They were looking at each other with challenge and complicity in their eyes. His voice, his look, all the loud confident vigorous things he embodied and expressed, set her blood beating with curiosity. "I didn't know you and Rolliver were friends," she said.
"Oh JIM—" his accent verged on the protective. "Old Jim's all right. He's in Congress now. I've got to have somebody up in Washington." He had thrust his hands in his pockets, and with his head thrown back and his lips shaped to the familiar noiseless whistle, was looking slowly and discerningly about him.
Presently his eyes reverted to her face. "So this is what I helped you to get," he said. "I've always meant to run over some day and take a look. What is it they call you—a Marquise?"
She paled a little, and then flushed again. "What made you do it?" she broke out abruptly. "I've often wondered."
He laughed. "What—lend you a hand? Why, my business instinct, I suppose. I saw you were in a tight place that time I ran across you in Paris—and I hadn't any grudge against you. Fact is, I've never had the time to nurse old scores, and if you neglect 'em they die off like gold-fish." He was still composedly regarding her. "It's funny to think of your having settled down to this kind of life; I hope you've got what you wanted. This is a great place you live in."
"Yes; but I see a little too much of it. We live here most of the year." She had meant to give him the illusion of success, but some underlying community of instinct drew the confession from her lips.
"That so? Why on earth don't you cut it and come up to Paris?"
"Oh, Raymond's absorbed in the estates—and we haven't got the money.
This place eats it all up."
"Well, that sounds aristocratic; but ain't it rather out of date? When the swells are hard-up nowadays they generally chip off an heirloom." He wheeled round again to the tapestries. "There are a good many Paris seasons hanging right here on this wall."
"Yes—I know." She tried to check herself, to summon up a glittering equivocation; but his face, his voice, the very words he used, were like so many hammer-strokes demolishing the unrealities that imprisoned her. Here was some one who spoke her language, who knew her meanings, who understood instinctively all the deep-seated wants for which her acquired vocabulary had no terms; and as she talked she once more seemed to herself intelligent, eloquent and interesting.