Why, for example, should Plowden be free to take things from me, and you not?"She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye.
"Unfortunately I was not asked to join your Board."He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her meditatively as he turned these words over in his mind.
"What I'm doing for Plowden," he said with slow vagueness meanwhile, "it isn't so much because he's on the Board.
He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me at a time when that meant everything in the world to me--and I don't forget things of that sort. Besides, I like him--and it pleases me to let him in for a share of my good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying myself.
Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed to let you in also for a share of that good fortune?
You think there's a difference, but I tell you it's imaginary--pure moonshine. Why, the very people whose opinion you're afraid of--what did they do themselves when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of the earth had only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about them--and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked.
I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal--Iwouldn't have them in my house--but it seems there wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in London.""Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed.
"It wasn't a nice exhibition that society made of itself--one admits that,--but it was only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets, you know.
And--I don't think I see your application, in any event.
The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis.
People ran after those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?"Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little shake of the head. "'On a business basis,'"he repeated, as if talking to himself. "They like to have things 'on a business basis.'"He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well, in a reluctant, tentative way. "I don't understand you," she remarked, blankly.
"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows, and marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy. "This is the question.
You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board.
You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden, and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke--but it had its meaning--at least to me. Now I want to ask you--if I decide to form another Company, a very small and particular Company--if I should decide to form it, I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess you know what I mean."The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of physical ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the silence which ensued.
"Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say," she observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his self-command. "Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you," she went on.
"We--we have been lagging behind unconscionably.
If you wish to please me, let us hurry forward now.
And please!--no more talk at all!"
"But just a word--you're not angry?"
She shook her head very slightly.
"And you do know that I'm your friend--your solid, twenty-four-carat friend?"After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper--"Yes--be my friend--if it amuses you,"--and led the way with precipitate steps down the winding road.
