Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten years, and puffy under the eyes.  There were lines of irritation in his face and lines of weariness.  He had not kept the freshness of youth so well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience.  To his guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so, and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day’s pilgrimage.  At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest you, Mrs. Delancy.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn’t it you?”

“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things—­conflict.”

“Yes, I can understand that.  There is so much to be done for everybody.”

Henderson looked amused.  “You know in the city the gospel is that everybody is to be done.”

“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it all for—­this conflict?  Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”

“Yes, that’s it; the devil is usually the other fellow.  But, Mrs. Delancy,” added Henderson, with an accent of seriousness, “I don’t know what it’s all for.  I doubt if there is much in it.”

“And yet the world credits you with finding a great deal in it.”

“The world is generally wrong.  Do you understand poker, Mrs. Delancy?  No!  Of course you do not.  But the interest of the game isn’t so much in the cards as in the men.”

“I thought it was the stakes.”

“Perhaps so.  But you want to win for the sake of winning.  If I gambled it would be a question of nerve.  I suppose that which we all enjoy is the exercise of skill in winning.”

“And not for the sake of doing anything—­just winning?  Don’t you get tired of that?” asked Edith, quite simply.

There was something in Edith’s sincerity, in her fresh enthusiasm about life, that appeared to strike a reminiscent note in Henderson.  Perhaps he remembered another face as sweet as hers, and ideals, faint and long ago, that were once mixed with his ideas of success.  At any rate, it was with an accent of increased deference, and with a look she had not seen in his face before, that he said: 

“People get tired of everything.  I’m not sure but it would interest me to see for a minute how the world looks through your eyes.”  And then he added, in a different tone, “As to your East Side, Mrs. Henderson tried that some years ago.”

“Wasn’t she interested?”

“Oh, very much.  For a time.  But she said there was too much of it.”  And Edith could detect no tone of sarcasm in the remark.

Down at the other end of the table, matters were going very smoothly.  Jack was charmed with his hostess.  That clever woman had felt her way along from the heresy trial, through Tuxedo and the Independent Theatre and the Horse Show, until they were launched in a perfectly free conversation, and Carmen knew that she hadn’t to look out for thin ice.