“No,” Nancy said, “there—there is no danger of that.”
“I don’t like that cutting you down,” he said, frowning. “It would be rather a bad outlook for us all if she threw you over, now wouldn’t it?”
“Oh!—she won’t, there’s nothing to worry about, really.”
“It would be like my luck to have the only café in America turn me out-of-doors.—I should never eat again.”
“I promise it won’t,” Nancy said; “can’t you trust me?”
“I never have trusted any woman—but you,” he said.
“You can trust me,” Nancy said. “The truth is, she couldn’t put me out even if she wanted to. I—she is under a kind of obligation to me.”
“Thank God for that. I only hope you are in a position to threaten her with blackmail.”
“I could if anybody could,” Nancy said. She put out of her mind as disloyal, the faintly unpleasant suggestion of his words. He owed her mythical patron a substantial sum of money by this time. He was not even able to pay Michael the cash for the nightly teapot full of Chianti that Nancy herself now sent out for him regularly. For the first time since her association with him she was tempted to compare him to Dick, and that not very favorably; but at the next instant she was reproaching herself with her littleness of vision. He was too great a man to gauge by the ordinary standards of life. Money meant nothing to him 231 except that it was the insignificant means to the end of that Art, which was to him consecrated.