“I asked you if—well, if it was Joan Ferriby.”
“Yes. And I answered that it was not Joan Ferriby. That was mere gossip, of which we are both aware, and for which neither of us cares a pin.”
“Then it comes to this,” said Mr. Wade, drawing lines on the tablecloth with his dessert knife as if it were a balance-sheet, and he was casting the final totals there. “You are a man of the world; you are clever; you are like your father before you, in that you have something that women care about. Heaven only knows what it is, for I don't!” He paused, and looked at his companion as if seeking that intangible something. Then he jerked his head towards the drawing-room, where Marguerite could be dimly heard playing an air from the latest comic opera with a fine contempt for accidentals. “That child,” he said, “knows no more about life than a sparrow. A man like myself—seventeen stone—may have to balance his books at any moment. You have a clear field; for you may take my word for it that you will be the first in it. My own experience of life has been mostly financial, but I am pretty certain that the first man a woman cares for is the man she cares for all along, though she may never see him again. I don't hold it out as an inducement, but there is no reason why you should not know that she will have a hundred and fifty thousand pounds—not when I am dead, but on the day she marries.” Mr. Wade paused, and took a sip of his most excellent port. “Do not hurry,” he said. “Take your time. Think about it carefully—unless you have already thought about it, and can say yes or no now.”
“I can do that.”
Mr. Wade bent forward heavily, with one arm on the table.
“Ah!” he said. “Which is it?”
“It is no,” answered Cornish, simply. The banker passed his table-napkin across his lips, paused for a moment, and then rose with, as was his hospitable custom, his hand upon the sherry decanter. “Then let us go into the drawing-room,” he said.