“Nonsense! Anyhow, there is one here who seems quite insensible. I have talked already with Mr. Aynesworth. He would not listen to me!”
“Ah!”
“Nevertheless,” she continued softy, “of one thing I am very sure. Every man is like every woman; he is vulnerable if you can discover the right spot and the right weapons. Mr. Aynesworth is not a woman’s man, but I fancy that he is ambitious. I thought that you might go and see him. He has rooms somewhere in Dorset Street.”
He rose to his feet. A glance at the clock reminded him of the hour.
“I will go,” he said. “I will do what I can. I think, dear,” he added, bending over her to say farewell, “that you should have been the man!”
She laughed softly.
“Am I such a failure as a woman, then?” she asked with a swift upward glance. “Don’t be foolish, Lumley. My woman will be here to dress me directly. You must really go away.”
He strode down the stairs with tingling pulses, and drove to the House, where his speech, a little florid in its rhetoric, and verbose as became the man, was nevertheless a great success.
“Quite a clever fellow, Barrington,” one of his acquaintances remarked, “when you get him away from his wife.”