“I have heard all about your wonderful fortune,” she said, looking at him with veneration. “It gives you a sort of halo, you know. We all speak of you as a kind of Monte Cristo. It’s a queer thing, isn’t it, the fascination of wealth?”
“I haven’t noticed that it’s done me much good up till now, so far as regards the things we were discussing,” Jacob replied, a little sadly.
“Then that must be because you are very unresponsive,” she said softly, rising to her feet and coming and standing before him. “Would you care—to dance?”
“Hadn’t I better set the gramophone going first?” Jacob suggested, with blatant lack of intuition.
She drew back a little, laughed softly, and put on a record herself. Then she held out her arms.
“Come, then, my anxious pupil,” she invited. “What do you most wish to learn, and have you any idea of the steps?”
Jacob confessed to some acquaintance with modern dancing and a knowledge at least of the steps. They danced a fox trot, and at its conclusion she shook her head at him.
“I know all about you now, Mr. Pratt,” she said. “You are an absolute fraud. You dance as well as I do.”
“But I need practice badly,” he assured her anxiously.
“I suppose—it’s really Sybil?” she asked ruefully, looking him in the eyes with a queer little smile at the corners of her lips.