“What is it that you can’t realize?”
“Why, that you are Elinor’s father—you are so—so young!”
“I’m forty-four years old,” Hugh answered smilingly.
“Really, Mr. Benton! Surely you have discovered an elixir of youth. I’ve met Mrs. Benton, and I can’t understand how you—oh please—forgive me—I have an abominable habit of thinking aloud.” Geraldine lowered her eyes while she waited anxiously to see what effect her thrust had taken.
“My wife is four years younger than I,” Hugh replied gravely. “You must remember that time deals more lightly with a man than it does with a woman.”
“You won’t think I’m presuming if I say that anyone would take Mrs. Benton to be many years your senior. Has she been ill?”
“No, Mrs. Benton has not been ill,” he sighed. “She is quite reserved, and a bit old-fashioned. Don’t you think it rather difficult to keep one’s youth without indulging in a few modern pleasures?”
“Indeed, I do,” Geraldine answered, and her sigh asked for understanding as she added, as though reluctantly, “and I can sympathize with you—my husband and I were—er——”
All the world—all his own world of finance and business, at least, gave Hugh Benton credit for being a clever man. It was a common expression among his club and business associates that anyone would have to get up early to put anything over on Hugh Benton. But there would have been smiles, contemptuous, tolerant, amused, could those men have seen Hugh Benton in the hands of a woman as clever as himself, cleverer by far, in her own sphere. For Hugh Benton had never lived by his wits. Geraldine DeLacy’s daily bread depended on hers. She molded him like wax. In her hands he was pliable as a child. It would have astonished even him could he have stood off in an astral body and heard himself discussing his most intimate domestic affairs with a total stranger. He did not know that Mrs. DeLacy was but satisfying her curiosity concerning the rumors she had heard of incompatibility in the Benton family, but Geraldine knew that it took her but one-half hour to discover all she wished to know.
But as he talked, becoming each minute more confidential, it seemed less and less that this beautiful woman was a stranger. It was so much to have her sitting next to him, looking at him tenderly, with eyes expressing sympathy and warmth. Her complete understanding of everything he said seemed so thorough. Her capability to grasp intuitively his innermost thoughts amazed him.