“Cut out the small talk and get right down to the grand facts of life,” she said briskly. “Did I find Selsbury and affinitize him or did I not? Did I....”
He snarled at her like an angry mongrel.
“‘Did I, didn’t I’—great Moses! Do I want all that stuff? Why did you allow him to come back here?”
“Let him come back?” she said scornfully. “I made him come back! When I got him into the house, I had him like that. I knew how you’d turn up. I knew there was money here, and I was going to stay with it. It’s a funny thing about me that, of all the affinities I’ve met, noth’n’ is quite so close as money. Noth’n’ understands me better or talks more like Governor George Demosthenes.”
The man was finished. He too was a philosopher.
“Well, there’s no help for it,” he said with a groan that he could not suppress. “We’ll have to share. The old terms, mind—none of your fifty-fifty stuff. Seventy-thirty.”
“Seventy-thirty! Well, I admire cold blood! It’s fifty-fifty or nothing with me, Dan. But there ain’t anything to share.”
Here he corrected her.
“She’s paying up. I’ve given her back the cheque. If you wait half-an-hour she’ll have it cashed. Now are you satisfied? Sixty-forty?”
“Fifty-fifty!” said Heloise firmly. “You’d never forgive yourself if you gave me less.”