"I'm going a long way--right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to call on some people there."
"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a friend of Mr. Ruston's."
"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting--inspiring."
"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry him, Berthe."
"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."
"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."
"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who----"
Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word. Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.
"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.
Mrs. Dennison started with a smile on her face. Berthe was so funny; she was like a page out of a French novel. She loved anything not quite respectable, and peopled the world with heroes of loose morals and overpowering wills. She adored a dominating mind and lived in the discovery of affinities. What nonsense it all was--so very remote from the satisfactory humdrum of real life. One kept house, and gave dinners, and made the children happy, and was fond of one's husband, and life passed most----Here Mrs. Dennison suddenly yawned, and fell to hoping that the Carlins would not be oppressively dull. She had been bored all day long; the children had been fretful, and poor Harry was hurt and in low spirits because of a cruel caricature in a comic paper, and Tom Loring had scolded her for laughing at the caricature (it hit Harry off so exactly), and nobody had come to see her, except a wretch who had once been her kitchenmaid, and had come to terrible grief, and wanted to be taken back, and of course couldn't be, and had to be sent away in tears with a sovereign, and the tears were no use and the sovereign not much.
The Carlins fortunately proved tolerably interesting in their own way. Carlin was about fifty-five--an acute man of business, it seemed, and possessed by an unwavering confidence in the abilities of Willie Ruston. Mrs. Carlin was ten or fifteen years younger than her husband--a homely little woman, with a swarm of children. Mrs. Dennison wondered how they all fitted into the small house, but was told that it was larger by two good rooms than their old dwelling in the country town, whence Willie had summoned them to take a hand in his schemes. Willie had not insisted on the coal business being altogether abandoned--as Mrs. Carlin said, with a touch of timidity, it was well to have something to fall back upon--but he required most of Carlin's time now, and the added work made residence in London a necessity. In spite of Mr. Carlin's air of hard-headedness, and his wife's prudent recognition of the business aspect of life, they neither of them seemed to have a will of their own. Willie--as they both called him--was the Providence, and the mixture of reverence and familiarity presented her old acquaintance in a new light to Maggie Dennison. Even the children prattled about "Willie," and their mother's rebukes made "Mr. Ruston" no more than a strange and transitory effort. Mrs. Dennison wondered what there was in the man--consulting her own recollections of him in hope of enlightenment.