"Not so very greatly, perhaps," Iglesias replied, with a soberly humorous expression. "For I have always been very exacting and have asked very much. I am culpably fastidious. My tastes are far beyond my means, my desires out of all reasonable relation to my station and my merits. And it should be remembered that my circle of acquaintances has been a very limited one, until quite recently—I do not wish to appear more glaringly arrogant or discourteous than I actually am. I had my ideal. It happened that I failed to realise it; and I am very impatient of compromise in matters of intimate and purely personal import. In respect of them I hold I have an unqualified right to consult my own tastes. It has always been easier to me to go without than to accept a second-best."
"In point of fact no woman was good enough! Poor brutes!"
Poppy mused a little, with averted face.
"How beastly cheap they'd all feel—I've not forgotten the undulating and aspiring withered leaf—if they knew how mightily they all fell short!" she added naughtily. Suddenly she looked round at Dominic Iglesias. Her eyes were as stars, but her lips trembled. "Bless me, but you've extensively original methods of conveying information! It's lucky for me I've a steady head. So—so it comes to this—I reign all alone?" she said.
"Yes, dear friend, save for my love for my mother—such as the throne is or ever has been—you reign alone," Iglesias answered quietly.
Poppy rested her elbows upon her knees, dropped her face into her hands, and sat thus bowed together in the whiteness of the moonlight.
"Ah, dear!" she murmured presently, brokenly, "I've got my answer. It's better and—worse, than I expected. All the same I'm content—that's to say, the best of me is—royally, consummately content.—Thank you a thousand times, thrice-beloved and very most exceedingly unworldy-wise one," she said.
Then for a while both were silent, wrapped about by, and resting in, the magic of the summer night. When Poppy roused herself at last to speak, it was in a different key, studiously matter-of-fact.
"Look here, dear man, do you in the least realise how extremely far gone you were when I arrived to you on Barnes Common this evening? Because I tell you plainly I didn't in the very least like it. In my opinion it is high time you gave up dragging that Barking Brothers & Barking cart."
"I shall give up doing so very soon," Iglesias replied. "Just now I am acting as manager. Sir Abel is at Marienbad, and the other partners are out of town."