d a roll of bills that
would have choked an ox."

"Where is he now?"

"Up stairs playing the wheel."

Ben shook his head. He had his salary in his pocket, and he vividly
remembered what roulette had done to it a fortnight gone.

"If Bolles is drunk, it wouldn't do any good to talk to him." Ben
sighed and drank his liquor neat. He was tired.

Chapter XIII

Regularly once a week Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene visited a hair-dresser.
This distinguished social leader employed a French maid who was very
adept at dressing hair, but the two never got along very well
verbally; Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene insisted on speaking in broken French
while the maid persisted in broken English. Such conversation is
naturally disjointed and leads nowhere. The particular hair-dresser
who received Mrs. Haldene's patronage possessed a lively imagination
together with an endless chain of gossip. Mrs. Haldene was superior to
gossiping with servants, but a hair-dresser is a little closer in
relation to life. Many visited her in the course of a week, and some
had the happy faculty of relieving their minds of what they saw and
heard regardless of the social status of the listener. Mrs. Haldene
never came away from the hair-dresser's empty-handed; in fact, she
carried away with her food for thought that took fully a week to
digest.

Like most places of its kind, the establishment was located in the
boarding-house district; but this did not prevent fashionable
carriages from stopping at the door, nor the neighboring boarders from
sitting on their front steps and speculating as to whom this or that
carriage belonged. There was always a maid on guard in the hall; she
was very haughty and proportionately homely. It did not occur to the
proprietress that this maid was a living advertisement of her
incompetence to perform those wonders stated in the neat little
pamphlets piled on the card-table; nor did it impress the patrons, who
took it for granted that the maid, naturally enough, could not afford
to have the operation of beauty performed.

A woman with wrinkles is always hopeful.

A strange medley of persons visited this house, each seeking in her
own peculiar way the elixir of life, which is beauty, or the potion of
love, which is beauty's handmaiden. There were remedies plus remedies;
the same skin-food was warranted to create double-chins or destroy
them; the same tonic killed superfluous hair or made it grow on bald
spots. A freckle to erad