"Yes, yes," he said wearily. She took his hand and fondled it as a child might. With all his business he was a somewhat lonely man.
"We'll see what we can do with it," he added more cheerily, in a little glow of latent gallantry that left him feeling uncomfortable and hot. Then he touched an electric button and his private secretary appeared with a bundle of notes and documents in his hand, and Cordelia slipped away triumphant.
It was her one and only financial plunge. Although Alfred Spaulding never confessed to her that the precariousness of his venture on her behalf cost him two long nights of sleeplessness, it was more successful than he or even she herself had hoped for. Out of it she made twenty-two hundred dollars.
The man of Wall Street, not unnaturally, silently braced himself for another scene with her, determined that this time she should not prevail. Perhaps she saw this, or perhaps she realized that for once sheer luck had gone with her. At any rate, to her host's surprise, and not a little to his inner satisfaction, she placed the money in her own bank and said nothing more of the matter.
CHAPTER XVII
INEFFECTUAL FLUTTERS
She prayed that night for his pure soul,
And thanked her new-found God
That he returned unscathed and whole
To that white world he trod.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
A woman's last love is always a rechauffé of her first.—"The Silver Poppy."