He laughed. "And Maud? Is she, too, well and happy?"
Dita lifted her hands and eyes. "That is a very tame way of describing her. Her gowns are dreams this spring, she is considered almost a beauty; people, you see, are gradually forgetting that she was ever 'that plain Maud Carmine who plays nicely,' and Wallace Martin and herself are engaged to be married." A faint, amused smile crept around her mouth at this announcement.
Hepworth looked up with sudden interest. "Indeed! Well, that might have been expected, I dare say, but will it not rather seriously interfere with the business?"
"No," she shook her head. "No, I think not, Maud has no intention of quitting. Wallace's plays are more or less problematical and Maud has invested a good deal of her money in this. It is really paying remarkably well, you know."
"Dita," his voice was low, and he could not conceal the chagrin, the touch of pain in it. "Why have you never touched a cent of your own money, since my departure? I only learned a few days ago that you had not. I can not begin to tell you how it made me feel. It not only distressed but deeply wounded me."
She twisted a little in her chair. "It--it has never been necessary," she said. "We began to make money at once. Really, Cresswell, Maud and I have prospered beyond our wildest dreams."
"But suppose you had not. Is your prosperity the only reason you have not touched it? Would you have done so under any circumstances? That is what I have been asking myself for the past week, and am now asking you."
She flushed uncertainly. "Ah," she said. "I can not answer you that. I can not tell. One never knows what one will do when the pinch comes."
He smiled faintly. "I'll not put any more embarrassing questions to you, but confine myself to perfectly safe topics. You are looking very well."
"And happy? But there, that is hardly a safe topic, is it?"
A sudden light came into her eyes, making them warm and softly bright. She smiled at him with a fresh, almost childlike enthusiasm. "Yes, I'm happy," she said, "happier than I've ever been in all my life. Why, Cresswell, it's been fun, fun. There's been lots of work, and lots of planning, but nevertheless, I've never enjoyed anything so much in my life. Often I go to bed at night tired out, but it's always with a comforting sense of satisfaction. It's all so varied and interesting, you know, but it isn't that that makes me happy." She clasped her hands and looked up at him with an unconscious appeal for sympathy and understanding in her eyes. "It's better than that, better than anything else. It's meant success, think of it, success. Not a horrid, little picayune one either, but a nice, big one."