* * * * *

When Tomlinson had opened the telegram he stood with it for a moment in
his hand, looking the boy full in the face. His look had in it that
peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling "Napoleonic
abstraction." In reality he was wondering whether to give the boy
twenty-five cents or fifty.

The message that he had just read was worded, "Morning quotations show
preferred A. G. falling rapidly recommend instant sale no confidence
send instructions."

The Wizard of Finance took from his pocket a pencil (it was a
carpenter's pencil) and wrote across the face of the message: "Buy me
quite a bit more of the same yours truly."

This he gave to the boy. "Take it over to him," he said, pointing to
the telegraph corner of the rotunda. Then after another pause he
mumbled, "Here, sonny," and gave the boy a dollar.

With that he turned to walk towards the elevator, and all the people
about him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some big
financial deal was going through--a _coup_, in fact, they called it.

The elevator took the Wizard to the second floor. As he went up he felt
in his pocket and gripped a quarter, then changed his mind and felt for
a fifty-cent piece, and finally gave them both to the elevator boy,
after which he walked along the corridor till he reached the corner
suite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a thousand
dollars a month ever since the Erie Auriferous Consolidated Company had
begun tearing up the bed of Tomlinson's Creek in Cahoga County with its
hydraulic dredges.

"Well, mother," he said as he entered.

There was a woman seated near the window, a woman with a plain, homely
face such as they wear in the farm kitchens of Cahoga County, and a set
of fashionable clothes upon her such as they sell to the ladies of
Plutoria Avenue.

This was "mother," the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight years
younger than himself. And she, too, was in the papers and the public
eye; and whatsoever the shops had fresh from Paris, at fabulous prices,
that they sold to mother. They had put a Balkan hat upon her with an
upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything
that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see
her emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back
jacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatever
she wore, the lady editors of _Spring Not