"Mind! with all you're giving me! You won't think it's just the money, Peter;" she had a very charming hesitancy about it. "It's what money stands for, beauty, and suitability—and—everything." He was very tender with her.
"It's not that I have such a pile of it either," he assured her, "though I turn over a great deal in the course of a year. It's easier making money than people think."
"Easier for everybody?" There was a certain eagerness in the look and voice.
"Easier for those who know how. I'm only forty, and I've learned; there's not much I couldn't get if I set about it. It's a kind of a gift, perhaps, like painting or music, but there's a great deal to be learned, too."
"And some haven't the gift to learn, perhaps." For some reason she sighed.... He was turning all this over in his mind when suddenly Ellen recalled him.
"Have you told Clarice yet?"
"I mean to, Sunday, if you don't mind my not coming down to you. Miss Goodward is spending the week end at Maplemont, and by staying at Julian's——"
"Of course." Ellen sympathized. "I shall want to know what Clarice says." She never did know exactly, for when Clarice gave Peter her congratulations in the terrace garden after dinner, she missed, extraordinarily for her, the felicitous note.
"I'm so happy for Eunice, you can't imagine," she insisted. "I've always said we've none of us known what Eunice can do until she's had her opportunity. And now with all the background you can give her—— You'll see!"
He didn't quite know what he was to see except that if Eunice were to be in the picture it was bound to be satisfying. But Mrs. Lessing was not done with him. "For all her being so beautiful and so well placed," she went on, "Eunice has never had any life at all, not what you might call a life. And she might so easily have missed this. It is hard for girls to realize sometimes that the success of marriage depends on real qualities in the man, in mastery over things and not just over her susceptibilities. It is quite the most sensible thing I've known Eunice to do."