To her surprise and the keen retaliating delight of her sex, a conscious flush covered his face to the crisp edges of his black and matted beard.  For a moment she hoped that he had lied.  But, to her greater surprise, he stammered in equal frankness:  “It’s growed upon me for the last five years—­ever since I was alone with him.”  He stopped, cleared his throat, and then, standing up before her, said in his former voice, but with a more settled and intense deliberation:  “You wanter know how long it will last, do ye?  Well, you know your special friend, Jim Stacy—­the big millionaire—­the great Jim of the Stock Exchange—­the man that pinches the money market of Californy between his finger and thumb and makes it squeal in New York—­the man who shakes the stock market when he sneezes?  Well, it will go on until that man is a beggar; until he has to borrow a dime for his breakfast, and slump out of his lunch with a cent’s worth of rat poison or a bullet in his head!  It’ll go on until his old partner—­that softy George Barker—­comes to the bottom of his d——­d fool luck and is a penny-a-liner for the papers and a hanger-round at free lunches, and his scatter-brained wife runs away with another man!  It’ll go on until the high-toned Demorest, the last of those three little tin gods of Heavy Tree Hill, will have to climb down, and will know what I feel and what he’s made me feel, and will wish himself in hell before he ever made the big strike on Heavy Tree!  That’s me!  You hear me!  I’m shoutin’!  It’ll last till then!  It may be next week, next month, next year.  But it’ll come.  And when it does come you’ll see me and Eddy just waltzin’ in and takin’ the chief seats in the synagogue!  And you’ll have a free pass to the show!”

Either he was too intoxicated with his vengeful vision, or the shadows of the room had deepened, but he did not see the quick flush that had risen to his wife’s face with this allusion to Barker, nor the after-settling of her handsome features into a dogged determination equal to his own.  His blind fury against the three partners did not touch her curiosity; she was only struck with the evident depth of his emotion.  He had never been a braggart; his hostility had always been lazy and cynical.  Remembering this, she had a faint stirring of respect for the undoubted courage and consciousness of strength shown in this wild but single-handed crusade against wealth and power; rather, perhaps, it seemed to her to condone her own weakness in her youthful and inexplicable passion for him.  No wonder she had submitted.

“Then you have nothing more to tell me?” she said after a pause, rising and going towards the mantel.