"He does talk well; I'll admit that. But who is going to capitalize this venture?"
His sister smiled. "Well, Clinton, I could hardly ask him that, you know."
"No, I suppose not. And if you had, I imagine that he would hardly have liked to answer it. Anyhow, he's cheered you up, and I ought to be grateful to him for that. It was a mistake for you to take that trip to Mont-Mer, Crete. It was too much for you."
She made no response to this, and her brother, noting the delicately flushed face and languid movements, told himself reproachfully that the mistake was in going away and leaving her to struggle alone with the hospital venture. He sat down on a cedar chest beside the window.
"Let's retint the whole lower floor, Crete," he suggested, seizing upon the first change of topic that offered itself. "Now that this place is to be a home again and not a sanitarium, let's retint and get the public institution smell out of it."
She laid down the ivory brush and turned to him. But her gaze was abstracted, and when she spoke in a musing voice, her words showed that she had not been listening. "Clinton, have you ever figured out just how much of the Coalinga oil stock belongs to me?"
He had been sitting with one knee hugged between his arms. Now he released it and brought himself upright upon the cedar chest.
"Why, no, I haven't. I don't think it makes much difference, while we're living together, sharing everything this way."
She got up from the dressing-table and walked over to the far window, drawing the deep lace collar of the amethyst negligée up about her ears as though to screen herself from his view. Out on the bay the lighted ferry-boats plied their silent passage, and on the Key Route pier an orange-colored train crawled cautiously, like a brilliant caterpillar, across a thread of track. Marcreta, gazing out into the clear soft dusk, sent a question backward over her shoulder.
"Would it be very much trouble to go over our properties some time and—make a division?"