Her indignation against Clayton took the form of calculation; and she was quick to pursue her advantage. In the library she produced the new and enlarged plans for the house.
“Roddie says he has tried to call you at the mill, but you are always out of your office. So he sent these around to-day.”
True to the resolution he had made that night in the hospital, he went over them carefully. And even their magnitude, while it alarmed him, brought no protest from him. After all the mill and the new plant were his toys to play with. He found there something to fill up the emptiness of his life. If a great house was Natalie's ambition, if it gave her pleasure and something to live for, she ought to have it.
She had prepared herself for a protest, but he made none, even when the rather startling estimate was placed before him.
“I just want you to be happy, my dear,” he said. “But I hope you'll arrange not to run over the estimate. It is being pretty expensive as it is. But after all, success doesn't mean anything, unless we are going to get something out of it.”
They were closer together that evening than they had been for months. And at last he fell to talking about the mill. Natalie, curled up on the chaise longue in her boudoir, listened attentively, but with small comprehension as he poured out his dream, for himself now, for Graham later. A few years more and he would retire. Graham could take hold then. He might even go into politics. He would be fifty then, and a man of fifty should be in his prime. And to retire and do nothing was impossible. A fellow went to seed.
Eyes on the wood fire, he talked on until at last, roused by Natalie's silence, he glanced up. She was sound asleep.
Some time later, in his dressing-gown and slippers, he came and roused her. She smiled up at him like a drowsy child.
“Awfully tired,” she said. “Is Graham in?”
“Not yet.”