r himself and offered to sell at a
ruinous figure. A few well-timed tears, an expression of angelic
innocence on her beautiful face, a despairing gesture or two with her
lovely arms, coupled with the audacity which she had shown in forcing
an entrance into his office, effected the man's capitulation. She was
then in her twenty-fourth year.

The result was that she cast her net no more, but devoted herself
thenceforth with tender consecration to her important catch. In time
Ames brought a friend, the rollicking James Hawley-Crowles, to call
upon the charming Beaubien. In time, too, as was perfectly natural, a
rivalry sprang up between the men, which the beautiful creature
watered so tenderly that the investments which she was enabled to make
under the direction of these powerful rivals flourished like Jack's
beanstalk, and she was soon able to leave her small apartment and take
a suite but a few blocks from the Ames mansion.

At length the strain between Ames and Hawley-Crowles reached the
breaking point; and then the former decided that the woman's
bewitching smiles should thenceforth be his alone. He forthwith drew
the seldom sober Hawley-Crowles into certain business deals, with the
gentle connivance of the suave Beaubien herself, and at length sold
the man out short and presented a claim on every dollar he possessed.
Hawley-Crowles awoke from his blissful dream sober and trimmed. But
then the Beaubien experienced one of her rare and inexplicable
revulsions of the ethical sense, and a compromise had to be effected,
whereby the Hawley-Crowles fortune was saved, though the man should
see the Beaubien no more.

By this time her beauty was blooming in its utmost profusion, and her
prowess had been fairly tried. She took a large house, furnished it
like unto a palace, and proceeded to throw her gauntlet in the face of
the impregnable social caste. There she drew about her a circle of
bon-vivants, artists, litterateurs, politicians, and men of
finance--with never a woman in the group. Yet in her new home she
established a social code as rigid as the Median law, and woe to him
within her gates who thereafter, with or without intent, passed the
bounds of respectful decorum. His name was heard no more on her rosy
lips.

Her dinners were Lucullan in their magnificence; and over the rare
wines and imperial cigars which she furnished, her guests passed many
a tip and prognostication anent the market, which she in turn quietl