etely as a highly energetic and elaborate avarice.
He was no doubt acquisitive and retentive and mean-spirited, but these
were merely the ugly aspects of a disposition that involved many other
factors. He was also incurably a schemer. He liked to fit things
together, to dove-tail arrangements, to devise economies, to spread
ingeniously into new fields, he had a love of organization and
contrivance as disinterested as an artist's love for the possibilities
of his medium. He would rather have made a profit of ten per cent. out
of a subtly planned shop than thirty by an unforeseen accident. He
wouldn't have cheated to get money for the world. He knew he was better
at figuring out expenditures and receipts than most people and he was as
touchy about his reputation for this kind of cleverness as any poet or
painter for his fame. Now that he had awakened to the idea that his wife
was capable of looking into and possibly even understanding his
business, he was passionately anxious to show her just how wonderfully
he had done it all, and when he perceived she was in her large,
unskilled, helpless way, intensely concerned for all the vast multitude
of incompetent or partially competent young women who floundered about
in badly paid employment in our great cities, he grasped at once at the
opportunity of recovering her lost interest and respect by doing some
brilliant feats of contrivance in that direction. Why shouldn't he? He
had long observed with a certain envy the admirable advertisement such
firms as Lever and Cadbury and Burroughs & Wellcome gained from their
ostentatiously able and generous treatment of their workpeople, and it
seemed to him conceivable that in the end it might not be at all
detrimental to his prosperity to put his hand to this long neglected
piece of social work. The Babs Wheeler business had been a real injury
in every way to the International Bread and Cake Stores and even if he
didn't ultimately go to all the lengths his wife seemed to contemplate,
he was resolved at any rate that an affair of that kind should not occur
again. The expedition to Marienbad took with it a secretary who was also
a stenographer. A particularly smart young inspector and Graper, the
staff manager, had brisk four-day holidays once or twice for
consultation purposes; Sir Isaac's rabbit-like architect was in
attendance for a week and the Harmans returned to Putney with the first
vivid greens of late March,--for the Putney Hill ho