“To me?”

“Certainly,” said Brent, “I don’t pretend to care anything about your husband.  He’ll do as well as the next man.  His duties are pretty well —­defined.”

Again she was silent.  But after a moment dropped back in her chair and laughed uneasily.

“You’re preposterous,” she said; “I can’t think why I let you talk to me in this way.”

CHAPTER VIII

OF MENTAL PROCESSES—­FEMININE AND INSOLUBLE

Honora may be pardoned for finally ascribing to Mr. Brent’s somewhat sardonic sense of humour his remarks concerning her husband’s elevation to a conspicuous position in the world of finance.  Taken in any other sense than a joke, they were both insulting and degrading, and made her face burn when she thought of them.  After he had gone—­or rather after she had dismissed him—­she took a book upstairs to wait for Howard, but she could not read.  At times she wished she had rebuked Trixton Brent more forcibly, although he was not an easy person to rebuke; and again she reflected that, had she taken the matter too seriously, she would have laid herself open to his ridicule.  The lion was often unwittingly rough, and perhaps that was part of his fascination.

If Howard had come home before midnight it is possible that she might have tried to sound him as to his relations with Trixton Brent.  That gentleman, she remembered, had the reputation of being a peculiarly hardheaded business man, and it was of course absurd that he should offer her husband a position merely to please her.  And her imagination failed her when she tried to think of Howard as the president of a trust company.  She was unable to picture him in a great executive office: 

This tram of thought led her to the unaccustomed task of analyzing his character.  For the first time since her marriage comparisons crept into her mind, and she awoke to the fact that he was not a masterful man—­even among men.  For all his self-confidence-self-assurance, perhaps, would be the better word—­he was in reality a follower, not a leader; a gleaner.  He did not lack ideas.  She tried to arrest the process in her brain when she got as far as asking herself whether it might not be that he lacked ideals.  Since in business matters he never had taken her into his confidence, and since she would not at any rate have understood such things, she had no proof of such a failing.  But one or two vague remarks of Trixton Brent’s which she recalled, and Howard’s own request that she should be friendly with Brent, reenforced her instinct on this point.