had taken a freer hand and had changed some of the investments
unknown to his wife. He had put the money into local enterprises, of
which the men he met told him, but about which he could know very
little. There were new water-power companies up in the mountains, and
there was especially the Seaboard Railroad and Development Company--a
daring scheme for opening up a tract of land along the northern coast of
California. Into this last venture Archie had put much more of Adelle's
money than he liked to remember. It was a pet project of the men he knew
best in the Bellevue Club--the polo-playing set. The Honorable George
Pointer was very active in Seaboard, representing an English syndicate
that was supposed to be backing the enterprise with ample funds, and for
this reason the Pointers had prolonged their California sojourn beyond
the usual term. Seaboard, it was said, would prove eventually to be much
more important than a short line of new railroad developing a desolate
stretch of the Pacific: it was to be used as a club upon one of the
older railroads. The best families of the State were heavily interested
in it, the younger generation of bloods expecting by means of it to
rival the railroading exploits of their fathers, whose fortunes, as
everybody knows, were acquired in the golden seventies and eighties in
much the same way. (And when the explosion in Seaboard came off, it left
deep scars all through California society.)

All this Archie tried to make Adelle understand, when unexpectedly she
gained a knowledge of his operations in Seaboard. She happened to open
some letters from his brokers that came to Archie during his
absence--letters that clamored for more ready money with which to pay
for options that Archie had taken upon the common stock of the new
company. Adelle was disturbed when she discovered that more than a
million of her money had already gone into Seaboard. The couple had some
sharp words about the matter, in which Adelle put the thing rather too
bluntly to Archie,--

"What do you know about railroads? You aren't a business man--you never
earned a dollar in business in your life!"

Adelle was probably remembering how she had given Archie the only order
he had ever received for his painting. Archie naturally resented her
allusion to his penniless and dependent state. He knew, he asserted,
quite as much as other men, whom he instanced, all of whom managed their
wives' money affairs without being scol