The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Price She Paid, by David Graham Phillips

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Title: The Price She Paid

Author: David Graham Phillips

Posting Date: September 27, 2008 [EBook #457]
Release Date: March, 1996

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PRICE SHE PAID

by

David Graham Phillips

I

HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one--the end of a lifelong fraud which
never had been suspected, and never would be. With the world, with his
acquaintances and neighbors, with his wife and son and daughter, he
passed as a generous, warm-hearted, good-natured man, ready at all
times to do anything to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or
meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever thought or
done a single thing except for his own comfort. Like all intensely
selfish people who are wise, he was cheerful and amiable, because that
was the way to be healthy and happy and to have those around one
agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished them to do. He told
people, not the truth, not the unpleasant thing that might help them,
but what they wished to hear. His family lived in luxurious comfort
only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort. His wife and his
daughter dressed fashionably and went about and entertained in the
fashionable, expensive way only because that was the sort of life that
gratified his vanity. He lived to get what he wanted; he got it every
day and every hour of a life into which no rain ever fell; he died,
honored, respected, beloved, and lamented.

The clever trick he had played upon his fellow beings came very near to
discovery a few days after his death. His widow and her son and
daughter-in-law and daughter were in the living-room of the charming
house at Hanging Rock, near New York, alternating between sorrowings
over the dead man and plannings for the future. Said the widow:

"If Henry had only thought what would become of us if he were taken
away!"

"If he had saved even a small part of what he made every year from the
time he was twenty-six--fo