lages, and
waiting about so pleasant and genial!--it made one realize how naturally
good-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss
Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off
again like autumn leaves.

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated
lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin
to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was
sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself:
and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have
had her arrested for assault.

Mind you, I don't mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Not
at all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heard
her recite "The Raven," at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And when
she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the
High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn't
have told it from the original.

So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her
resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to
a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading
actress.

But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The
moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough.
Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course,
within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from
the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba,
and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and
Heaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow,--it wasn't for a modest
man like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the world
are just one and the same crowd. If you're in it, you're in it, that's
all! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or
Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to.

For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself.
Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was no
certainty.

Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote to
Jeff. They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves. If a
man's got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away. Just
as well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till he
forces his way into it.