She did look at him, calmly, coldly, without the tremor of an eyelid, without raising a hand to touch him as he stood close by, without indeed making any verbal answer. A slight shudder passed over her, visible in the twitch of her shoulders.
"It's getting cooler!" he exclaimed. "I'll fetch a wrap for you." And so hastened away, obsequious, uxorious, as he always was with her.
"But Charley never would take any counsel from anybody," resumed he presently. "He's always been tractable enough, that's true; never raised much of a disturbance until to-night—I don't see why he cut up so ugly now. He's not crazy over Grace, and if the truth be told, Grace isn't the sort of girl that a man would get crazy over. You're that sort."
"Perhaps not," she smiled faintly. "Just the same, Grace's attitude may have started him to thinking. When he began thinking he seemed to conclude that all the world was wrong."
"And he's starting in to set it right! He's going in for the uplift stunt, eh? That's the way with a lot of these reformers! They want to set the world right according to their own ideas. They don't pay any attention to the men who keep them from starving. I made that boy—what he's got he owes to me."
"Indeed! How singular! He says that it's just the other way about; that what you have you took from him! He says you want to take more—more than your share—from things that belong to everybody."
"What's that! What's that! Well, now, of all the insane idiocy I ever heard! Good God, what next! Him, Charles Halsey, the man I brought up with me! Jennie, I never heard the like of that in all my time."
"But if that's the way he feels, now's not the time to argue that with him!"
"But, good God, the effrontery—"
"All the world is full of effrontery, Mr. Rawn," she said—continuing to address him formally, as she always did. "It's buy and sell. Everything we get we pay for in one way or another. Even if we took power out of the air by our overhead motors, we'd pay for that, one way or another—nothing comes from nothing—we pay, we pay all the time, Mr. Rawn!"