Margaret was of the women who seem never to think of what they are really absorbed in, and never to look at what they are really scrutinizing.  She disconcerted him by interrupting his reflections with:  “Your private opinion of me is of small consequence to me, Grant, beside the relief and the joy of being able to say my secret self aloud.  Also”—­here she grew dizzy at her own audacity in the frankness that fools—­“Also, if I wished to get you, Grant, or any man, I’d not be silly enough to fancy my character or lack of it would affect him.  That isn’t what wins men—­is it?”

“You and Josh Craig have a most uncomfortable way of answering people’s thoughts,” said Arkwright.  “Now, how did you guess I was thinking mean things about you?”

“For the same reason that Mr. Craig is able to guess what’s going on in your head.”

“And that reason is—­”

She laughed mockingly.  “Because I know you, Grant Arkwright—­you, the meanest-generous man, and the most generous-mean man the Lord ever permitted.  The way to make you generous is to give you a mean impulse; the way to make you mean is to set you to fearing you’re in danger of being generous.”

“There’s a bouquet with an asp coiled in it,” said Arkwright, pleased; for with truly human vanity he had accepted the compliment and had thrown away the criticism.  “I’ll go bring Josh Craig.”  “No, not to-night,” said Miss Severence, with a sudden compression of the lips and a stern, almost stormy contraction of the brows.

“Please don’t do that, Rita,” cried Arkwright.  “It reminds me of your grandmother.”

The girl’s face cleared instantly, and all overt signs of strength of character vanished in her usual expression of sweet, reserved femininity.  “Bring him to-morrow,” said she.  “A little late, please.  I want others to be there, so that I can study him unobserved.”  She laughed.  “This is a serious matter for me.  My time is short, and my list of possible eligibles less extended than I could wish.”  And with a satiric smile and a long, languorous, coquettish glance, she waved him away and waved the waiting Jackie into his place.

Arkwright found Craig clear of “Patsy” Raymond and against the wall near the door.  He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed.  His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz.  It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam—­like Blucher, when he looked out over London and said:  “God!  What a city to sack!”

Arkwright thought Josh was too absorbed to be aware of his approach; but as soon as he was beside him Josh said:  “You were right about that apartment of mine.  It’s a squalid hole.  Six months ago, when I got my seventy-five hundred a year, I thought I was rich.  Rich?  Why, that woman there has ten years’ salary on her hair.  All the money I and my whole family ever saw wouldn’t pay for the rings on any one of a hundred hands here.  It makes me mad and it makes me greedy.”