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