Vansittart's dark eyes. She glanced across the
yellow sand hills, where the works were effectually concealed by the
rise and fall of the wind-swept land, from whence came no sign of human
life, and only at times, when the north wind blew, a faint and not
unpleasant odour like the smell of sealing-wax. For all that the world
knew of the malgamite workers, they might have been a colony of lepers.
"You speak," said Mrs. Vansittart, "as if you were a failure instead of
a brilliant success. I think"--she paused for a moment, as if the
thought were a real one and not a mere conversational convenience, as
are the thoughts of most people--"that the cream of social life
consists of the cheery failures."
"I have no faith in my own luck," answered Percy Roden, gloomily, whose
world was a narrow one, consisting as it did of himself and his
bank-book. Moreover, most men draw aside readily enough the curtain
that should hide the world in which they live, whereas women take their
stand before their curtain and talk, and talk--of other things.
Mrs. Vansittart had never for a moment been mistaken in her estimate of
her companion, of--as he considered himself--her lover. She had
absolutely nothing in common with him. She was a physically lazy, but a
mentally active woman, whose thoughts ran to abstract matters so
persistently that they brought her to the verge of abstraction itself.
Percy Roden, on the other hand, would, with better health, have been an
athlete.
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