t.

"I know you'll win--you never fail!" she cried, "You'll not lose a
moment?"

"No. I'll 'phone him at once."

Bivens called Stuart and made an appointment to meet him at the
Algonquin Club for dinner two days later.

"Why two days' delay?" Nan asked petulantly.

"It will require that time to prepare the papers. Don't worry. I'll put
the thing through now."

When Stuart sat down with Bivens in one of the magnificent private
dining rooms of his millionaire club two days later, he was struck with
the perfection of the financier's dress, and the easy elegance of his
manners.

"Nan has surely done wonders with some pretty crude material!" he
mused.

As the meal progressed the lawyer's imagination continued to picture
the process of training through which she had put Bivens to develop
from the poor white Southerner, the polished little man of the gilded
world he now saw. No flight of his fancy could imagine the real humour
of it all. He recalled Nan's diary with grim amusement.

While Bivens had really been wax in her skillful hands since the day of
her marriage, the one task she found hard was her desperate and
determined effort to make him a well-groomed man. She was finally
compelled to write out instructions for his daily conduct and enforce
them with all sorts of threats and blandishments. She pasted this
programme in Bivens's hat, at last, and he was in mortal terror lest
some one should lift the inside band and read them. They were minute
and painfully insistent on the excessive use of soap and water. They
required that he wash and scrub two and three times daily. Not only did
they prescribe tooth brushes and mouth washes, with all sorts of pastes
and powders, but that he should follow it with an invention of the
devil for torturing the gums known as "dental floss." To get even with
the man who invented the thing Bivens bought him out and stopped its
manufacture--only to find the scoundrel had invented a new one and had
it on the market three weeks later.

In the midst of this agony of breaking him to the copious use of water,
Bivens found a doctor who boldly declared that excessive bathing was
ruinous to the health--that water was made for fish and air for man.
The little millionaire made him chief of the staff of his household
doctors, but Nan refused to admit him when she learned his views.
Bivens secretly built him a hospital, endowed it, and gave a fund to
found a magazine to proclaim his gospel.