She got one for him, struck the match herself. He watched her, loafing lordly; very handsome and dear he looked in his beautiful evening clothes.
And thence, in the lamplit privacy of the little study,--Mr. Heth having fared forth to a Convention "banquet,"--the talk ranged wide. Late in the evening, it returned again to Carlisle, as the possessor of large independent funds, a topic of pleasurable possibilities from her standpoint.
She said idly: "Do you believe it makes you happy to give away money, Hugo? That's a rule I heard somewhere."
"Unquestionably one of the most refined ways known of tickling one's little vanity.... How full of good deeds you are these days. You're thinking of the poor again, I'm right?"
"I must have been. There's nobody else who'd take money from you, is there?"
"Oh, isn't there? I must introduce you to high finance some day."
"Well," said Carlisle, "I meant just to give it away--to anybody--just to show how free and superior you are, or something.... Silly, isn't it? What's your happiness rule, Hugo?"
He replied with the readiness of a man who has been over this path long ago:
"To have the capacity to want things very much, and the ability to get them."
And he squeezed the little hand he held, as if to say that he had both wanted much and gotten much.
Carlisle was much struck with this rule, which she now saw to have been her own and mamma's all their lives long. After duly complimenting Hugo upon it, she said:
"Here's another one, a man told me once: 'Cultivate your sympathies all the time, and do something useful.'"
"That's orthodox! It was a young curate with a lisp who told you, I'll wager."
"Very warm!" she laughed, struck again by his astuteness. "It was your hoodoo--Dr. Vivian! And, oh, now that I think of it, he gave me that other pointer, too,--about giving away money."
Hugo replied: "The man seems to be dripping with wise old saws, in a thoroughly inexpensive sort of way.... Well, we'll show him something about giving away money some day."
He was silent a moment, and Carlisle then remembered her thought of another large subscription to the Settlement, which she, for her part, could easily make now with fifty thousand dollars all her own. But Canning obliterated all such reflections by turning and taking her abruptly in his arms.