The girl in the blue dress looked at him with wistful eyes, but she laughed more gaily than ever, and cried:
“Wait, please, till after the dance on the tenth, and when you do go, send home things to us, won’t you? Shawls and cashmeres, and embroideries. And pearls! I’ve always longed to know a real live pearl-fisher. He ought to remember us, oughtn’t he, everybody—because we’ve been so kind and patient with his vagaries? We all deserve something, but bags Me the pearls!”
“Oh, you shall have your pearls right enough,” said the handsome man, but there was a careless tone in his voice which made the promise seem worthless as sand, and he never glanced in the direction of the girl in the blue dress.
Pretty, wistful little Norah Boyce looked up quickly as if she were about to speak; thought better of it, and turned back to stare into the fire.
The girl seated on the oak stool leaned forward once again, and looked straight into the face of the handsome man. One white hand rested against her throat, a slim column of a throat, bare of ornament. Her fingers moved as though in imagination they were fingering a rope of pearls.
Buried in the depth of a great arm-chair lay the form of a giant of a man who had listened to the conversation with a sleepy smile. At this point a yawn overcame him; he struggled with it, only to find himself entangled in a second.
“I say,” he drawled lazily, “what about bed? Doesn’t that strike you as about the most sensible proposition for the moment? I know this dissatisfied feeling. No New Year’s gathering is complete without it. Best thing to get to sleep as soon as possible, and start afresh next day. Things look better after coffee and bacon. What’s the use of grizzling? If we can’t have what we want, let us like what we can get. Eh? It’s pretty certain we’ll never get what we want.”
“Are you so sure of that?” asked a quiet voice. The hostess sat erect in her seat, her graceful head with its silvering hair silhouetted against the wall. She looked round the circle of her guests, and smiled, a fine, delicate smile. “When you make that statement, Frank, you are contradicting flatly all the premises of modern thought. The time has passed for sitting still and lamenting the impossible. The time is past for calling anything impossible. The thing that a man strives for—deeply, strongly, persistently—that thing he can hovel That is the theory held by many great thinkers of to-day. And it is true.”
There was silence for a moment, while everyone looked questioningly at the figure of the speaker. The man with the tired eyes asked a question:
“I suppose that applies to women as well as to men! Have you proved it, Mrs Ingram?”