“But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there, and keep you there?” he asked her, with gleeful boldness. “And just ask yourself whether you do really want to help it. Why should you? You've seen enough of me to know that I can be a good friend. And I'm the kind of friend who amounts to something—who can and will do things for those he likes. What obligation are you under to turn away that kind of a friend, when he offers himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself.”
“But you are not in a position to nominate the questions that I am to put to myself,” she said. The effort to import decision into her tone and manner was apparent. “That is what I desire you to understand. We must not talk any more about me. I am not the topic of conversation.”
“But first let me finish what I wanted to say,” he insisted. “My talk won't break any bones. You'd be wrong not to listen to it—because it's meant to help you—to be of use to you. This is the thing, Lady Cressage: You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position. Like my friend Plowden”—he watched her face narrowly but in vain, in the dull light, for any change at mention of the name—“like my friend Plowden you have a position and title to keep up, and next to nothing to keep it up on. But he can go down into the City and make money—or try to. He can accept Directorships and tips about the market and so on, from men who are disposed to be good to him, and who see how he can be of use to them—and in that way he can do something for himself. But there is the difference: you can't do these things, or you think you can't, which is the same thing. You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by notice-boards, telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that way; that you mustn't say this thing or do the other. Now your friend down ahead there—Miss Madden—she doesn't take much stock in notice-boards. In fact, she feeds the gulls, simply because she's forbidden to do it. But you—you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're annoyed with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't I read you right?”
She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic. There was no touch of expostulation in the voice with which she answered him. “I see what you think you mean,” she said.
“Think!” he responded, with self-confident emphasis. “I'm not 'thinking.' I'm reading an open book. As I say, you're not contented—you're not happy; you don't try to pretend that you are. But all the same, though you hate it, you accept it. You think that you really must obey your notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought to do is to take a different view. Why should you put up all this barbed wire between yourself and your friends? It doesn't do anybody else any good—and it does you harm. Why, for example, should Plowden be free to take things from me, and you not?”
She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye. “Unfortunately I was not asked to join your Board.”
He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her meditatively as he turned these words over in his mind. “What I'm doing for Plowden,” he said with slow vagueness meanwhile, “it isn't so much because he's on the Board. He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me at a time when that meant everything in the world to me—and I don't forget things of that sort. Besides, I like him—and it pleases me to let him in for a share of my good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying myself. Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed to let you in also for a share of that good fortune? You think there's a difference, but I tell you it's imaginary—pure moonshine. Why, the very people whose opinion you're afraid of—what did they do themselves when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of the earth had only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about them—and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal—I wouldn't have them in my house—but it seems there wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in London.”
“Oh yes, there were many houses,” she interposed. “It wasn't a nice exhibition that society made of itself—one admits that,—but it was only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets, you know. And—I don't think I see your application, in any event. The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?”
Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little shake of the head. “'On a business basis,'” he repeated, as if talking to himself. “They like to have things 'on a business basis.'”
He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well, in a reluctant, tentative way. “I don't understand you,” she remarked, blankly.