up the street,
every person whom he passed turned to glance after him.

"I wonder if it is true that he hasn't made his money honestly?" asked
Virginia.

"Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed Mrs. Pendleton, who in her natural desire to
believe only good about people was occasionally led into believing the
truth.

"Well, I don't care," retorted Virginia, "he's mean. I know just by the
way his wife dresses."

"Oh, Jinny!" gasped Mrs. Pendleton, and glanced in embarrassment at her
nephew, whose face, to her surprise, was beaming with enjoyment. The
truth was that John Henry, who would have condemned so unreasonable an
accusation had it been uttered by a full-grown male, was enraptured by
the piquancy of hearing it on the lovely lips of his cousin. To demand
that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility of a human
being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of gallantry.
His slow wit was enslaved by Jinny's audacity as completely as his kind
ox-like eyes were enthralled by the young red and white of her beauty.

"But he's a great man. You can't deny that," he said with the playful
manner in which he might have prodded a kitten in order to make it claw.

"A great man! Just because he has made money!"

"Well, he couldn't have got rich, you know, if he hadn't had the sense
to see how to do it," replied the young man with enthusiasm. Like most
Southerners who had been forced without preparation into the hard school
of industry, he had found that his standards followed inevitably the
changing measure of his circumstances. From his altered point of view,
the part of owing property appeared so easy, and the part of winning it
so difficult, that his respect for culture had yielded almost
unconsciously to his admiration for commerce. When the South came again
to the front, he felt instinctively that it would come, shorn of its
traditional plumage, a victor from the hard-fought industrial
battlefields of the century; and because Cyrus Treadwell led the way
toward this triumph, he was ready to follow him. Of the whole town, this
grim, half legendary figure (passionately revered and as passionately
hated) appeared to him to stand alone not for the decaying past, but for
the growing future. The stories of the too rapid development of the
Treadwell fortune he cast scornfully aside as the malicious slanders of
failure. What did all this tittle-tattle about a great man prove anyhow
except his greatness? Suppose