re simply
trying to ruin me--not him, but _me_. The president is a friend of
Mowbray's, and he'll call off this horrid investigation, and everything'll
be all right, if you'll only stop."

"Who sent you here?" I asked.

"I came of my own accord," she protested. Then, realizing from the sound of
her voice that she could not have convinced me with a tone so unconvincing,
she hedged with: "It was my own suggestion, really it was."

"Your husband permitted _you_ to come--and to _me_?"

She flushed.

"And you have accepted his overtures when you knew he made them only
because he needed your money?"

She hung her head. "I love him," she said simply. Then she looked straight
at me and I liked her expression. "A woman has no false pride when love is
at stake," she said. "We leave that to you men."

"Love!" I retorted, rather satirically, I imagine. "How much had your own
imperiled fortune to do with your being so forgiving?"

"Something," she admitted. "You must remember I have children. I must think
of their future. I don't want them to be poor. I want them to have the
station they were born to." She went to one of the windows overlooking the
street. "Look here!" she said.

I stood beside her. The window was not far above the street level. Just
below us was a handsome victoria, coachman, harness, horses, all most
proper, a footman rigid at the step. A crowd had gathered round--in those
stirring days when I was the chief subject of conversation wherever men
were interested in money--and where are they not?--there was almost always
a crowd before my offices. In the carriage sat two children, a boy and a
girl, hardly more than babies. They were gorgeously overdressed, after
the vulgar fashion of aristocrats and apers of aristocracy. They sat
stiffly, like little scions of royalty, with that expression of complacent
superiority which one so often sees on the faces of the little children of
the very rich--and some not so little, too. The thronging loungers, most
of them either immigrant peasants from European caste countries or the
un-disinfected sons of peasants, were gaping in true New York "lower class"
awe; the children were literally swelling with delighted vanity. If they
had been pampered pet dogs, one would have laughed. As they were human
beings, it filled me with sadness and pity. What ignorance, what stupidity
to bring up children thus in democratic America--democratic to-day,
inevitably more democratic to-morr