formed the impression, even now when he was making no physical effort, that his wind was bad; and thick veins in his hands were other traces which betrayed unpleasantly that this man no longer was the youth that his manner liked to assume.
Whenever Ethel had thought about him before, she had considered him contented as long as he obtained enough from his wife to buy himself good—too good and too youthful—clothes and to indulge in his occasional "business trips", drinking and gambling a little perhaps or "flirting" with younger girls. Ethel did not permit herself to dwell concretely upon men's dissipations. But now she knew that Miss Platt's husband either never was just such a man as that or else recently he had developed more ambitious appetites.
He began talking about himself to her, about a syndicate to develop export trade into which he expected to "put a little money." Miss Platt's husband, no longer satisfied with his allowance from his wife, was thinking money—more money—immediately. Ethel wondered where he expected to get it; and, wondering, she thought about his errand this afternoon, which he had not yet mentioned to her, and his listening at her grandfather's door.
She recognized vaguely that at one time—and perhaps even at this time—Miss Platt could have made money by telling muckrakers about the Cullen private affairs. But Miss Platt did not; she always had been trustworthy. One could not think of her husband as trustworthy. Ethel never imagined that Kincheloe "knew" what Miss Platt must know; and the fact that Ethel had caught him listening at a door to overhear what her grandfather was dictating to Miss Platt proved that she did not confide in her husband. Why?
