"I said nothing," he answered, almost choking.
Even his discomfiture escaped her, and presently she took him to the others. Her excitement was not gone, it made her wonderfully beautiful, but though he might triumph that he had caused it, he knew that she had slipped away from him. He tried in vain to master his exasperation.
Judith's thoughts were of Mather; she felt that if she could tell him what she had done, she would crush him. This was what she had hoped for: the time when she should prove that she could influence events. He had said the world would be too much for her! Perhaps now she could break that masterfulness against which she had always rebelled. And she smiled at the quiet assurance of his manner, for he had merely started a mill and built up a business, while she had all but created a Trust! It would humble him, if he but knew.
There is no need of describing the next half-hour's doings of that mixed company. Pride and sweetness, loutishness, strength, amiability, ambition, and a feeble man's weak despair, all were together in the Blanchard's parlour, and got on very badly. It is enough to say that Judith talked with Mather, looking at him from time to time with a gleam of unexpressed thought which he did not understand; that Ellis, trying to subdue a grin of fury into a suave smile, put his hands in his pockets and clenched them there; and that by this action he exposed, protruding from his vest pocket, the end of a narrow red book at which the Colonel was presently staring as if fascinated.
Now the Colonel had once been, as already stated, what the early Victorians were fond of calling a man of substance. Hence complacence to the exclusion of persistence, and a later life dominated by the achievements of youth. He ran away from college to go to the Civil War, and at the coming of peace retired on his laurels. Arduous service in the State militia brought him his title; he married, travelled, and frittered away the years until changes in the value of property brought him face to face with what might seem the unavoidable choice, either to accommodate himself to a more modest establishment, or to go to work to earn money.
Out of the seeming deadlock the Colonel's financial insight found a way. His capital, used as income, for some years more maintained him in the necessary way of life. Meanwhile he promised himself to regain his money by the simple means of the stock market, but when he came to apply the remedy, some perverseness in its workings made it fail, and to his astonishment he found himself at the end of his resources. To none of his friends might he turn for relief, for your friend who lends also lectures, and the Colonel could never bear that. Our esteemed warrior was, however, still fertile in resource, and his genius discovered a possible base of supplies. Hence the fascination exerted by the check-book which Ellis always carried about with him.
Some moralists might dub the Colonel weak for dwelling on this contemplation. Yet consistency is regarded as a virtue, and the Colonel was usually consistent in trying to get what he wanted. With his military eye still fixed on the end of the narrow red book, he drew near to Ellis and began to speak with him. Naturally, that which was in the Colonel's mind came first to his lips.
"The stock market has been flighty lately," quoth he.
So were girls, thought Ellis. "Very flighty," he said. "But that scarcely concerns you, I hope."
"Oh, no, no!" the Colonel hastily assured him. "And yet—Mr. Ellis, may I have a word with you in my study?"