They had planned to go for a spin in Mortimer's motor after dinner, but in view of the Quarrier fiasco neither was in the mood for anything.
Mortimer, as usual, ate and drank heavily. He was a carnivorous man, and liked plenty of thick, fat, underdone meat. As for Lydia, her appetite was as erratic as her own impulses. Her table, always wastefully elaborate, no doubt furnished subsistence for all the relatives of her household below stairs, and left sufficient for any ambitious butler to make a decent profit on.
"Do you know, Leroy," she observed, as they left the table and sauntered back into the pale blue drawing-room, "do you know that the servants haven't been paid for three months?"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake," he expostulated, "don't begin that sort of thing! I get enough of that at home; I get it every time I show my nose!"
"I only mentioned it," she said carelessly.
"I heard you all right. It isn't any pleasanter for me than for you. In fact, I'm sick of it; I'm dead tired of being up against it every day of my life. When a man has anything somebody gets it before he can sidestep. When a man's dead broke there's nobody in sight to touch."
"You had an opportunity to make Howard pay you back."
"Didn't I tell you I missed him?"
"Yes. What are you going to do?"
"Do?"
"Of course. You are going to do something, I suppose."
They had reached the gold and green room above. Lydia began pacing the length of a beautiful Kermanshah rug--a pale, delicate marvel of rose and green on a ground of ivory--lovely, but doomed to fade sooner than the pretty woman who trod it with restless, silk-shod feet.
Mortimer had not responded to her last question. She said presently: "You have never told me how you intend to make him pay you back."
"What?" inquired Mortimer, turning very red.
"I said that you haven't yet told me how you intend to make Howard return the money you lost through his juggling with your stock."
"I don't exactly know myself," admitted Mortimer, still overflushed. "I mean to put it to him squarely, as a debt of honour that he owes. I asked him whether to invest. Damn him! he never warned me not to. He is morally responsible. Any man who would sit there and nod monotonously like a mandarin, knowing all the while what he was doing to wreck the company, and let a friend put into a rotten concern all the cash he could scrape together, is a swindler!"
"I think so too," she said, studying the rose arabesques in the rug.