“Oh, Mr. Ducie, how unkind!” cried Miss Dean.
“Yes, indeed,” with affected obduracy, “Ran must sigh his sighs, and hope his hopes, and shed his tears all by himself. For my own part I don’t deal in goods of that grade. But if ever he strikes on some nice little speculation, or discovers a gold mine, why I am his own only twin brother and I will come in with him on the ground floor.”
“And, speaking of business,” said Colonel Kenwynton, “how goes it in the south of France? Your brother did not accompany you.”
The group had taken chairs, and, with the permission of the ladies, Ducie had lighted his cigar. “No, Ran sticks to cotton through thick and thin. It is his creed that God never thought it worth while to create anything but the cotton plant, and the earth was evolved to grow and market it.”
Mrs. Floyd-Rosney was struggling with the species of discomposure which is incompatible with reserve and silence. “You went into the wine trade instead,” she made the parenthetical statement from an imperfect memory.
Mr. Ducie had that air of averse distaste which one feels in hearing one’s own affairs misrepresented. “Beg pardon,” he said, “I quitted New Orleans some six years ago with old Mr. Chenault; he was a wine merchant there, a branch of a Bordeaux house,--knew my father and used to furnish my grandfather’s cellar at Duciehurst in the long ago. He offered me an opening in the French house at Bordeaux, but I didn’t take kindly to the trade, and as the Chenaults had connections with the silk manufacturing interests in Lyons they contrived to wedge me in with their relatives.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had obviously lost her poise, “I remember now,--but I can’t recall who was speaking of you and your success the other day,--to be a junior partner in the concern.”
Adrian Ducie’s consciousness of the breach of the commercial verities turned him stiff. “Oh no! I?--a junior partner? Why, never in the world!” he exclaimed brusquely. Then, realizing that there was no reason for heat, since the matter had no concern for those present, he went on more suavely. “I occupy a sort of confidential and privileged relation to the members of the firm, owing chiefly to the value of the Chenault interest, but I have neither the responsibility nor the profits of a junior partner.”