"When you invest money you ought to look after it," she said magisterially. "You are a Socialist, aren't you? How do you know that your money isn't being used to oppress somebody?"
"Oh, I do know that much," was the investor's protest. "Raymer is a good boss—too good for the crowd he is trying to brother, I'm afraid."
"What makes you say that?"
"A word or two that he has dropped, now and then. When he branched out, he had to increase his force accordingly. Some of the new men seem inclined to make trouble."
Again she fell silent, and he saw the brooding look come into the dark eyes. It was evident that something he had said had started a train of thought—and the thoughts were not altogether pleasant ones. Analyzing again, he fancied he could picture the inward struggle to break away from the unpleasantnesses, and he shook hands enthusiastically with his own gift of insight when she looked up suddenly and said: "See! the breeze is freshening out on the water. You are fagged and tired and needing a bracer. Let's go and do a turn on the lake in the Clytie."
From where he was sitting Griswold could see the trim little catboat, resplendent in polished brass and mahogany, riding at its buoy beyond the lawn landing-stage. He cared little for the water, but the invitation pointed to a delightful prolongation of the basking process which had come to be one of the chief luxuries of the Mereside afternoons.
"I'm not much of a sailor," he began; but she cut him off.
"You'll do to pull and haul. Wait for me; I'll be ready in less time than it would take another woman—Fidelia, for example—to make up her mind what she wanted to wear."
He waited; and when she came down, a few minutes later, crisply boyish in the nattiest of yachting costumes, he wondered how she could appear in so many different characters, fitting each in succession and contriving always to make the latest transformation, while it lasted, the one in which she figured as the most enticingly adorable.
"Did you look in the glass before you came down?" he asked, standing up to get the artistic effect of the shapely little figure backgrounded against the dull reds of the house wall.