Carlisle sat down in a circular brocaded chair, in which gold back and gold arms were one; a sufficiently decorative background for her shining décolleté. Hugo, standing and fingering his white tie, looked down at her with no loss of confidence in his handsome eyes.
"You've changed somehow," said he. "I haven't quite placed it yet. Still, I can feel it there."
"I'm older, my friend, years older than when you used to know me. And then I'm suffering from a serious bereavement, too. I've lost my good opinion of myself."
"Perhaps I can be of some help in restoring it to you."
"That is the question.... Besides ageing immensely, I'm also getting frightfully modern, you see...."
And pursuing this latter thought a little, she presently replied to him:
"Oh, no--sociology, not politics.... I've been thinking for some time of inspecting the Works, to see if it needed repairs. How horrid of you to laugh! Don't you think a woman should take some interest in how the money is made that she lives on?..."
She said this smiling, in the lightest way imaginable. Small wonder if Hugo didn't guess that she had thought twenty times in two weeks of actually doing this thing she spoke of. Still less if it never occurred to him that he here confronted again the footprint of the condemned revivalist fellow, lately become his beloved's sworn friend....
"Have you asked your father that question yet?"
"I thought I'd better get the advice of a prominent lawyer first. Tell me what you think?"