awed upon its prey?

"Madame Beattie," said he, "if I had money you should have it. Right or
wrong you should have it if it would buy you out of here. But I haven't
got it."

"It's there you are a fool," she said, moved actually now by his
numbness to his own endowment. "I could beat my head and scream, when I
think how you're throwing things away, your time, in that beastly night
school, your power, your personal charm. Jeff, you've the devil's own
luck. You were born with it. And you simply won't use it."

He had said that himself in a moment of hope not long before: that he
had the devil's own luck. But he wasn't going to accept it from her.

"You talk of luck," he said, "to a man just out of jail."

"You needn't have been in jail," she was hurling at him in an unpleasant
intensity of tone, as if she would have liked to scream it and the quiet
street denied her. "If you hadn't pleaded guilty, if you hadn't handed
over every scrap of evidence, if you had been willing to take advantage
of what that clerk was ready to swear--why, you might have got off and
kept on in business and be a millionaire to-day."

How she managed to know some of the things she did he never fathomed.
He had never seen anybody of the direct and shameless methods of Madame
Beattie, willing to ask the most intimate questions, make the most
unscrupulous demands. He remembered the young clerk who had wanted to
perjure himself for his sake.

"That would have made a difference, I suppose," he said, "young
Williams' testimony. I wonder how he happened to think of it."

"He thought of it because I went to him," said Madame Beattie. "I said,
'Isn't there anything you could swear to that would help him?' He knew
at once. He turned white as a sheet. 'Yes,' he said, 'and I'll swear to
it.' I told him we'd make it worth his while."

"You did?" said Jeff. "Well, there's another illusion gone. I took a
little comfort in young Williams. I thought he was willing to perjure
himself because he had an affection for me. So you were to make it worth
his while."

She laughed a little, indifferently, with no bitterness, but in
retrospect of a scene where she had been worsted.

"You needn't mourn that lost ideal," she said. "Young Williams showed me
the door. It was in your office, and he actually did show me the door.
He was glad to perjure himself, he said, for you. Not for money. Not for
me."

Jeff laughed out.

"Well," he said, "that's something to th