“Yes; but I see a little too much of it.  We live here most of the year.”  She had meant to give him the illusion of success, but some underlying community of instinct drew the confession from her lips.

“That so?  Why on earth don’t you cut it and come up to Paris?”

“Oh, Raymond’s absorbed in the estates—­and we haven’t got the money.  This place eats it all up.”

“Well, that sounds aristocratic; but ain’t it rather out of date?  When the swells are hard-up nowadays they generally chip off an heirloom.”  He wheeled round again to the tapestries.  “There are a good many Paris seasons hanging right here on this wall.”

“Yes—­I know.”  She tried to check herself, to summon up a glittering equivocation; but his face, his voice, the very words he used, were like so many hammer-strokes demolishing the unrealities that imprisoned her.  Here was some one who spoke her language, who knew her meanings, who understood instinctively all the deep-seated wants for which her acquired vocabulary had no terms; and as she talked she once more seemed to herself intelligent, eloquent and interesting.

“Of course it’s frightfully lonely down here,” she began; and through the opening made by the admission the whole flood of her grievances poured forth.  She tried to let him see that she had not sacrificed herself for nothing; she touched on the superiorities of her situation, she gilded the circumstances of which she called herself the victim, and let titles, offices and attributes shed their utmost lustre on her tale; but what she had to boast of seemed small and tinkling compared with the evidences of his power.

“Well, it’s a downright shame you don’t go round more,” he kept saying; and she felt ashamed of her tame acceptance of her fate.

When she had told her story she asked for his; and for the first time she listened to it with interest.  He had what he wanted at last.  The Apex Consolidation scheme, after a long interval of suspense, had obtained its charter and shot out huge ramifications.  Rolliver had “stood in” with him at the critical moment, and between them they had “chucked out” old Harmon B. Driscoll bag and baggage, and got the whole town in their control.  Absorbed in his theme, and forgetting her inability to follow him, Moffatt launched out on an epic recital of plot and counterplot, and she hung, a new Desdemona, on his conflict with the new anthropophagi.  It was of no consequence that the details and the technicalities escaped her:  she knew their meaningless syllables stood for success, and what that meant was as clear as day to her.  Every Wall Street term had its equivalent in the language of Fifth Avenue, and while he talked of building up railways she was building up palaces, and picturing all the multiple lives he would lead in them.  To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence, and as she listened to him the vision of the things he could have unrolled itself before her like the long triumph of an Asiatic conqueror.