“This is the day of plain truths!” she rang out with a high mildness. “You don’t count then any devotion, any intelligence that I may have placed at your service—even rating my faculties modestly?”
“I count your intelligence, but I don’t count your devotion, and one’s nothing without the other. You’re not trusted—well, where it makes the difference.”
“Not trusted!” the Princess repeated with her splendid stare. “Why I thought I could be hanged to-morrow!”
“They may let you hang, perfectly, without letting you act. You’re liable to be weary of us,” he went on; “and indeed I think you’re weary even now.”
“Ah you must be a first-rate man—you’re such a brute!” she replied, noticing, as she had noticed before, that he pronounced “weary” weery.
“I didn’t say you were weary of me,” he said with a certain awkwardness. “But you can never live poor—you don’t begin to know the meaning of it.”
“Oh no, I’m not tired of you,” she declared as if she wished she were. “In a moment you’ll make me cry with rage, and no man has done that for years. I was very poor when I was a girl,” she added in a different manner. “You yourself recognised it just now in speaking of the insignificant character of my fortune.”
“It had to be a fortune to be insignificant,” Muniment smiled. “You’ll go back to your husband!”
To this she made no answer, only looking at him with a high, gradual clearance of her heat. “I don’t see after all why they trust you more than they trust me,” she said at last.
“I am not sure they do. I’ve heard something this evening that suggests that.”