reality it had made no difference to the Big Financier, who knew his man
and, with wide-open eyes, did what he had done.

Virginie was not subtle. She did not understand, was never satisfied
with allusions, and she had no gift for catching the drift of things.
She could endure no peradventure in her conversation. She wanted plain
speaking and to be literally sure.

"Are you going to take it?" she asked abruptly.

He could not bear to be checked in his course. He waved a hand and
smiled at her. Then his eyes seemed to travel away into the distance,
the look of the dreamer in them; but behind all was that strange, ruddy
underglow of revelation which kept emerging from shadows, retreating and
emerging, yet always there now, in much or in little, since the burning
of the mill.

"I've lent a good deal of money without security in my time," he
reflected, "but the only people who ever paid me back were a deaf and
dumb man and a flyaway--a woman that was tired of selling herself, and
started straight and right with the money I lent her. She had been the
wife of a man who studied with me at Laval. She paid me back every
penny, too, year by year for five years. The rest I lent money to never
paid; but they paid, the dummy and the harlot that was, they paid! But
they paid for the rest also! If I had refused these two because of the
others, I'd not be fit to visit at Neighbourhood House where Virginie
Poucette lives."

He looked closely at the order she had given him again, as though to let
it sink in his mind and be registered for ever. "I'm going to do without