"To save myself and—you," she replied with a certain sternness. It was unlike her to put herself first in speech—she who always considered herself last.
"Narcisse, I forbid you to interfere in this affair. I forbid you to go crazily on to compromising us both."
She looked straight into his eyes. "The time has come when I must use my own judgment," said she.
And, with that, she went; he knew her, knew when it was idle to oppose her. Besides—what if she should be right? In all their years together, as children, as youths, as workers, he had always respected her judgment, because it had always been based upon a common sense clearer than his own, freer from those passions which rise from the stronger appetites of men to befog their reason, to make what they wish to be the truth seem actually the truth.
"She's wrong," he said to himself. "But she'll not do anything foolish. She's the kind that can go in safety along the wrong road, because they always keep a line of retreat open." And that reflection somewhat reassured him.
Narcisse went direct to Fosdick at his office. As there was only one caller ahead of her, she did not have long to wait in the anteroom guarded by Waller of the stealthy, glistening smile. "Mr. Fosdick is very busy this morning," explained he. It was the remark he always made to callers as he passed them along; it helped Fosdick to cut them short. "The big railway consolidation, you know?"
"No, I don't know," replied Narcisse.
"Oh—you artists! You live quite apart from our world of affairs. But I supposed news of a thing of such tremendous public benefit would have reached everybody."
Narcisse smiled faintly. She could not imagine any of these gentlemen, roosted so high and with eyes training in every direction in search of prey, occupying themselves for one instant with a thing that was a public benefit, except in the hope of changing it into a "private snap."
"It's marvelous," continued Waller, "how Fosdick and these other men of enormous wealth go on working for their fellow men when they might be taking their ease and amusing themselves."