“You needn't be scared, if I'm not,” he said reproachfully. “The house is worth two hundred and fifty thousand, and there's only fifty on it now. If that fat, Dutch skinflint, Plank, shows his tusks, we can clap on another fifty.” And as she made no sound or movement in reply: “As far as Plank goes, haven't I done enough for him to square it? What have we ever got out of him, except a thousand or two now and then when the cards went against me? If I took it, it was practically what he owes me. And if he thinks it's too much—look here, Leila! I've a trick up my sleeve. I can make good any time I wish to. I'm in a position to marry that man to the girl he's mad about—stark, raving mad.”
Mrs. Mortimer slowly raised her head and looked at her husband.
“Leroy, are you mad?”
“I! Not much!” he exclaimed gleefully. “I can make him the husband of the most-run-after girl in New York—if I want to. And at the same time I can puncture the most arrogant, the most cold-blooded, selfish, purse-proud, inflated nincompoop that ever sat at the head of a director's table. O-ho! Now you're staring, Leila. I can do it; I can make good. What are you worrying about? Why, I've got a hundred ways to square that cheque, and each separate way is a winner.”
He rose, shook out the creases in his trousers, and adjusted the squat, gold fob which ornamented his protruding waistcoat.
“So you'll fix it, won't you, Leila?” he said, apparently oblivious that he had expressed himself as able to adjust the matter in one hundred equally edifying and satisfactory manners.
She did not answer. He lingered a moment at the door, looking back with an ingratiating leer; but she paid him no attention, and he took himself off, confident that her sulkiness could not result in anything unpleasant to anybody except herself.
Nor did it, as far as he could see. The days brought no noticeable change in his wife's demeanour toward him. Plank, when he met him, was civil enough, though it did occur to Mortimer that he saw very little of Plank in these days.
“Ungrateful beggar!” he thought bitterly; “he's toadying to Belwether now. I can't do anything more for him, so I don't interest him.”
And for a while he wore either a truculent, aggrieved air in Plank's presence, or the meeker demeanour of a martyr, sentimentally misunderstood, but patient under the affliction.