“With Deborah Audaer?” suggested Sep.
Rees got up and stretched himself.
“What’s the use of talking, when there’s one of Marion’s ecstatic effusions to be answered, and Goodhare may be in any minute.”
“I’m sick of Goodhare, Rees; aren’t you? He’s a selfish, greedy old rascal, and he always contrives to get the lion’s share of the plunder and the fox’s share of the risk. He hardly lets one call one’s soul one’s own.”
“Have we any souls?” said Rees. “I don’t feel as if I had any such relic of respectability about me. Whatever I may have had left of that sort Deborah took away with her the day she came here with my mother. When I’m tired of this life I shall go to Carstow and claim it back from her.”
“Do you think, Rees,” suggested Sep, after a pause, “that a man who’s led the sort of life we have is—is—well—quite good enough for a woman like Miss Audaer?”
“My dear boy, why trouble ourselves with questions of that sort? As long as they’ll have us and worship us, no matter what sort of lives we’ve led, why should we worry ourselves by trying to lead any better?”
“And you think Miss Audaer worships you still?”
Rees got up, swaggered confidently across the room to his desk, unlocked it, and took from an inner drawer a woman’s little morocco purse, which he flung across the table carelessly to his companion.
“Look inside,” said he.