“It is a long time that I have been wanting to meet you,” she informed me.  “You are smart.”

I smiled, yet I was inclined to resent her use of the word, though I was by no means sure of the shade of meaning she meant to put into it.  I had, indeed, an uneasy sense of the scantiness of my fund of humour to meet and turn such a situation; for I was experiencing, now, with her, the same queer feeling I had known in my youth in the presence of Cousin Robert Breck—­the suspicion that this extraordinary person saw through me.  It was as though she held up a mirror and compelled me to look at my soul features.  I tried to assure myself that the mirror was distorted.  I lost, nevertheless, the sureness of touch that comes from the conviction of being all of a piece.  She contrived to resolve me again into conflicting elements.  I was, for the moment, no longer the self-confident and triumphant young attorney accustomed to carry all before him, to command respect and admiration, but a complicated being whose unity had suddenly been split.  I glanced around the table at Ogilvy, at Dickinson, at Ralph Hambleton.  These men were functioning truly.  But was I?  If I were not, might not this be the reason for the lack of synthesis—­of which I was abruptly though vaguely aware between my professional life, my domestic relationships, and my relationships with friends.  The loyalty of the woman beside me struck me forcibly as a supreme trait.  Where she had given, she did not withdraw.  She had conferred it instantly on Maude.  Did I feel that loyalty towards a single human being? towards Maude herself—­my wife? or even towards Nancy?  I pulled myself together, and resolved to give her credit for using the word “smart” in its unobjectionable sense.  After all; Dickens had so used it.

“A lawyer must needs know something of what he is about, Mrs. Scherer, if he is to be employed by such a man as your husband,” I replied.

Her black eyes snapped with pleasure.

“Ah, I suppose that is so,” she agreed.  “I knew he was a great man when I married him, and that was before Mr. Nathaniel Durrett found it out.”

“But surely you did not think, in those days, that he would be as big as he has become?  That he would not only be president of the Boyne Iron Works, but of a Boyne Iron Works that has exceeded Mr. Durrett’s wildest dreams.”

She shook her head complacently.

“Do you know what I told him when he married me?  I said, ’Adolf, it is a pity you are born in Germany.’  And when he asked me why, I told him that some day he might have been President of the United States.”

“Well, that won’t be a great deprivation to him,” I remarked.  “Mr. Scherer can do what he wants, and the President cannot.”

“Adolf always does as he wants,” she declared, gazing at him as he sat beside the brilliant wife of the grandson of the man whose red-shirted foreman he had been.  “He does what he wants, and gets what he wants.  He is getting what he wants now,” she added, with such obvious meaning that I found no words to reply.  “She is pretty, that Mrs. Durrett, and clever,—­is it not so?”