course I get it at
the same price as others--fifty per cent."

"Did they understand you'd get fifty thousand instead of twenty-five
thousand?" she asked.

He chuckled again.

"If they didn't they will," he admitted.

She pondered over that thoughtfully for a while.

"Is that straight business?" she inquired.

"Of course it's straight business or I wouldn't be doing it. It is
perfectly legitimate. You just don't understand."

"No," she confessed, "I guess I don't; only I thought it was just
twenty-five per cent."

"It is twenty-five per cent.," he insisted, and then he gave it up.
"You'd better quit thinking," he advised. "It'll put wrinkles in your
brow, and I'm the one that has the wrinkles scheduled. I've just
contracted for one hundred thousand dollars' worth of advertising, and
I've got to go out to sell enough stock to bring in the cash. Also,
I've rented a factory, and to-morrow I'm going to let out contracts
for bottling machinery, vats and fixtures. I've already ordered the
office furniture. You ought to see it. It's swell. I'm having some
lithographed stationery made, too, embossed in four colors, with a
picture of Doctor Quagg in the corner."

"How much stock has the doctor?" she asked.

"Ten thousand."

"Is that all he's going to have?" she wanted to know.

"Why, certainly, that's all he's going to have. I made the bargain
with him and he's satisfied."

"Ten thousand dollars' worth out of a half-million-dollar corporation?
Why, Jim, for his medicine, upon which the whole business is built, he
only gets--how much is that of all of it?"

"One fiftieth, or two per cent.," he told her.

"Two per cent.!" she gasped. "Is that straight business, Jim?"

"Of course it's straight business," he assured her. "Of course," and
he smiled, "Doc didn't stop to figure that he only gets two per cent.
of the profits of the concern. He figures that he's to draw dividends
on the large hunk of ten thousand dollars' worth of stock, and he's
satisfied. Why aren't you?"

"I don't know," she replied slowly, still with the vague feeling that
something was wrong. "Really, Jim, it don't seem to me that straight
business is any more fair than crooked business."

Wallingford was hugely disappointed.

"And that's all the appreciation I get for confining myself to the
straight and narrow!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, I didn't mean that, Jim," she said, with instant contrition. "You
don't know how glad I am that now, since