sudden and unexpected
question, he left his office early, and went over to look at the house
and try to bring himself to some conclusion here.  The long procession
of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the clear red of the
sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a lump in his throat,
stopped in front of his house and looked at their multitude.  They were
not merely a part of the landscape; they were a part of his pride and
glory, his success, his triumphant life's work which was fading into
failure in his helpless hands.  He ground his teeth to keep down that
lump, but the moisture in his eyes blurred the lamps, and the keen pale
crimson against which it made them flicker.  He turned and looked up,
as he had so often done, at the window-spaces, neatly glazed for the
winter with white linen, and recalled the night when he had stopped
with Irene before the house, and she had said that she should never
live there, and he had tried to coax her into courage about it.  There
was no such facade as that on the whole street, to his thinking.
Through his long talks with the architect, he had come to feel almost
as intimately and fondly as the architect himself the satisfying
simplicity of the whole design and the delicacy of its detail.  It
appealed to him as an exquisite bit of harmony appeals to the unlearned
ear, and he recognised the difference between this fine work and the
obstreperous pretentiousness of the many overloaded house-fronts which
Seymour had made him notice for his instruction elsewhere on the Back
Bay.  Now, in the depths of his gloom, he tried to think what Italian
city it was where Seymour said he had first got the notion of treating
brick-work in that way.

He unlocked the temporary door with the key he always carried, so that
he could let himself in and out whenever he liked, and entered the
house, dim and very cold with the accumulated frigidity of the whole
winter in it, and looking as if the arrest of work upon it had taken
place a thousand years before.  It smelt of the unpainted woods and the
clean, hard surfaces of the plaster, where the experiments in
decoration had left it untouched; and mingled with these odours was
that of some rank pigments and metallic compositions which Seymour had
used in trying to realise a certain daring novelty of finish, which had
not proved successful.  Above all, Lapham detected the peculiar odour
of his own paint, with which the architect had been greatly interested
one day, when Lapham showed it to him at the office.  He had asked
Lapham to let him try the Persis Brand in realising a little idea he
had for the finish of Mrs. Lapham's room.  If it succeeded they could
tell her what it was, for a surprise.

Lapham glanced at the bay-window in the reception-room, where he sat
with his girls on the trestles when Corey first came by; and then he
explored the whole house to the attic, in the light faintly admitted
through the linen sashes.  The floors were strewn with shavings and
chips which the carpenters had left, and in the music-room these had
been blown into long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide
rent in the linen sash.  Lapham tried to pin it up, but failed, and
stood looking out of it over the water.  The ice had left the river,
and the low tide lay smooth and red in the light of the sunset.  The
Cambridge flats showed the sad, sodden yellow of meadows stripped bare
after a long sleep under snow; the hills, the naked trees, the spires
and roofs had a black outline, as if they were objects in a landscape
of the French school.

The whim seized Lapham to test the chimney in the music-room; it had
been tried in the dining-room below, and in his girls' fireplaces
above, but here the hearth was still clean.  He gathered some shavings
and blocks together, and kindled them, and as the flame mounted gaily
from them, he pulled up a nail-keg which he found there and sat down to
watch it.  Nothing could have been better; the chimney was a perfect
success; and as Lapham glanced out of the torn linen sash he said to
himself that that party, whoever he was, who had offered to buy his
house might go to the devil; he would never sell it as long as he had a
dollar.  He said that he should pull through yet; and it suddenly came
into his mind that, if he could raise the money to buy out those West
Virginia fellows, he should be all right, and would have the whole game
in his own hand.  He slapped himself on the thigh, and wondered that he
had never thought of that before; and then, lighting a cigar with a
splinter from the fire, he sat down again to work the scheme out in his
own mind.  He did not hear the feet heavily stamping up the stairs, and
coming towards the room where he sat; and the policeman to whom the
feet belonged had to call out to him, smoking at his chimney-corner,
with his back turned to the door, "Hello! what are you doing here?"

"What's that to you?" retorted Lapham, wheeling half round on his
nail-keg.

"I'll show you," said the officer, advancing upon him, and then
stopping short as he recognised him.  "Why, Colonel Lapham! I thought
it was some tramp got in here!"

"Have a cigar?" said Lapham hospitably.  "Sorry there ain't another
nail-keg."

The officer took the cigar.  "I'll smoke it outside.  I've just come
on, and I can't stop.  Tryin' your chimney?"

"Yes, I thought I'd see how it would draw, in here.  It seems to go
first-rate."

The policeman looked about him with an eye of inspection.  "You want to
get that linen window, there, mended up."

"Yes, I'll speak to the builder about that.  It can go for one night."

The policeman went to the window and failed to pin the linen together
where Lapham had failed before.  "I can't fix it." He looked round once
more, and saying, "Well, good night," went out and down the stairs.

Lapham remained by the fire till he had smoked his cigar; then he rose
and stamped upon the embers that still burned with his heavy boots, and
went home.  He was very cheerful at supper.  He told his wife that he
guessed he had a sure thing of it now, and in another twenty-four hours
he should tell her just how.  He made Penelope go to the theatre with
him, and when they came out, after the play, the night was so fine that
he said they must walk round by the new house and take a look at it in
the starlight.  He said he had been there before he came home, and
tried Seymour's chimney in the music-room, and it worked like a charm.

As they drew near Beacon Street they were aware of unwonted stir and
tumult, and presently the still air transmitted a turmoil of sound,
through which a powerful and incessant throbbing made itself felt.  The
sky had reddened above them, and turning the corner at the Public
Garden, they saw a black mass of people obstructing the perspective of
the brightly-lighted street, and out of this mass a half-dozen engines,
whose strong heart-beats had already reached them, sent up volumes of
fire-tinged smoke and steam from their funnels.  Ladders were planted
against the facade of a building, from the roof of which a mass of
flame burnt smoothly upward, except where here and there it seemed to
pull contemptuously away from the heavy streams of water which the
firemen, clinging like great beetles to their ladders, poured in upon
it.

Lapham had no need to walk down through the crowd, gazing and
gossiping, with shouts and cries and hysterical laughter, before the
burning house, to make sure that it was his.

"I guess I done it, Pen," was all he said.

Among the people who were looking at it were a party who seemed to have
run out from dinner in some neighbouring house; the ladies were
fantastically wrapped up, as if they had flung on the first things they
could seize.

"Isn't it perfectly magnificent!" cried a pretty girl.  "I wouldn't
have missed it on any account.  Thank you so much, Mr. Symington, for
bringing us out!"

"Ah, I thought you'd like it," said this Mr. Symington, who must have
been the host; "and you can enjoy it without the least compunction,
Miss Delano, for I happen to know that the house belongs to a man who
could afford to burn one up for you once a year."

"Oh, do you think he would, if I came again?"

"I haven't the least doubt of it.  We don't do things by halves in
Boston."

"He ought to have had a coat of his noncombustible paint on it," said
another gentleman of the party.

Penelope pulled her father away toward the first carriage she could
reach of a number that had driven up.  "Here, father! get into this."

"No, no; I couldn't ride," he answered heavily, and he walked home in
silence.  He greeted his wife with, "Well, Persis, our house is gone!
And I guess I set it on fire myself;" and while he rummaged among the
papers in his desk, still with his coat and hat on, his wife got the
facts as she could from Penelope.  She did not reproach him.  Here was
a case in which his self-reproach must be sufficiently sharp without
any edge from her.  Besides, her mind was full of a terrible thought.

"O Silas," she faltered, "they'll think you set it on fire to get the
insurance!"

Lapham was staring at a paper which he held in his hand.  "I had a
builder's risk on it, but it expired last week.  It's a dead loss."

"Oh, thank the merciful Lord!" cried his wife.

"Merciful!" said Lapham.  "Well, it's a queer way of showing it."

He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which sometimes follows a
great moral shock.  It was perhaps rather a torpor than a sleep.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom Corey investigates the seriousness of Lapham's financial problems and is told that, in addition to all other known problems, Lapham is competing with a company in West Virginia that can undersell him on a nearly stagnate market. While Corey is pondering the problem, he receives a thank you note from Penelope in gratitude for his financial offer. He wants to come to see her, but she will not let him. Tom's uncle, Jim Bellingham, advises Silas to place himself in the hands of his debtors; but Silas' pride deters him, and he puts the house up for sale in an act of desperation. Silas cannot, however, part with this last concrete aspect of his life's work and social dreams and declines an offer to sell the next day. Going up to the house that night, he lights a fire in the chimney which, accidentally, burns down the house. The insurance had expired the week before, and Mrs. Lapham is relieved that no one can suspect Silas of burning it down purposely.


prompt:
Chapter: LAPHAM awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from the loss of the
night before, through which it loomed mistily.  But before he lifted
his head from the pillow, it gathered substance and weight against
which it needed all his will to bear up and live.  In that moment he
wished that he had not wakened, that he might never have wakened; but
he rose, and faced the day and its cares.

The morning papers brought the report of the fire, and the conjectured
loss.  The reporters somehow had found out the fact that the loss fell
entirely upon Lapham; they lighted up the hackneyed character of their
statements with the picturesque interest OF the coincidence that the
policy had expired only the week before; heaven knows how they knew it.
They said that nothing remained of the building but the walls; and
Lapham, on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell.
The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon the
blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of
ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears,
down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills
and copings.

He gathered himself up as well as he could, and went on to his office.
The chance of retrieval that had flashed upon him, as he sat smoking by
that ruined hearth the evening before, stood him in such stead now as a
sole hope may; and he said to himself that, having resolved not to sell
his house, he was no more crippled by its loss than he would have been
by letting his money lie idle in it; what he might have raised by
mortgage on it could be made up in some other way; and if they would
sell he could still buy out the whole business of that West Virginia
company, mines, plant, stock on hand, good-will, and everything, and
unite it with his own.  He went early in the afternoon to see
Bellingham, whose expressions of condolence for his loss he cut short
with as much politeness as he knew how to throw into his impatience.
Bellingham seemed at first a little dazzled with the splendid courage
of his scheme; it was certainly fine in its way; but then he began to
have his misgivings.

"I happen to know that they haven't got much money behind them," urged
Lapham.  "They'll jump at an offer."

Bellingham shook his head.  "If they can show profit on the old
manufacture, and prove they can make their paint still cheaper and
better hereafter, they can have all the money they want.  And it will
be very difficult for you to raise it if you're threatened by them.
With that competition, you know what your plant at Lapham would be
worth, and what the shrinkage on your manufactured stock would be.
Better sell out to them," he concluded, "if they will buy."

"There ain't money enough in this country to buy out my paint," said
Lapham, buttoning up his coat in a quiver of resentment.  "Good
afternoon, sir." Men are but grown-up boys after all.  Bellingham
watched this perversely proud and obstinate child fling petulantly out
of his door, and felt a sympathy for him which was as truly kind as it
was helpless.

But Lapham was beginning to see through Bellingham, as he believed.
Bellingham was, in his way, part of that conspiracy by which Lapham's
creditors were trying to drive him to the wall.  More than ever now he
was glad that he had nothing to do with that cold-hearted,
self-conceited race, and that the favours so far were all from his
side.  He was more than ever determined to show them, every one of
them, high and low, that he and his children could get along without
them, and prosper and triumph without them.  He said to himself that if
Penelope were engaged to Corey that very minute, he would make her
break with him.

He knew what he should do now, and he was going to do it without loss
of time.  He was going on to New York to see those West Virginia
people; they had their principal office there, and he intended to get
at their ideas, and then he intended to make them an offer.  He managed
this business better than could possibly have been expected of a man in
his impassioned mood.  But when it came really to business, his
practical instincts, alert and wary, came to his aid against the
passions that lay in wait to betray after they ceased to dominate him.
He found the West Virginians full of zeal and hope, but in ten minutes
he knew that they had not yet tested their strength in the money
market, and had not ascertained how much or how little capital they
could command.  Lapham himself, if he had had so much, would not have
hesitated to put a million dollars into their business.  He saw, as
they did not see, that they had the game in their own hands, and that
if they could raise the money to extend their business, they could ruin
him.  It was only a question of time, and he was on the ground first.
He frankly proposed a union of their interests.  He admitted that they
had a good thing, and that he should have to fight them hard; but he
meant to fight them to the death unless they could come to some sort of
terms.  Now, the question was whether they had better go on and make a
heavy loss for both sides by competition, or whether they had better
form a partnership to run both paints and command the whole market.
Lapham made them three propositions, each of which was fair and open:
to sell out to them altogether; to buy them out altogether; to join
facilities and forces with them, and go on in an invulnerable alliance.
Let them name a figure at which they would buy, a figure at which they
would sell, a figure at which they would combine,--or, in other words,
the amount of capital they needed.

They talked all day, going out to lunch together at the Astor House,
and sitting with their knees against the counter on a row of stools
before it for fifteen minutes of reflection and deglutition, with their
hats on, and then returning to the basement from which they emerged.
The West Virginia company's name was lettered in gilt on the wide low
window, and its paint, in the form of ore, burnt, and mixed, formed a
display on the window shelf Lapham examined it and praised it; from
time to time they all recurred to it together; they sent out for some
of Lapham's paint and compared it, the West Virginians admitting its
former superiority.  They were young fellows, and country persons, like
Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the same amused, undaunted
provincial eyes at the myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement
above the level of their window.  He got on well with them.  At last,
they said what they would do.  They said it was nonsense to talk of
buying Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for selling out,
they would not do it, for they knew they had a big thing.  But they
would as soon use his capital to develop it as anybody else's, and if
he could put in a certain sum for this purpose, they would go in with
him.  He should run the works at Lapham and manage the business in
Boston, and they would run the works at Kanawha Falls and manage the
business in New York.  The two brothers with whom Lapham talked named
their figure, subject to the approval of another brother at Kanawha
Falls, to whom they would write, and who would telegraph his answer, so
that Lapham could have it inside of three days.  But they felt
perfectly sure that he would approve; and Lapham started back on the
eleven o'clock train with an elation that gradually left him as he drew
near Boston, where the difficulties of raising this sum were to be over
come.  It seemed to him, then, that those fellows had put it up on him
pretty steep, but he owned to himself that they had a sure thing, and
that they were right in believing they could raise the same sum
elsewhere; it would take all OF it, he admitted, to make their paint
pay on the scale they had the right to expect.  At their age, he would
not have done differently; but when he emerged, old, sore, and
sleep-broken, from the sleeping-car in the Albany depot at Boston, he
wished with a pathetic self-pity that they knew how a man felt at his
age.  A year ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion
that it would be hard to raise the money.  But he thought ruefully of
that immense stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug in the
market, of his losses by Rogers and by the failures of other men, of
the fire that had licked up so many thousands in a few hours; he
thought with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled
away in stocks, and of the commissions that the brokers had pocketed
whether he won or lost; and he could not think of any securities on
which he could borrow, except his house in Nankeen Square, or the mine
and works at Lapham.  He set his teeth in helpless rage when he thought
of that property out on the G. L. & P., that ought to be worth so much,
and was worth so little if the Road chose to say so.

He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining round, as he
would have expressed it, and trying to see if he could raise the money.
But he found that people of whom he hoped to get it were in the
conspiracy which had been formed to drive him to the wall.  Somehow,
there seemed a sense of his embarrassments abroad.  Nobody wanted to
lend money on the plant at Lapham without taking time to look into the
state of the business; but Lapham had no time to give, and he knew that
the state of the business would not bear looking into.  He could raise
fifteen thousand on his Nankeen Square house, and another fifteen on
his Beacon Street lot, and this was all that a man who was worth a
million by rights could do! He said a million, and he said it in
defiance of Bellingham, who had subjected his figures to an analysis
which wounded Lapham more than he chose to show at the time, for it
proved that he was not so rich and not so wise as he had seemed.  His
hurt vanity forbade him to go to Bellingham now for help or advice; and
if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers for money, it
would have been useless; they were simply well-to-do Western people,
but not capitalists on the scale he required.

Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to
bring men.  When its test was applied, practically or theoretically, to
all those who had seemed his friends, there was none who bore it; and
he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had
befriended in their time of need.  He said to himself that he had been
a fool for that; and he scorned himself for certain acts of
scrupulosity by which he had lost money in the past.  Seeing the moral
forces all arrayed against him, Lapham said that he would like to have
the chance offered him to get even with them again; he thought he
should know how to look out for himself.  As he understood it, he had
several days to turn about in, and he did not let one day's failure
dishearten him.  The morning after his return he had, in fact, a gleam
of luck that gave him the greatest encouragement for the moment.  A man
came in to inquire about one of Rogers's wild-cat patents, as Lapham
called them, and ended by buying it.  He got it, of course, for less
than Lapham took it for, but Lapham was glad to be rid of it for
something, when he had thought it worth nothing; and when the
transaction was closed, he asked the purchaser rather eagerly if he
knew where Rogers was; it was Lapham's secret belief that Rogers had
found there was money in the thing, and had sent the man to buy it.
But it appeared that this was a mistake; the man had not come from
Rogers, but had heard of the patent in another way; and Lapham was
astonished in the afternoon, when his boy came to tell him that Rogers
was in the outer office, and wished to speak with him.

"All right," said Lapham, and he could not command at once the severity
for the reception of Rogers which he would have liked to use.  He found
himself, in fact, so much relaxed towards him by the morning's touch of
prosperity that he asked him to sit down, gruffly, of course, but
distinctly; and when Rogers said in his lifeless way, and with the
effect of keeping his appointment of a month before, "Those English
parties are in town, and would like to talk with you in reference to
the mills," Lapham did not turn him out-of-doors.

He sat looking at him, and trying to make out what Rogers was after;
for he did not believe that the English parties, if they existed, had
any notion of buying his mills.

"What if they are not for sale?" he asked.  "You know that I've been
expecting an offer from the G. L. & P."

"I've kept watch of that.  They haven't made you any offer," said
Rogers quietly.

"And did you think," demanded Lapham, firing up, "that I would turn
them in on somebody else as you turned them in on me, when the chances
are that they won't be worth ten cents on the dollar six months from
now?"

"I didn't know what you would do," said Rogers non-committally.  "I've
come here to tell you that these parties stand ready to take the mills
off your hands at a fair valuation--at the value I put upon them when I
turned them in."

"I don't believe you!" cried Lapham brutally, but a wild predatory hope
made his heart leap so that it seemed to turn over in his breast.  "I
don't believe there are any such parties to begin with; and in the next
place, I don't believe they would buy at any such figure;
unless--unless you've lied to them, as you've lied to me.  Did you tell
them about the G. L. & P.?"

Rogers looked compassionately at him, but he answered, with unvaried
dryness, "I did not think that necessary."

Lapham had expected this answer, and he had expected or intended to
break out in furious denunciation of Rogers when he got it; but he only
found himself saying, in a sort of baffled gasp, "I wonder what your
game is!"

Rogers did not reply categorically, but he answered, with his impartial
calm, and as if Lapham had said nothing to indicate that he differed at
all with him as to disposing of the property in the way he had
suggested: "If we should succeed in selling, I should be able to repay
you your loans, and should have a little capital for a scheme that I
think of going into."

"And do you think that I am going to steal these men's money to help
you plunder somebody in a new scheme?" answered Lapham.  The sneer was
on behalf of virtue, but it was still a sneer.

"I suppose the money would be useful to you too, just now."

"Why?"

"Because I know that you have been trying to borrow."

At this proof of wicked omniscience in Rogers, the question whether he
had better not regard the affair as a fatality, and yield to his
destiny, flashed upon Lapham; but he answered, "I shall want money a
great deal worse than I've ever wanted it yet, before I go into such
rascally business with you.  Don't you know that we might as well knock
these parties down on the street, and take the money out of their
pockets?"

"They have come on," answered Rogers, "from Portland to see you.  I
expected them some weeks ago, but they disappointed me.  They arrived
on the Circassian last night; they expected to have got in five days
ago, but the passage was very stormy."

"Where are they?" asked Lapham, with helpless irrelevance, and feeling
himself somehow drifted from his moorings by Rogers's shipping
intelligence.

"They are at Young's. I told them we would call upon them after dinner
this evening; they dine late."

"Oh, you did, did you?" asked Lapham, trying to drop another anchor for
a fresh clutch on his underlying principles.  "Well, now, you go and
tell them that I said I wouldn't come."

"Their stay is limited," remarked Rogers.  "I mentioned this evening
because they were not certain they could remain over another night.
But if to-morrow would suit you better----"

"Tell 'em I shan't come at all," roared Lapham, as much in terror as
defiance, for he felt his anchor dragging.  "Tell 'em I shan't come at
all! Do you understand that?"

"I don't see why you should stickle as to the matter of going to them,"
said Rogers; "but if you think it will be better to have them approach
you, I suppose I can bring them to you."

"No, you can't! I shan't let you! I shan't see them! I shan't have
anything to do with them.  NOW do you understand?"

"I inferred from our last interview," persisted Rogers, unmoved by all
this violent demonstration of Lapham's, "that you wished to meet these
parties.  You told me that you would give me time to produce them; and
I have promised them that you would meet them; I have committed myself."

It was true that Lapham had defied Rogers to bring on his men, and had
implied his willingness to negotiate with them.  That was before he had
talked the matter over with his wife, and perceived his moral
responsibility in it; even she had not seen this at once.  He could not
enter into this explanation with Rogers; he could only say, "I said I'd
give you twenty-four hours to prove yourself a liar, and you did it.  I
didn't say twenty-four days."

"I don't see the difference," returned Rogers.  "The parties are here
now, and that proves that I was acting in good faith at the time.
There has been no change in the posture of affairs.  You don't know now
any more than you knew then that the G. L. & P. is going to want the
property.  If there's any difference, it's in favour of the Road's
having changed its mind."

There was some sense in this, and Lapham felt it--felt it only too
eagerly, as he recognised the next instant.

Rogers went on quietly: "You're not obliged to sell to these parties
when you meet them; but you've allowed me to commit myself to them by
the promise that you would talk with them."

"'Twan't a promise," said Lapham.

"It was the same thing; they have come out from England on my guaranty
that there was such and such an opening for their capital; and now what
am I to say to them?  It places me in a ridiculous position." Rogers
urged his grievance calmly, almost impersonally, making his appeal to
Lapham's sense of justice.  "I CAN'T go back to those parties and tell
them you won't see them.  It's no answer to make.  They've got a right
to know why you won't see them."

"Very well, then!" cried Lapham; "I'll come and TELL them why.  Who
shall I ask for? When shall I be there?"

"At eight o'clock, please," said Rogers, rising, without apparent alarm
at his threat, if it was a threat.  "And ask for me; I've taken a room
at the hotel for the present."

"I won't keep you five minutes when I get there," said Lapham; but he
did not come away till ten o'clock.

It appeared to him as if the very devil was in it.  The Englishmen
treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff, and talked
on as though it were merely the opening of the negotiation.  When he
became plain with them in his anger, and told them why he would not
sell, they seemed to have been prepared for this as a stroke of
business, and were ready to meet it.

"Has this fellow," he demanded, twisting his head in the direction of
Rogers, but disdaining to notice him otherwise, "been telling you that
it's part of my game to say this? Well, sir, I can tell you, on my
side, that there isn't a slipperier rascal unhung in America than
Milton K. Rogers!"

The Englishmen treated this as a piece of genuine American humour, and
returned to the charge with unabated courage.  They owned now, that a
person interested with them had been out to look at the property, and
that they were satisfied with the appearance of things.  They developed
further the fact that they were not acting solely, or even principally,
in their own behalf, but were the agents of people in England who had
projected the colonisation of a sort of community on the spot, somewhat
after the plan of other English dreamers, and that they were satisfied,
from a careful inspection, that the resources and facilities were those
best calculated to develop the energy and enterprise of the proposed
community.  They were prepared to meet Mr. Lapham--Colonel, they begged
his pardon, at the instance of Rogers--at any reasonable figure, and
were quite willing to assume the risks he had pointed out.  Something
in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth
below their speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked
again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them.  He had
thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen
them--or thought he had seen them--his accomplices, ready to betray the
interests of which they went on to speak with a certain comfortable
jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his show of integrity.
It was a deeper game than Lapham was used to, and he sat looking with a
sort of admiration from one Englishman to the other, and then to
Rogers, who maintained an exterior of modest neutrality, and whose air
said, "I have brought you gentlemen together as the friend of all
parties, and I now leave you to settle it among yourselves.  I ask
nothing, and expect nothing, except the small sum which shall accrue to
me after the discharge of my obligations to Colonel Lapham."

While Rogers's presence expressed this, one of the Englishmen was
saying, "And if you have any scruple in allowin' us to assume this
risk, Colonel Lapham, perhaps you can console yourself with the fact
that the loss, if there is to be any, will fall upon people who are
able to bear it--upon an association of rich and charitable people.
But we're quite satisfied there will be no loss," he added savingly.
"All you have to do is to name your price, and we will do our best to
meet it."

There was nothing in the Englishman's sophistry very shocking to
Lapham.  It addressed itself in him to that easy-going, not evilly
intentioned, potential immorality which regards common property as
common prey, and gives us the most corrupt municipal governments under
the sun--which makes the poorest voter, when he has tricked into place,
as unscrupulous in regard to others' money as an hereditary prince.
Lapham met the Englishman's eye, and with difficulty kept himself from
winking.  Then he looked away, and tried to find out where he stood, or
what he wanted to do.  He could hardly tell.  He had expected to come
into that room and unmask Rogers, and have it over.  But he had
unmasked Rogers without any effect whatever, and the play had only
begun.  He had a whimsical and sarcastic sense of its being very
different from the plays at the theatre.  He could not get up and go
away in silent contempt; he could not tell the Englishmen that he
believed them a pair of scoundrels and should have nothing to do with
them; he could no longer treat them as innocent dupes.  He remained
baffled and perplexed, and the one who had not spoken hitherto
remarked--

"Of course we shan't 'aggle about a few pound, more or less.  If
Colonel Lapham's figure should be a little larger than ours, I've no
doubt 'e'll not be too 'ard upon us in the end."

Lapham appreciated all the intent of this subtle suggestion, and
understood as plainly as if it had been said in so many words, that if
they paid him a larger price, it was to be expected that a certain
portion of the purchase-money was to return to their own hands.  Still
he could not move; and it seemed to him that he could not speak.

"Ring that bell, Mr. Rogers," said the Englishman who had last spoken,
glancing at the annunciator button in the wall near Rogers's head, "and
'ave up something 'of, can't you? I should like TO wet me w'istle, as
you say 'ere, and Colonel Lapham seems to find it rather dry work."

Lapham jumped to his feet, and buttoned his overcoat about him.  He
remembered with terror the dinner at Corey's where he had disgraced and
betrayed himself, and if he went into this thing at all, he was going
into it sober.  "I can't stop," he said, "I must be going."

"But you haven't given us an answer yet, Mr. Lapham," said the first
Englishman with a successful show of dignified surprise.

"The only answer I can give you now is, NO," said Lapham.  "If you want
another, you must let me have time to think it over."

"But 'ow much time?" said the other Englishman.  "We're pressed for
time ourselves, and we hoped for an answer--'oped for a hanswer," he
corrected himself, "at once.  That was our understandin' with Mr.
Rogers."

"I can't let you know till morning, anyway," said Lapham, and he went
out, as his custom often was, without any parting salutation.  He
thought Rogers might try to detain him; but Rogers had remained seated
when the others got to their feet, and paid no attention to his
departure.

He walked out into the night air, every pulse throbbing with the strong
temptation.  He knew very well those men would wait, and gladly wait,
till the morning, and that the whole affair was in his hands.  It made
him groan in spirit to think that it was.  If he had hoped that some
chance might take the decision from him, there was no such chance, in
the present or future, that he could see.  It was for him alone to
commit this rascality--if it was a rascality--or not.

He walked all the way home, letting one car after another pass him on
the street, now so empty of other passing, and it was almost eleven
o'clock when he reached home.  A carriage stood before his house, and
when he let himself in with his key, he heard talking in the
family-room. It came into his head that Irene had got back
unexpectedly, and that the sight of her was somehow going to make it
harder for him; then he thought it might be Corey, come upon some
desperate pretext to see Penelope; but when he opened the door he saw,
with a certain absence of surprise, that it was Rogers.  He was
standing with his back to the fireplace, talking to Mrs. Lapham, and he
had been shedding tears; dry tears they seemed, and they had left a
sort of sandy, glistening trace on his cheeks.  Apparently he was not
ashamed of them, for the expression with which he met Lapham was that
of a man making a desperate appeal in his own cause, which was
identical with that of humanity, if not that of justice.

"I some expected," began Rogers, "to find you here----"

"No, you didn't," interrupted Lapham; "you wanted to come here and make
a poor mouth to Mrs. Lapham before I got home."

"I knew that Mrs. Lapham would know what was going on," said Rogers
more candidly, but not more virtuously, for that he could not, "and I
wished her to understand a point that I hadn't put to you at the hotel,
and that I want you should consider.  And I want you should consider me
a little in this business too; you're not the only one that's
concerned, I tell you, and I've been telling Mrs. Lapham that it's my
one chance; that if you don't meet me on it, my wife and children will
be reduced to beggary."

"So will mine," said Lapham, "or the next thing to it."

"Well, then, I want you to give me this chance to get on my feet again.
You've no right to deprive me of it; it's unchristian.  In our dealings
with each other we should be guided by the Golden Rule, as I was saying
to Mrs. Lapham before you came in.  I told her that if I knew myself, I
should in your place consider the circumstances of a man in mine, who
had honourably endeavoured to discharge his obligations to me, and had
patiently borne my undeserved suspicions.  I should consider that man's
family, I told Mrs. Lapham."

"Did you tell her that if I went in with you and those fellows, I
should be robbing the people who trusted them?"

"I don't see what you've got to do with the people that sent them here.
They are rich people, and could bear it if it came to the worst.  But
there's no likelihood, now, that it will come to the worst; you can see
yourself that the Road has changed its mind about buying.  And here am
I without a cent in the world; and my wife is an invalid.  She needs
comforts, she needs little luxuries, and she hasn't even the
necessaries; and you want to sacrifice her to a mere idea! You don't
know in the first place that the Road will ever want to buy; and if it
does, the probability is that with a colony like that planted on its
line, it would make very different terms from what it would with you or
me.  These agents are not afraid, and their principals are rich people;
and if there was any loss, it would be divided up amongst them so that
they wouldn't any of them feel it."

Lapham stole a troubled glance at his wife, and saw that there was no
help in her.  Whether she was daunted and confused in her own
conscience by the outcome, so evil and disastrous, of the reparation to
Rogers which she had forced her husband to make, or whether her
perceptions had been blunted and darkened by the appeals which Rogers
had now used, it would be difficult to say.  Probably there was a
mixture of both causes in the effect which her husband felt in her, and
from which he turned, girding himself anew, to Rogers.

"I have no wish to recur to the past," continued Rogers, with growing
superiority.  "You have shown a proper spirit in regard to that, and
you have done what you could to wipe it out."

"I should think I had," said Lapham.  "I've used up about a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars trying."

"Some of my enterprises," Rogers admitted, "have been unfortunate,
seemingly; but I have hopes that they will yet turn out well--in time.
I can't understand why you should be so mindful of others now, when you
showed so little regard for me then.  I had come to your aid at a time
when you needed help, and when you got on your feet you kicked me out
of the business.  I don't complain, but that is the fact; and I had to
begin again, after I had supposed myself settled in life, and establish
myself elsewhere."

Lapham glanced again at his wife; her head had fallen; he could see
that she was so rooted in her old remorse for that questionable act of
his, amply and more than fully atoned for since, that she was helpless,
now in the crucial moment, when he had the utmost need of her insight.
He had counted upon her; he perceived now that when he had thought it
was for him alone to decide, he had counted upon her just spirit to
stay his own in its struggle to be just.  He had not forgotten how she
held out against him only a little while ago, when he asked her whether
he might not rightfully sell in some such contingency as this; and it
was not now that she said or even looked anything in favour of Rogers,
but that she was silent against him, which dismayed Lapham.  He
swallowed the lump that rose in his throat, the self-pity, the pity for
her, the despair, and said gently, "I guess you better go to bed,
Persis.  It's pretty late."

She turned towards the door, when Rogers said, with the obvious
intention of detaining her through her curiosity--

"But I let that pass.  And I don't ask now that you should sell to
these men."

Mrs. Lapham paused, irresolute.

"What are you making this bother for, then?" demanded Lapham.  "What DO
you want?"

"What I've been telling your wife here.  I want you should sell to me.
I don't say what I'm going to do with the property, and you will not
have an iota of responsibility, whatever happens."

Lapham was staggered, and he saw his wife's face light up with eager
question.

"I want that property," continued Rogers, "and I've got the money to
buy it.  What will you take for it? If it's the price you're standing
out for----"

"Persis," said Lapham, "go to bed," and he gave her a look that meant
obedience for her.  She went out of the door, and left him with his
tempter.

"If you think I'm going to help you whip the devil round the stump,
you're mistaken in your man, Milton Rogers," said Lapham, lighting a
cigar.  "As soon as I sold to you, you would sell to that other pair of
rascals.  I smelt 'em out in half a minute."

"They are Christian gentlemen," said Rogers.  "But I don't purpose
defending them; and I don't purpose telling you what I shall or shall
not do with the property when it is in my hands again.  The question
is, Will you sell, and, if so, what is your figure? You have got
nothing whatever to do with it after you've sold."

It was perfectly true.  Any lawyer would have told him the same.  He
could not help admiring Rogers for his ingenuity, and every selfish
interest of his nature joined with many obvious duties to urge him to
consent.  He did not see why he should refuse.  There was no longer a
reason.  He was standing out alone for nothing, any one else would say.
He smoked on as if Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before
the fire as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the mantel,
and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face on either side.
But at last he said, "Well?"

"Well," answered Lapham, "you can't expect me to give you an answer
to-night, any more than before.  You know that what you've said now
hasn't changed the thing a bit.  I wish it had.  The Lord knows, I want
to be rid of the property fast enough." "Then why don't you sell to me?
Can't you see that you will not be responsible for what happens after
you have sold?"

"No, I can't see that; but if I can by morning, I'll sell."

"Why do you expect to know any better by morning?  You're wasting time
for nothing!" cried Rogers, in his disappointment.  "Why are you so
particular? When you drove me out of the business you were not so very
particular."

Lapham winced.  It was certainly ridiculous for man who had once so
selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling now about the
rights of others.

"I guess nothing's going to happen overnight," he answered sullenly.
"Anyway, I shan't say what I shall do till morning."

"What time can I see you in the morning?"

"Half-past nine."

Rogers buttoned his coat, and went out of the room without another
word.  Lapham followed him to close the street-door after him.

His wife called down to him from above as he approached the room again,
"Well?"

"I've told him I'd let him know in the morning."

"Want I should come down and talk with you?"

"No," answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his isolation
brought, "you couldn't do any good." He went in and shut the door, and
by and by his wife heard him begin walking up and down; and then the
rest of the night she lay awake and listened to him walking up and
down.  But when the first light whitened the window, the words of the
Scripture came into her mind: "And there wrestled a man with him until
the breaking of the day.... And he said, Let me go, for the day
breaketh.  And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."

She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised his dull
eyes after the first silence, and said, "I don't know what I'm going to
say to Rogers."

She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she saw her
husband when she followed him with her eyes from the window, drag
heavily down toward the corner, where he was to take, the horse-car.

He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found his
letters already on his table.  There was one, long and
official-looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and
Lapham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the offer of
the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills.  But he went
mechanically through the verification of his prophetic fear, which was
also his sole hope, and then sat looking blankly at it.

Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham handed him the
letter.  He must have taken it all in at a glance, and seen the
impossibility of negotiating any further now, even with victims so
pliant and willing as those Englishmen.

"You've ruined me!" Rogers broke out.  "I haven't a cent left in the
world! God help my poor wife!"

He went out, and Lapham remained staring at the door which closed upon
him.  This was his reward for standing firm for right and justice to
his own destruction: to feel like a thief and a murderer.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Silas makes a last-ditch attempt to unite with the West Virginia paint company. They are friendly and willing to join with Silas if he can back them with enough capital to develop their enterprise. Silas cannot raise enough money, however, until Rogers presents the English agents, who offer Silas a sufficient sum for the mills even after he tells them of the situation; they are merely representatives for a group of wealthy English people and do not care how they spend the settlers' money. Not giving the agents an answer, Silas returns home and finds Rogers there trying to convince Persis that the mills must be sold to save his family from poverty; if the mills are sold at the price the English offer, Rogers will be able to completely repay Silas and have enough money to take care of his family. Rogers has muddled Persis' mind to the point that she cannot help Silas make a decision when Rogers offers to buy the mills from Silas to relieve him of the responsibility of selling to the English. Lapham paces the floor all night trying to decide what to do. Going to his office the next morning, he finds that the railroad's offer has come through. When Rogers arrives, he shows the letter to him, indicating that he will not sell to the English. "You've ruined me!" Rogers cries. "I haven't a cent left in the world! God help my poor wife!" This was Silas' reward for standing firm for right and justice to his own destruction; to feel like a thief and murderer, Howells comments.


prompt:
Chapter: LATER in the forenoon came the despatch from the West Virginians in New
York, saying their brother assented to their agreement; and it now
remained for Lapham to fulfil his part of it.  He was ludicrously far
from able to do this; and unless he could get some extension of time
from them, he must lose this chance, his only chance, to retrieve
himself.  He spent the time in a desperate endeavour to raise the
money, but he had not raised the half of it when the banks closed.
With shame in his heart he went to Bellingham, from whom he had parted
so haughtily, and laid his plan before him.  He could not bring himself
to ask Bellingham's help, but he told him what he proposed to do.
Bellingham pointed out that the whole thing was an experiment, and that
the price asked was enormous, unless a great success were morally
certain.  He advised delay, he advised prudence; he insisted that
Lapham ought at least to go out to Kanawha Falls, and see the mines and
works before he put any such sum into the development of the enterprise.

"That's all well enough," cried Lapham; "but if I don't clinch this
offer within twenty-four hours, they'll withdraw it, and go into the
market; and then where am I?"

"Go on and see them again," said Bellingham.  "They can't be so
peremptory as that with you.  They must give you time to look at what
they want to sell.  If it turns out what you hope, then--I'll see what
can be done.  But look into it thoroughly."

"Well!" cried Lapham, helplessly submitting.  He took out his watch,
and saw that he had forty minutes to catch the four o'clock train.  He
hurried back to his office, and put together some papers preparatory to
going, and despatched a note by his boy to Mrs. Lapham saying that he
was starting for New York, and did not know just when he should get
back.

The early spring day was raw and cold.  As he went out through the
office he saw the clerks at work with their street-coats and hats on;
Miss Dewey had her jacket dragged up on her shoulders, and looked
particularly comfortless as she operated her machine with her red
fingers.  "What's up?" asked Lapham, stopping a moment.

"Seems to be something the matter with the steam," she answered, with
the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so many pretty women who have
to work for a living.

"Well, take your writer into my room.  There's a fire in the stove
there," said Lapham, passing out.

Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office.  She had passed
the day in a passion of self-reproach, gradually mounting from the
mental numbness in which he had left her, and now she could wait no
longer to tell him that she saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of
trial and left him to bear it alone.  She wondered at herself in shame
and dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as to the
real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could have let him
hoodwink her so, even for a moment.  It astounded her that such a thing
should have happened, for if there was any virtue upon which this good
woman prided herself, in which she thought herself superior to her
husband, it was her instant and steadfast perception of right and
wrong, and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt.  But she
had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in his
own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided herself was the
thing that had played her false; that she had kept her mind so long
upon that old wrong which she believed her husband had done this man
that she could not detach it, but clung to the thought of reparation
for it when she ought to have seen that he was proposing a piece of
roguery as the means.  The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him
if he decided against him had been more to her apprehension than the
harm he might do if he decided for him.  But now she owned her
limitations to herself, and above everything in the world she wished
the man whom her conscience had roused and driven on whither her
intelligence had not followed, to do right, to do what he felt to be
right, and nothing else.  She admired and revered him for going beyond
her, and she wished to tell him that she did not know what he had
determined to do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and
would gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.

She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year, and her
heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her there, and thought of
the early days when she knew as much about the paint as he did; she
wished that those days were back again.  She saw Corey at his desk, and
she could not bear to speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need
not recognise him, and pushed on to Lapham's room, and opening the door
without knocking, shut it behind her.

Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment that her husband
was not there.  Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating
a typewriter.  She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the
scant attention which such young women often bestow upon people not
personally interesting to them.  It vexed the wife that any one else
should seem to be helping her husband about business that she had once
been so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl's
indifference to her presence.  Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one
corner, and Lapham's office coat, looking intensely like him to his
wife's familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs.
Lapham liked even less than the girl's good looks this domestication of
her garments in her husband's office.  She began to ask herself
excitedly why he should be away from his office when she happened to
come; and she had not the strength at the moment to reason herself out
of her unreasonableness.

"When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?" she sharply asked of
the girl.

"I couldn't say exactly," replied the girl, without looking round.

"Has he been out long?"

"I don't know as I noticed," said the girl, looking up at the clock,
without looking at Mrs. Lapham.  She went on working her machine.

"Well, I can't wait any longer," said the wife abruptly.  "When Colonel
Lapham comes in, you please tell him Mrs. Lapham wants to see him."

The girl started to her feet and turned toward Mrs. Lapham with a red
and startled face, which she did not lift to confront her.
"Yes--yes--I will," she faltered.

The wife went home with a sense of defeat mixed with an irritation
about this girl which she could not quell or account for.  She found
her husband's message, and it seemed intolerable that he should have
gone to New York without seeing her; she asked herself in vain what the
mysterious business could be that took him away so suddenly.  She said
to herself that he was neglecting her; he was leaving her out a little
too much; and in demanding of herself why he had never mentioned that
girl there in his office, she forgot how much she had left herself out
of his business life.  That was another curse of their prosperity.
Well, she was glad the prosperity was going; it had never been
happiness.  After this she was going to know everything as she used.

She tried to dismiss the whole matter till Lapham returned; and if
there had been anything for her to do in that miserable house, as she
called it in her thought, she might have succeeded.  But again the
curse was on her; there was nothing to do; and the looks of that girl
kept coming back to her vacancy, her disoccupation.  She tried to make
herself something to do, but that beauty, which she had not liked,
followed her amid the work of overhauling the summer clothing, which
Irene had seen to putting away in the fall.  Who was the thing, anyway?
It was very strange, her being there; why did she jump up in that
frightened way when Mrs. Lapham had named herself?

After dark, that evening, when the question had worn away its poignancy
from mere iteration, a note for Mrs. Lapham was left at the door by a
messenger who said there was no answer.  "A note for me?" she said,
staring at the unknown, and somehow artificial-looking, handwriting of
the superscription.  Then she opened it and read: "Ask your husband
about his lady copying-clerk.  A Friend and Well-wisher," who signed
the note, gave no other name.

Mrs. Lapham sat helpless with it in her hand.  Her brain reeled; she
tried to fight the madness off; but before Lapham came back the second
morning, it had become, with lessening intervals of sanity and release,
a demoniacal possession.  She passed the night without sleep, without
rest, in the frenzy of the cruellest of the passions, which covers with
shame the unhappy soul it possesses, and murderously lusts for the
misery of its object.  If she had known where to find her husband in
New York, she would have followed him; she waited his return in an
ecstasy of impatience.  In the morning he came back, looking spent and
haggard.  She saw him drive up to the door, and she ran to let him in
herself.

"Who is that girl you've got in your office, Silas Lapham?" she
demanded, when her husband entered.

"Girl in my office?"

"Yes! Who is she? What is she doing there?"

"Why, what have you heard about her?"

"Never you mind what I've heard.  Who is she? IS IT MRS. M. THAT YOU
GAVE THAT MONEY TO? I want to know who she is! I want to know what a
respectable man, with grown-up girls of his own, is doing with such a
looking thing as that in his office? I want to know how long she's been
there? I want to know what she's there at all for?"

He had mechanically pushed her before him into the long, darkened
parlour, and he shut himself in there with her now, to keep the
household from hearing her lifted voice.  For a while he stood
bewildered, and could not have answered if he would, and then he would
not.  He merely asked, "Have I ever accused you of anything wrong,
Persis?"

"You no need to!" she answered furiously, placing herself against the
closed door.

"Did you ever know me to do anything out of the way?"

"That isn't what I asked you."

"Well, I guess you may find out about that girl yourself.  Get away
from the door."

"I won't get away from the door."

She felt herself set lightly aside, and her husband opened the door and
went out.  "I WILL find out about her," she screamed after him.  "I'll
find out, and I'll disgrace you.  I'll teach you how to treat me----"

The air blackened round her: she reeled to the sofa and then she found
herself waking from a faint.  She did not know how long she had lain
there, she did not care.  In a moment her madness came whirling back
upon her.  She rushed up to his room; it was empty; the closet-doors
stood ajar and the drawers were open; he must have packed a bag hastily
and fled.  She went out and wandered crazily up and down till she found
a hack.  She gave the driver her husband's business address, and told
him to drive there as fast as he could; and three times she lowered the
window to put her head out and ask him if he could not hurry.  A
thousand things thronged into her mind to support her in her evil will.
She remembered how glad and proud that man had been to marry her, and
how everybody said she was marrying beneath her when she took him.  She
remembered how good she had always been to him, how perfectly devoted,
slaving early and late to advance him, and looking out for his
interests in all things, and sparing herself in nothing.  If it had not
been for her, he might have been driving stage yet; and since their
troubles had begun, the troubles which his own folly and imprudence had
brought on them, her conduct had been that of a true and faithful wife.
Was HE the sort of man to be allowed to play her false with impunity?
She set her teeth and drew her breath sharply through them when she
thought how willingly she had let him befool her, and delude her about
that memorandum of payments to Mrs. M., because she loved him so much,
and pitied him for his cares and anxieties.  She recalled his
confusion, his guilty looks.

She plunged out of the carriage so hastily when she reached the office
that she did not think of paying the driver; and he had to call after
her when she had got half-way up the stairs.  Then she went straight to
Lapham's room, with outrage in her heart.  There was again no one there
but that type-writer girl; she jumped to her feet in a fright, as Mrs.
Lapham dashed the door to behind her and flung up her veil.

The two women confronted each other.

"Why, the good land!" cried Mrs. Lapham, "ain't you Zerrilla Millon?"

"I--I'm married," faltered the girl "My name's Dewey, now."

"You're Jim Millon's daughter, anyway.  How long have you been here?"

"I haven't been here regularly; I've been here off and on ever since
last May."

"Where's your mother?"

"She's here--in Boston."

Mrs. Lapham kept her eyes on the girl, but she dropped, trembling, into
her husband's chair, and a sort of amaze and curiosity were in her
voice instead of the fury she had meant to put there.

"The Colonel," continued Zerrilla, "he's been helping us, and he's got
me a type-writer, so that I can help myself a little.  Mother's doing
pretty well now; and when Hen isn't around we can get along."

"That your husband?"

"I never wanted to marry him; but he promised to try to get something
to do on shore; and mother was all for it, because he had a little
property then, and I thought may be I'd better.  But it's turned out
just as I said and if he don't stay away long enough this time to let
me get the divorce,--he's agreed to it, time and again,--I don't know
what we're going to do." Zerrilla's voice fell, and the trouble which
she could keep out of her face usually, when she was comfortably warmed
and fed and prettily dressed, clouded it in the presence of a
sympathetic listener.  "I saw it was you, when you came in the other
day," she went on; "but you didn't seem to know me.  I suppose the
Colonel's told you that there's a gentleman going to marry me--Mr.
Wemmel's his name--as soon as I get the divorce; but sometimes I'm
completely discouraged; it don't seem as if I ever could get it."

Mrs. Lapham would not let her know that she was ignorant of the fact
attributed to her knowledge.  She remained listening to Zerrilla, and
piecing out the whole history of her presence there from the facts of
the past, and the traits of her husband's character.  One of the things
she had always had to fight him about was that idea of his that he was
bound to take care of Jim Millon's worthless wife and her child because
Millon had got the bullet that was meant for him.  It was a perfect
superstition of his; she could not beat it out of him; but she had made
him promise the last time he had done anything for that woman that it
should BE the last time.  He had then got her a little house in one of
the fishing ports, where she could take the sailors to board and wash
for, and earn an honest living if she would keep straight.  That was
five or six years ago, and Mrs. Lapham had heard nothing of Mrs. Millon
since; she had heard quite enough of her before; and had known her idle
and baddish ever since she was the worst little girl at school in
Lumberville, and all through her shameful girlhood, and the married
days which she had made so miserable to the poor fellow who had given
her his decent name and a chance to behave herself.  Mrs. Lapham had no
mercy on Moll Millon, and she had quarrelled often enough with her
husband for befriending her.  As for the child, if the mother would put
Zerrilla out with some respectable family, that would be ONE thing; but
as long as she kept Zerrilla with her, she was against letting her
husband do anything for either of them.  He had done ten times as much
for them now as he had any need to, and she had made him give her his
solemn word that he would do no more.  She saw now that she was wrong
to make him give it, and that he must have broken it again and again
for the reason that he had given when she once scolded him for throwing
away his money on that hussy--

"When I think of Jim Millon, I've got to; that's all."

She recalled now that whenever she had brought up the subject of Mrs.
Millon and her daughter, he had seemed shy of it, and had dropped it
with some guess that they were getting along now.  She wondered that
she had not thought at once of Mrs. Millon when she saw that memorandum
about Mrs. M.; but the woman had passed so entirely out of her life,
that she had never dreamt of her in connection with it.  Her husband
had deceived her, yet her heart was no longer hot against him, but
rather tenderly grateful that his deceit was in this sort, and not in
that other.  All cruel and shameful doubt of him went out of it.  She
looked at this beautiful girl, who had blossomed out of her knowledge
since she saw her last, and she knew that she was only a blossomed
weed, of the same worthless root as her mother, and saved, if saved,
from the same evil destiny, by the good of her father in her; but so
far as the girl and her mother were concerned, Mrs. Lapham knew that
her husband was to blame for nothing but his wilful, wrong-headed,
kind-heartedness, which her own exactions had turned into deceit.  She
remained a while, questioning the girl quietly about herself and her
mother, and then, with a better mind towards Zerrilla, at least, than
she had ever had before, she rose up and went out.  There must have
been some outer hint of the exhaustion in which the subsidence of her
excitement had left her within, for before she had reached the head of
the stairs, Corey came towards her.

"Can I be of any use to you, Mrs. Lapham? The Colonel was here just
before you came in, on his way to the train."

"Yes,--yes. I didn't know--I thought perhaps I could catch him here.
But it don't matter.  I wish you would let some one go with me to get a
carriage," she begged feebly.

"I'll go with you myself," said the young fellow, ignoring the
strangeness in her manner.  He offered her his arm in the twilight of
the staircase, and she was glad to put her trembling hand through it,
and keep it there till he helped her into a hack which he found for
her.  He gave the driver her direction, and stood looking a little
anxiously at her.

"I thank you; I am all right now," she said, and he bade the man drive
on.

When she reached home she went to bed, spent with the tumult of her
emotions and sick with shame and self-reproach.  She understood now, as
clearly as if he had told her in as many words, that if he had
befriended those worthless jades--the Millons characterised themselves
so, even to Mrs. Lapham's remorse--secretly and in defiance of her, it
was because he dreaded her blame, which was so sharp and bitter, for
what he could not help doing.  It consoled her that he had defied her,
deceived her; when he came back she should tell him that; and then it
flashed upon her that she did not know where he was gone, or whether he
would ever come again.  If he never came, it would be no more than she
deserved; but she sent for Penelope, and tried to give herself hopes of
escape from this just penalty.

Lapham had not told his daughter where he was going; she had heard him
packing his bag, and had offered to help him; but he had said he could
do it best, and had gone off, as he usually did, without taking leave
of any one.

"What were you talking about so loud, down in the parlour," she asked
her mother, "just before he came up. Is there any new trouble?"

"No; it was nothing."

"I couldn't tell.  Once I thought you were laughing." She went about,
closing the curtains on account of her mother's headache, and doing
awkwardly and imperfectly the things that Irene would have done so
skilfully for her comfort.

The day wore away to nightfall, and then Mrs. Lapham said she MUST
know.  Penelope said there was no one to ask; the clerks would all be
gone home, and her mother said yes, there was Mr. Corey; they could
send and ask him; he would know.

The girl hesitated.  "Very well," she said, then, scarcely above a
whisper, and she presently laughed huskily.  "Mr. Corey seems fated to
come in, somewhere.  I guess it's a Providence, mother."

She sent off a note, inquiring whether he could tell her just where her
father had expected to be that night; and the answer came quickly back
that Corey did not know, but would look up the book-keeper and inquire.
This office brought him in person, an hour later, to tell Penelope that
the Colonel was to be at Lapham that night and next day.

"He came in from New York, in a great hurry, and rushed off as soon as
he could pack his bag," Penelope explained, "and we hadn't a chance to
ask him where he was to be to-night. And mother wasn't very well,
and----"

"I thought she wasn't looking well when she was at the office to-day.
And so I thought I would come rather than send," Corey explained in his
turn.

"Oh, thank you!"

"If there is anything I can do--telegraph Colonel Lapham, or anything?"

"Oh no, thank you; mother's better now.  She merely wanted to be sure
where he was."

He did not offer to go, upon this conclusion of his business, but hoped
he was not keeping her from her mother.  She thanked him once again,
and said no, that her mother was much better since she had had a cup of
tea; and then they looked at each other, and without any apparent
exchange of intelligence he remained, and at eleven o'clock he was
still there.  He was honest in saying he did not know it was so late;
but he made no pretence of being sorry, and she took the blame to
herself.

"I oughtn't to have let you stay," she said.  "But with father gone,
and all that trouble hanging over us----"

She was allowing him to hold her hand a moment at the door, to which
she had followed him.

"I'm so glad you could let me!" he said, "and I want to ask you now
when I may come again.  But if you need me, you'll----"

A sharp pull at the door-bell outside made them start asunder, and at a
sign from Penelope, who knew that the maids were abed by this time, he
opened it.

"Why, Irene!" shrieked the girl.

Irene entered with the hackman, who had driven her unheard to the door,
following with her small bags, and kissed her sister with resolute
composure.  "That's all," she said to the hackman.  "I gave my checks
to the expressman," she explained to Penelope.

Corey stood helpless.  Irene turned upon him, and gave him her hand.
"How do you do, Mr. Corey?" she said, with a courage that sent a thrill
of admiring gratitude through him.  "Where's mamma, Pen? Papa gone to
bed?"

Penelope faltered out some reply embodying the facts, and Irene ran up
the stairs to her mother's room.  Mrs. Lapham started up in bed at her
apparition.

"Irene Lapham."

"Uncle William thought he ought to tell me the trouble papa was in; and
did you think I was going to stay off there junketing, while you were
going through all this at home, and Pen acting so silly, too? You ought
to have been ashamed to let me stay so long! I started just as soon as
I could pack.  Did you get my despatch? I telegraphed from Springfield.
But it don't matter, now.  Here I am.  And I don't think I need have
hurried on Pen's account," she added, with an accent prophetic of the
sort of old maid she would become, if she happened not to marry.

"Did you see him?" asked her mother.  "It's the first time he's been
here since she told him he mustn't come."

"I guess it isn't the last time, by the looks," said Irene, and before
she took off her bonnet she began to undo some of Penelope's mistaken
arrangements of the room.

At breakfast, where Corey and his mother met the next morning before
his father and sisters came down, he told her, with embarrassment which
told much more, that he wished now that she would go and call upon the
Laphams.

Mrs. Corey turned a little pale, but shut her lips tight and mourned in
silence whatever hopes she had lately permitted herself.  She answered
with Roman fortitude: "Of course, if there's anything between you and
Miss Lapham, your family ought to recognise it."

"Yes," said Corey.

"You were reluctant to have me call at first, but now if the affair is
going on----"

"It is! I hope--yes, it is!"

"Then I ought to go and see her, with your sisters; and she ought to
come here and--we ought all to see her and make the matter public.  We
can't do so too soon.  It will seem as if we were ashamed if we don't."

"Yes, you are quite right, mother," said the young man gratefully, "and
I feel how kind and good you are.  I have tried to consider you in this
matter, though I don't seem to have done so; I know what your rights
are, and I wish with all my heart that I were meeting even your tastes
perfectly.  But I know you will like her when you come to know her.
It's been very hard for her every way--about her sister,--and she's
made a great sacrifice for me.  She's acted nobly."

Mrs. Corey, whose thoughts cannot always be reported, said she was sure
of it, and that all she desired was her son's happiness.

"She's been very unwilling to consider it an engagement on that
account, and on account of Colonel Lapham's difficulties.  I should
like to have you go, now, for that very reason.  I don't know just how
serious the trouble is; but it isn't a time when we can seem
indifferent."

The logic of this was not perhaps so apparent to the glasses of fifty
as to the eyes of twenty-six; but Mrs. Corey, however she viewed it,
could not allow herself to blench before the son whom she had taught
that to want magnanimity was to be less than gentlemanly.  She
answered, with what composure she could, "I will take your sisters,"
and then she made some natural inquiries about Lapham's affairs.  "Oh,
I hope it will come out all right," Corey said, with a lover's vague
smile, and left her.  When his father came down, rubbing his long hands
together, and looking aloof from all the cares of the practical world,
in an artistic withdrawal, from which his eye ranged over the
breakfast-table before he sat down, Mrs. Corey told him what she and
their son had been saying.

He laughed, with a delicate impersonal appreciation of the predicament.
"Well, Anna, you can't say but if you ever were guilty of supposing
yourself porcelain, this is a just punishment of your arrogance.  Here
you are bound by the very quality on which you've prided yourself to
behave well to a bit of earthenware who is apparently in danger of
losing the gilding that rendered her tolerable."

"We never cared for the money," said Mrs. Corey.  "You know that."

"No; and now we can't seem to care for the loss of it.  That would be
still worse.  Either horn of the dilemma gores us.  Well, we still have
the comfort we had in the beginning; we can't help ourselves; and we
should only make bad worse by trying.  Unless we can look to Tom's
inamorata herself for help."

Mrs. Corey shook her head so gloomily that her husband broke off with
another laugh.  But at the continued trouble of her face, he said,
sympathetically: "My dear, I know it's a very disagreeable affair; and
I don't think either of us has failed to see that it was so from the
beginning.  I have had my way of expressing my sense of it, and you
yours, but we have always been of the same mind about it.  We would
both have preferred to have Tom marry in his own set; the Laphams are
about the last set we could have wished him to marry into.  They ARE
uncultivated people, and so far as I have seen them, I'm not able to
believe that poverty will improve them.  Still, it may.  Let us hope
for the best, and let us behave as well as we know how.  I'm sure YOU
will behave well, and I shall try.  I'm going with you to call on Miss
Lapham.  This is a thing that can't be done by halves!"

He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in quarters.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Lapham, on Bellingham's advice, goes to New York to ask the West Virginians for more time to raise the money. Mrs. Lapham, who feels remorse in not being able to help her husband make his decision in the English matter, attempts to visit him at his office for the first time in a year. She finds him gone and his typist in his office. When she returns home, she receives an anonymous note telling her to ask her husband who his typist is. This leads her to think Silas has been keeping a mistress; she has deduced that the girl could be "Mrs. M." -- the name on the scrap of paper she found after Silas had torn the "Wm. M." payment slip apart. In a rage, she confronts him with this question when he returns. He does not answers her question and leaves for the town of Lapham without her knowing it. Persis goes to his office only to discover that the typist is Zerrilla Millon Dewey, the daughter of the man who saved her husband's life. The misunderstanding resolved, she returns home to spend the day in self-reproach, wondering if Silas will ever return. Finally, she sends a note to Tom Corey to discover Silas' whereabouts. Irene returns, angry that they did not inform her of the trouble sooner; she starts to help by putting the household matters in order. The next morning Tom tells his mother to visit the Laphams, indicating that he still intends to marry Penelope. The Coreys are caught in a trap. They have always said that they never cared for money. "And now we can't seem to care for the loss of it," Bromfield says. "That would be still worse."