But the fact was Mrs. Blair took the loaves and fishes with a childlike delight which meant appreciation, certainly, but not avarice. She enjoyed her wealth, and her life, and herself, immensely and openly; and that was her charm to her husband, a man immersed in large affairs, sagacious, powerful, and without imagination. He was a cultivated man, because his forbears had been educated people, of sober, comfortable wealth; hence he had gone to college, like other young men of his class, and had traveled, and had acquired an intellectual, or rather a commercial knowledge of Art. But, until he married, every instinct was for power, and the making of money. After that, though the guiding principle remained the same, a sense of beauty did awaken in him. He never flagged in his fierce and joyous and cruel passion for getting; but he delighted in his wife--perhaps as one of his own enormous machines might have delighted in a ray of sunlight dancing across its steel shafts, and flickering through the thunderous whir of its driving-wheel. He loaded the girl he married with every luxury; almost immediately she found she had nothing left to desire--from dogs to diamonds, houses, yachts, or pictures. She, poor child, realized no deprivation in seeing every wish fulfilled, and thought herself the luckiest and the happiest woman in the world. Her money, combined with a good deal of common-sense, gave her the power to interfere helpfully in the lives of less fortunate people. She called it Philanthropy, and found playing Providence to the halt, the maimed, and the blind a really keen interest. Her impulse was always to “manage”; and so, when her husband, frowning, and perhaps a little less satisfied with himself than usual, began to talk about his sister’s affairs, Mrs. Blair was instantly interested. “Of course her husband’s death will make a difference in her income?” she said, as they went upstairs to the library. “A country minister’s salary doesn’t amount to much anyhow; but”-- “Well, she made her bed,” he interrupted sharply; “she ought to be willing to lie in it!” “Oh, yes, of course; but now the man is dead, it’s different. I know you want to do something for her, you are so generous.” He pulled her pretty ear at that, and told her she was a flattering little humbug. “What do you want, diplomat? You’ll bankrupt me yet. Am I to build a palace for Lily? Look here, I wrote that West Virginia college president to-day and told him I’d give him the money he wanted. It’s all your doing, but I get the name of a great educator.” “Oh, Robert, how good you are! I think that ought to silence the people that say you ‘grind the face of the poor.’ I saw that in the paper to-day. Beasts! and you are so generous! I tell you what I want: I want you to have them come here, your sister and the children”--