"Yes," replied Mrs. Harrison, "he is." In a manner which put an end to all doubt in the matter.
"Do you really think?" asked Miss Abercrombie, "that there is anything in it?"
Mrs. Harrison poised her fork and gave her guest a knowing look. "Well, of course I can't see what he sees in her . . . pale and haggard as she is. Now with him it's different. He's . . . well." She halted suddenly, adding, "This fowl is tough, Pearl . . . I'm sorry it happened when you were dining with me." And then, "I suppose it's money he's after. She must be very rich."
The butler, after bringing more rich food, disappeared again and this time, Miss Abercrombie, casting to the winds all restraint, rose and said, "I'm going to bring my chair nearer, Belle. I can't talk all the way from this end of the table."
And she moved her chair and plate to a more strategic position so that when the butler returned, he found the two women sitting quite close to each other, their heads together, their voices lowered to the most confidential of pitches. Fragments of their talk reached an ear long trained to eavesdropping upon old women.
"But Lily is the one," drifted to the ear. "I'd really like to know the truth about her. Of course blood is thicker than water. They say she . . ." Mrs. Harrison rattled the ice in her glass, thus destroying the remainder of the sentence.
So they sat until near midnight—two old women, one of them at the end of a life barren of love, the other abandoned by love forever and cast aside, a slowly decaying mass of fat—pawing over the affairs of two women for whom the force of love in some manifestation or other was still a radiant reality. They knew nothing; they possessed only suspicions and fragments of gossip, but out of these they succeeded in patching together a mosaic which glowed with all the colors of the most glamorous sin and the most romantic passion.
