Zoséphine interrupted with kind resentment:
“Ah!”
“No; I know you didn’t. You’re one of the few women whose subscription I’ve sought in vain. Till then I loved my business. I’ve never loved it since. I’ve decided to sell out and quit. I’m going into another business, one that you’ll admire. I don’t say any thing about the man going into it,—
‘Honor and shame from no condition rise:
Act well your part; there all the honor lies,’—
but I want your advice about the party I think of going in with. It’s Claude St. Pierre.”
Zoséphine turned upon the speaker a look of steady penetration. He met it with a glance of perfect confiding. “She sees me,” he said, at the same time, far within himself.
It was as natural to Mr. Tarbox to spin a web as it is for a spider. To manœuvre was the profoundest instinct of his unprofound nature. Zoséphine felt the slender threads weaving around her. But in her heart of hearts there was a certain pleasure in being snared. It could not, to her, seem wholly bad for Tarbox to play spider, provided he should play the harmless spider. Mr. Tarbox spoke again, and she listened amiably.
“Claude is talented. He has what I haven’t; I have what he hasn’t, and together we could make each other’s fortunes, if he’s only the square, high-style fellow I think he is. I’m a student of human nature, and I think I’ve made him out. I think he’ll do to tie to. But will he? You can tell me. You read people by instinct. I ask you just as a matter of business advice and in business confidence. What do you think? Will you trust me and tell me—as my one only trusted friend—freely and fully—as I would tell you?”
Madame Beausoleil felt the odds against her, but she looked into her companion’s face with bright, frank eyes and said: “Yass, I t’ink yass; I t’ink ’tis so.”
“Thanks!” said her friend, with unnecessary fervor and tenderness. “Then Claude will be my partner, unless—my dear friend, shall you be so kind—I might almost say confiding—to me, and me not tell you something I think you’d ought to know? For I hope we are always to be friends; don’t you?”