She smiled, holding out her gloved hand in quite the old way, which had once so fascinated his grosser senses. "Mary Long, my dressmaker, lives here." She glanced at him half chidingly from beneath her thick lashes. "I come all the way out here to save money. You think I am extravagant, Dick, but that is the sort of thing I have to do to make ends meet. Mary is making me a dream of a frock now for one-fourth of what your high and mighty Frau would pay for it in New York."
"Always hard up," Mostyn said. "You never get enough to satisfy you."
She smiled coquettishly. "I was born that way," she answered. "My brother sends me money often. He has never forgotten how you and I got him out of that awful hole. He has gone into the wholesale whisky business and is doing well. He paid me back long ago."
"And you blew it in, of course?" Mostyn said, lightly.
"Yes, that's how I got that last New York trip," she nodded, merrily. "Dick, that was one month when I really lived. Gee! if life could only be like that I'd ask nothing more of the powers that rule; I certainly wouldn't."
"But life can't possibly be like that," he returned, gloomily. "Even that would pall on you in time. I am older than you, Marie, and I know what I am talking about. We can go just so far and no farther."
"Poof! piffle!" It was her old irresponsible ejaculation. "Life is what you make it. 'Laugh, and the world laughs with you.' Eat, drink, and be merry—that is my motto. But, say, Dick"—she was eying his face with slow curiosity—"what is the matter? You look like a grandfather. You are thin and peaked and nervous-looking. But I needn't ask—I know."
"You know!" he repeated, sensitively. "I am working pretty hard for one thing, and—"
"Poof!" She snapped her fingers. "You used to get fat on work. It isn't that, Dick, and you needn't try to fool me. I know you from the soles of your feet to the end of the longest hair on your head."
He avoided her fixed stare. "I'm not making money as I did once. Many of my investments have turned out badly. I seem to have lost my old skill in business matters."