What else had the old man expected but chicanery when he dabbled in the Pool. It was nothing but a clutching whirlpool of hands trying to grasp at a golden sovereign in the centre! Every one clutched, he as much as any one. Then with a jar, his mind reverted to the shade of many a tree he had seen in India, where men lived, and apparently lived happily, possessed of nothing but their souls, devoid of all things save the inevitable garment of flesh.
This certainly was not it, he thought, as with a smiling apology he slipped into the empty place and found himself in the battle-ground of a heated discussion.
A trifle dazzling surely, these lights and flowers and fair women. Helen looked well in white at the head of the table between Mr. Hirsch and Dr. Ramsay; and, thank Heaven! she had left off weepers in the evening. What a difference there was between lace and stiff crimped muslin; and how young she looked.
The rapidity of thought is immeasurable, the velocity of its vibration untranslatable in terms of mere human flesh and blood. These thoughts and millions of others suggested by the whole _entourage_ which in a second became part of Ned Blackborough's life-experience, passed into his mind and left him free at once to listen to his cousin's gay--
"Here's Ned! I'll appeal to him! Do you think it fair that we women shouldn't have votes?"
"We shall have to settle our terminology first, Helen," he replied in the same tone. "What is fair? I presume what Mrs. Tressilian considers to be right."
"_That_ isn't fair if you like," she retorted. "Fair is"--she paused.
"Exactly so!" laughed Peter Ramsay. "Is there an outside standard or is there not? That is the question."
Mr. Hirsch, who always wore white waistcoats in the evening (they were not so becoming as black ones) answered it.
"Of course there is a standard--the general consensus of opinion."
"Made up of units?" suggested Dr. Ramsay.
"Quite so!" retorted the financier, "but it gives the limit of safety. Between certain lines you can negotiate--even on the Stock Exchange, ha, ha!" His laugh was curiously explosive and shook him from head to foot.
"But surely there _is_ a standard," said Helen softly.
"There is a standard which, collectively, we accept, Helen. It comes back in the end to our personal verdict, I'm afraid," said her cousin, "and it is curious how that verdict varies," he continued addressing Mr. Hirsch. "You, I expect, believe in the law of supply and demand. Now, I feel, somehow, that if I were to charge a thousand pounds for a glass of water which a distracted husband wanted for his dying wife, I should be doing a detestably mean thing, even though the man was quite willing and able to pay for it." There was a pause.