So he answered: "How far I climb depends on the help of my best friends. I don't hide that. When my dear wife was with me, she was an inspiration to me. No man can drive his car to the summit without a woman to spur him on."
"Did marriage change you much?"
"Strengthened me. Bolted me to my foundations.... But here I'm monopolizing the conversation with talk about myself. Let's switch. What are your ambitions?"
Olive laughed—a laugh with a bitter taste in it. "I wanted to help a man to drive his car to the summit, and the car has stuck. I could inspire, but my inspiring goes to waste. I'm an engine racing without a shaft to take up its energy. Clifford is developing scruples. I don't know where he caught them. I can't stand sick people. That's my temperament—I must have energy and action around me."
"I understand that. Felt it myself at times," he answered sympathetically.
Without apparent reason her thoughts skipped to a woman who had sat near them at the roulette table. "Wasn't she the image of a disappointed vulture? I mean the woman in green. Swooping down from a distance to gorge herself with a tasty feast, and then finding a man with a rake to chase her off. I chuckled to myself as I watched her. Do men and women look to you like animals? They do to me. Monte Carlo's a Zoo, only the animals aren't caged."
"That's right! You're an extraordinarily keen observer, Mrs Matheson."
Sir Francis Letchmere approached them beamingly from the direction of the Casino. He had won money at trente-et-quarante, and was feeling very pleased with his own judgment and powers of intellect generally.
"Leave him to me," whispered Olive to Larssen. "I'll see that my father gets busy on the Hudson Bay Scheme. But on one condition."
"What's that?"