flagged while they disposed of the
earlier courses. Now they were at the ice and coffee stage. The waiters
grew less attentive; indeed there was nobody to observe them save the
olive-skinned boy with the mournful eyes who looked at the harbour of
Palermo through the Waterloo Road door. Farwell lit the cigar which
Victoria forced upon him, and leant back, puffing contentedly.

'Well,' he said at length, 'how do you like the life?'

'It is better than the old one,' she said.

'Oh, so you've come to that. You have given up the absolutes.'

'Yes, I've given them up. A woman like me has to.'

'Yes, I suppose you've got to,' pondered Farwell. 'But apart from that,
is it a success? Are you attaining your end? That's the only thing that
matters, you know.'

'I am, in a sense; I'm saving money. You see, he's generous.'

'Excellent, excellent,' sneered Farwell. 'I like to see you making out
of what the bourgeois call vice that which will enable you to command
bourgeois respect. By-and-by I suppose you'll have made a fortune.'

'Well, no; a competency perhaps, with luck.'

'With luck, as you say. Do you know, Victoria, this luck business is
grand! My firm goes in for mines: they went prospecting in America
twenty years ago and they happened to strike copper. That was good.
Other men struck granite only. That was bad. But my boss is a City
Sheriff now. Frightfully rich. There used to be four of them, but one
died of copper poisoning, and another was found shot in a gulch. Nobody
knows how it happened, but the other two got the mines.'

Victoria smiled. She liked this piratical tit bit.

'Yes,' she said, 'luck's the thing. And merit . . . well I suppose the
surviving partners had merit.'

'Anyhow, I wish you luck,' said Farwell. 'But tell me more. Do you find
you've paid too high a price for what you've got?'

'Too high a price?'

'Yes. Do you have any of that remorse we read about; would you like to
be what you were? Unattached, you know . . . eligible for Young Women's
Christian Associations?'

'Oh, no,' Victoria laughed. 'I can't pay too high a price for what I
think I'll get. I don't mean these jewels or these clothes, that's only
my professional uniform. When I've served my time I shall get that for
which no woman can pay too much: I shall be economically independent,
free.'

'Free.' Farwell looked towards the ceiling through a cloudlet of smoke.
'Yes, you're right. With the world as it is it's the only way.