"No," said Leslie, holding her black head high. "No, not to Mr. Swayne. Why must 'congratulations' always mean 'Mister' Anybody? They don't, here. I mean you can congratulate me on coming to see reason. I know, now, that I mustn't think of marrying him."
Gwenna drew a big breath of relief.
She laid her dope-thickened brush carefully down in the tin, and clapped her little sticky hands.
"I'm so thankful," she cried childishly. "It wouldn't have done, Leslie!"
"He wasn't a quarter good enough."
"Pooh. What's that got to do with caring? Nothing," declared Leslie, tilting her loose-limbed, mauve-clad figure back on the chair that Paul Dampier had sat in, the day before the Aviation Dinner. "It's caring that counts."
"Haven't I always been saying so?" said Gwenna earnestly as she took up her brush again. "Not just because I'm a happily-married woman myself, my dear."
Here she drew herself up with the same little gesture of matronly dignity that had made Mrs. Crewe smile. It forced Leslie to bite her lips into gravity. And Paul Dampier's girl concluded innocently, "I've always known how much Love means. What's money?"
"Nothing to run down, I assure you. Money's gorgeous. Money means Power," affirmed Leslie. "Apart from the silk-stockinged aspect of it, it lets you live a much fuller life mentally and spiritually. It can make you almost everything you want to be, to yourself and to other people, Taff. It's worth almost anything to get it. But there's one thing it's not worth," said Leslie Long, really gravely: "It's not worth marrying the wrong person for."