d shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about
them--and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. I knew
one or two of the men who were in that deal--I wouldn't have them in my
house--but it seems there wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in
London."

"Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed. "It wasn't a nice
exhibition that society made of itself--one admits that,--but it was
only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets,
you know. And--I don't think I see your application, in any event. The
craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after
those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled
in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?"

Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little
shake of the head. "'On a business basis,'" he repeated, as if talking
to himself. "They like to have things 'on a business basis.'"

He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well,
in a reluctant, tentative way. "I don't understand you," she remarked,
blankly.

"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows, and
marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy.
"This is the question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my
Board. You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden,
and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke--but it had its
meaning--at least to me. Now I want to ask you--if I decide to form
another Company, a very small and particular Company--if I should decide
to form it, I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?
Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess you know what I
mean."

The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle
for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of
confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of
physical ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady
Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and
nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain
beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the
silence which ensued.

"Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say," she
observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her
feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a
c