he centre of
Bettina Vanderpoel's world instead of in that of some little cash girl
with hair raked back from a sallow face, who stared at her as she passed
in a shop--or in that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent
in serving her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over
ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness ease for
the rest of existence? What did it mean? And what Law was laid upon her?
What Law which could only work through her and such as she who had
been born with almost unearthly power laid in their hands--the reins
of monstrous wealth, which guided or drove the world? Sometimes fear
touched her, as with this light touch an her heart, because she did not
KNOW the Law and could only pray that her guessing at it might be right.
And, even as she thought these things, G. Selden went on.

"You never can know," he said, "because you've always been in it. And
the rest of the world can't know, because they've never been anywhere
near it." He stopped and evidently fell to thinking.

"Tell me about the rest of the world," said Betty quietly.

He laughed again.

"Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn't know a thing about it.
And it's queer. It's the rest of us that mounts up when you come to
numbers. I guess it'd run into millions. I'm not thinking of beggars and
starving people, I've been rushing the Delkoff too steady to get onto
any swell charity organisation, so I don't know about them. I'm just
thinking of the millions of fellows, and women, too, for the matter of
that, that waken up every morning and know they've got to hustle for
their ten per or their fifteen per--if they can stir it up as thick as
that. If it's as much as fifty per, of course, seems like to me, they're
on Easy Street. But sometimes those that's got to fifty per--or even
more--have got more things to do with it--kids, you know, and more rent
and clothes. They've got to get at it just as hard as we have. Why, Miss
Vanderpoel, how many people do you suppose there are in a million that
don't have to worry over their next month's grocery bills, and the rent
of their flat? I bet there's not ten--and I don't know the ten."

He did not state his case uncheerfully. "The rest of the world"
represented to him the normal condition of things.

"Most married men's a bit afraid to look an honest grocery bill in the
face. And they WILL come in--as regular as spring hats. And I tell YOU,
when a man's got to l