d of the folly into which exotic instruction
will lead a man. If I were to go at it now I'd turn the whole thing
around--I'd make it 'Art Inspiring Business.'"

Bertha did not follow his thought entirely, but she felt herself in the
presence of a serious problem and listening to something deep down in
the heart of a strong man. Here was another world--not an altogether
strange world, for Congdon had also talked to her of his work--but a
world so far removed from her own life that it seemed some other planet.
"How well he talks," she thought. "Like a book."

"How charming she is," he was thinking. And the alert, aspiring pose of
her head made his thumb nervously munch at the bit of clay he had picked
up.

They wandered up and down the long room while he showed her tiles for
mantel decoration, bronze cats' heads for door-knobs, and curious and
lovely figures for lamps and ash-trays. "I take a shy at 'most
everything," he explained.

"Do you sell these?" she asked, indicating some designs for electric
desk-lamps.

He smiled. "Sometimes--not as often as I'd like to."

"How much are they?"

"Fifty dollars each."

"I'll take them both," she said, and her pulse leaped with the pride of
being a patron of art.

"Now see here, Mrs. Haney, I'm not displaying these to you as a
salesman--not that I'm so very delicate about offering my things, but I
try to wait till a second visit." He really did feel mean about it.
"Don't take 'em--wait till to-morrow. They're pretty middling bad
anyway. They're supposed to be mountain lions, but as a matter of fact I
never saw a mountain lion outside the Zoo."

"They're lions, all right. I want 'em, and I know the Captain will like
'em." She stepped back to call Haney. But finding him surrounded by all
of the other callers (they had "got him going" telling stories of his
wild life in the West), she turned to the sculptor with a smile, saying:
"Never mind, _I_ know they're what he needs--if he don't." And Moss,
recalling Congdon's description of the Haneys' material condition,
answered: "Very well, if you insist; but I really feel as though I had
played a confidence game on you."

"Can you fix 'em up with lights?" she asked, eager as a child. "I mean
right now."

"Certainly." He unscrewed a couple of small bulbs from a near-by
bracket, and, putting them into place on the lamps, turned on the
current. She laughed out in delight. One of the lions was playing with
the stem which suppor