er's
abrupt conclusion, John Valiant, who had withstood that pitiless hail
of questions, rose, bowed to him and slowly crossed the cleared space
to his counsel. The chairman looked severely over his eye-glasses, with
his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the rear of the room, laid
her delicately gloved hand on a companion's and smiled slowly without
withdrawing her gaze, and with the faintest tint of color in her face.

Katharine Fargo neither smiled nor flushed readily. Her smile was an
index of her whole personality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely
perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked somewhat out of
place in that mixed assemblage. They had not gasped at the tale of the
Corporation's unprecedented earnings, the lavish expenditure for its
palatial offices. The recital of the tragic waste, the nepotism, the
mole-like ramifications by which the vast structure had been undermined,
had left them rather amusedly and satirically appreciative. Smartly
groomed and palpably members of a set to whom John Valiant was a
familiar, they had had only friendly nods and smiles for the young man
at whom so many there had gazed with jaundiced eyes.

To the general public which read its daily newspaper perhaps none
of the gilded set was better known than "Vanity Valiant." The very
nickname--given him by his fellows in facetious allusion to a flippant
newspaper paragraph laying at his door the alleged new fashion of a
masculine vanity-box--had taken root in the fads and elegancies he
affected. The new Panhard he drove was the smartest car on the avenue,
and the collar on the white bulldog that pranced or dozed on its leather
seat sported a diamond buckle. To the space-writers of the social
columns, he had been a perennial inspiration. They had delighted to
herald a more or less bohemian gathering, into which he had smuggled
this pet, as a "dog-dinner"; and when one midnight, after a staid and
stodgy "bridge," in a gust of wild spirits he had, for a wager, jumped
into and out of a fountain on a deserted square, the act, dished up
by a night-hawking reporter had, the following Sunday, inspired three
metropolitan sermons on "The Idle Rich." The patterns of his waistcoats,
and the splendors of his latest bachelors' dinner at Sherry's--with such
items the public had been kept sufficiently familiar. To it, he stood
a perfect symbol of the eider ease and insolent display of inherited
wealth. And the great majority of those