to
forget. The day your father died I dropped in on Victor and told
him--him and Selma Gordon--about it. And both asked me to take you
their sympathy. They said a great deal about your love for your
father, and how sad it was to lose him. They were really distressed."

Jane's face almost brightened. "I've been rather hurt because I hadn't
received a word of sympathy from--them," she said.

"They'd have come, themselves, except that politics has made a very
ugly feeling against them--and Galland's your brother-in-law."

"I understand," said Jane. "But I'm not Galland--and not of that
party."

"Oh, yes, you are of that party," replied Charlton. "You draw your
income from it, and one belongs to whatever he draws his income from.
Civilization means property--as yet. And it doesn't mean men and
women--as yet. So, to know the man or the woman we look at the
property."

"That's hideously unjust," cried Jane.

"Don't be utterly egotistical," said Charlton. "Don't attach so much
importance to your little, mortal, WEAK personality. Try to realize
that you're a mere chip in the great game of chance. You're a chip with
the letter P on it--which stands for Plutocracy. And you'll be played
as you're labeled."

"You make it very hard for any one to like you."

"Well--good-by, then."

And ignoring her hasty, half-laughing, half-serious protests he took
himself away. She was intensely irritated. A rapid change in her
outward character had been going forward since her father's death--a
change in the direction of intensifying the traits that had always been
really dominant, but had been less apparent because softened by other
traits now rapidly whithering.

The cause of the change was her inheritance.

Martin Hastings, remaining all his life in utter ignorance of the showy
uses of wealth and looking on it with the eyes of a farm hand, had
remained the enriched man of the lower classes, at heart a member of
his original class to the end. The effect of this upon Jane had been
to keep in check all the showy and arrogant, all the upper class,
tendencies which education and travel among the upper classes of the
East and of Europe had implanted in her. So long as plain old Martin
lived, she could not FEEL the position she had--or, rather, would some
day have--in the modern social system. But just as soon as he passed
away, just as soon as she became a great heiress, actually in
possession of that which made the