"How interesting. Then you have not always been a business man?"
He suspected that Elise had learned the full details of his past from her aunt, who, being of an obviously inquiring nature, had doubtlessly by this time fully informed herself concerning him. He judged that she was merely feeling him out. It made him uneasy. But he answered, "In my own country, it is considered, for some reason, not quite au fait for a gentleman to engage in honest toil. Though my father was in trade, and no finer gentleman ever lived. Over here it is the reverse. One is not judged to have amounted to anything unless he is, or has been, a business man."
"More's the pity." She said it with more than necessary vehemence.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I believe this perpetual preoccupation in business has ruined the American man for anything else. He does not have time to play until he has made his fortune, and then he is too old to learn. He knows nothing of art, literature, or the finer things of life, and he cares less. He takes his pleasure in short, mad doses, as the business men were taking it at that bedlam of a supper club at which we met you the other night. One should take pleasure slowly, as one drinks liqueurs. One should take time to live. Don't you think so?"
"Of course." He had hardly listened, so intent was he upon looking at her.
The lazy eyes of Elise were glowing now. The butler, arriving with the tea things, interrupted their conversation. Rodrigo found the pause rather welcome. It broke for the moment the spell which her personality was weaving around him. Facing her thus, alone, she seemed as out of place in this staid gathering of old women of both sexes as Cleopatra in a sewing-circle. For here was a woman, he recognized, who possessed magnetic appeal. She had no interest in art or literature, despite her profession of concern for them. She was supremely self-indulgent, he judged, thrill-seeking, eager for something that would wake her sated and very beautiful self to life. Instinctively his pulse quickened as he looked at her, felt the magnetic tug of her. For him, he knew, she would be profoundly disturbing, much more disturbing than Sophia Binner or Rosa. In her beat the blood of Madame Du Barry, Manon Lescaut, though she would never lose her head for love. She would always keep her head. She would reserve the losing of heads to her victims.
And yet she fascinated him. Already he was wishing that the other guests would miraculously disappear. Already he was planning when he could see her again.
"Your indictment of American business, coming from an American woman, surprises me. I understood that American women were their husbands' chief inspirations in the making of money," he endeavored to put discussion upon a lighter plane.
"American wives want money to spend. That is why they urge their husbands to make it. They drive the poor fellows like muleteers. And if the business man has no wife to drive him, it is some other woman not so respectable but none the less desirous of jewels and a limousine. American women dominate their men absolutely. The husbands haven't a chance. You see, I can speak freely because I am half Spanish, and in most ways a great deal more than half. I am a Latin, like you. That is why it seems strange to me that you should wish to attach yourself to the grindstone of American business."