"Well, I rather like you, Mr. David Thain," she whispered. "You won't be vain about it, will you, but all the financiers I have ever met have been so extraordinarily full of their money and how they made it. You are different, aren't you?"
"I am content if you find me so," he answered, with rare gallantry.
David ordered a thoroughly American luncheon, of which his guest heartily approved.
"If you Americans," she observed, "only knew how to live as well as you know how to eat, what a nation you would be!"
"We fancy that we have some ideas that way, also," he told her. "Wherein do we fail most, from your English point of view?"
"In matters of sex," the Duchess replied coolly. "You know so much more about lobster Newburg than you do about women. I suppose it is all this strenuous money-getting that is responsible for your ignorance. No one over here, you see, tries for anything very much."
"You certainly all live in a more enervating atmosphere," David admitted.
"Tell me about your younger days?" she demanded.
"There is nothing to tell in the least interesting," he assured her. "My people were poor. I was sent to Harvard with great difficulty by a relative who kept a boot store. I became a clerk in a railway office, took a fancy to the work and planned out some schemes—which came off."
"How much money have you, in plain English?" she asked.