“Well then I hope you paid it every respect!” cried her visitor.
“I looked at it for a long time in my hand-glass,” she answered with more presence of mind.
“Miss Searle can for many years to come afford to be amused at grey hairs,” I interposed in the hope of some greater ease. It had its effect. “Ten years from last Thursday I shall be forty-four,” she almost comfortably smiled.
“Well, that’s just what I am,” said Searle. “If I had only come here ten years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the feast, but I should have had less appetite. I needed first to get famished.”
“Oh why did you wait for that?” his entertainer asked. “To think of these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!” At the vision of which waste and loss Mr. Searle had a fine shrill laugh.
“Well,” my friend explained, “I always had a notion—a stupid vulgar notion if there ever was one—that to come abroad properly one had to have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At last I came with my empty pot!”
Mr. Searle had a wait for delicacy, but he proceeded. “You’re reduced, you’re—a—straitened?”
Our companion’s very breath blew away the veil. “Reduced to nothing. Straitened to the clothes on my back!”
“You don’t say so!” said Mr. Searle with a large vague gasp. “Well—well—well!” he added in a voice which might have meant everything or nothing; and then, in his whimsical way, went on to finish a glass of wine. His searching eye, as he drank, met mine, and for a moment we each rather deeply sounded the other, to the effect no doubt of a slight embarrassment. “And you,” he said by way of carrying this off—“how about your wardrobe?”
“Oh his!” cried my friend; “his wardrobe’s immense. He could dress up a regiment!” He had drunk more champagne—I admit that the champagne was good—than was from any point of view to have been desired. He was rapidly drifting beyond any tacit dissuasion of mine. He was feverish and rash, and all attempt to direct would now simply irritate him. As we rose from the table he caught my troubled look. Passing his arm for a moment into mine, “This is the great night!” he strangely and softly said; “the night and the crisis that will settle me.”