She turned and looked at him, with a still mocking and yet a warmer light coming into her eyes. Some propulsion, not of mind, but of body, seemed to drive her involuntarily toward him—like a ship on a lee shore, she felt—as she sniffed delicately at his cigar-scented gloves, so anomalously redolent of virility, of masculinity, of something compelling and masterful, where they lay in her nervously toying fingers. She tried to laugh at herself, with chastening scorn; but she could not.
“And out of it all,” he went on, “when brokerage fees and other things are counted, we have made just three hundred and sixty-seven dollars!”
“Only that?”
“I had no more than the thirty minutes, you see, for a margin to work on!”
She pushed back her hair with a languid hand.
“But why cry over spilt milk?” she asked, wearily. Firmer and firmer, she felt, this mad fever of money-getting was taking hold on him.
“Especially when we seem about to wade knee-deep in cream!”
She made a last effort to fall in with his mood of ruthless aggression.
“Yes; what’s this you were going to open my eyes with?”
The final vestige of his clouded restraint slipped away from Durkin’s mind.