h! When I read in novels how a father's
friends help the hero and heroine, succouring the widow and the
fatherless, I must smile. I recall the days of our storm and stress,
when those sleek and slippery wolves, the 'business friends' of my
father, sat round waiting for my poor distracted, gallant-hearted mother
to stumble and stagger in her struggle with those wild-cats of
investments. Wild cats! Bengal tigers were a better name for them! But
she didn't! She won out and defied the whole caboodle, as she called
them when she was roused. She won out, or I shouldn't be here now,
maybe. She was a mother fighting for her offspring, and many a shrewd
knock they had from her. And the 'business friends' slunk away and we've
never seen them since. They talk about the romance of big business. What
about the tragedy of the small business? What about the dark and dirty
meannesses of business? What about the 'business friend,' watching,
watching for the weaker ones to fall? What sort of romance is there in
battles between wolves and women, in wars without chivalry? Mercy?
Consideration for the weak and helpless? Knightly courtesy towards
women? You won't find any of them in business, I'm afraid. I remember
often sitting in the room with my book, a school-boy on his holidays,
while some smug specimen of the business-friend variety sat explaining
and domineering over my mother, who did her best to understand. Perhaps
she was difficult and stupid. It isn't every woman--or man either--who
can keep a grasp on the details of banks and railroads and cement and
ginger-beer and marine insurance and company-law and all the other
tarradiddles that were going to yield twenty per cent and didn't yield
twenty cents! I used to wonder if these men's own wives would be as
intelligent as my mother in similar circumstances. Humph! I _saw_ those
ladies in one or two instances when they were widowed and had to face
the world without a man. I was astounded. To see those proud big-bosomed
women, with their red faces and narrow hearts and silly conversation,
collapse and go down in ruin before the blasts of adversity! To see
them, who had tried in their patronizing way to get us to give up our
home and go into apartments, selling up and letting apartments
themselves! Them! They hadn't a tenth of the fight in them my little
colonial mother had, for all their big bosoms and tall brag about their
independence and the fine offers they had when they were single.