Nancy's eyes twinkled as they passed on.

"You see what I have let you in for?" I said.

"My dear Hugh," she replied, "sooner or later we should have had to face
them anyhow. I have recognized that for some time. With their money, and
Mr. Scherer's prestige, and the will of that lady with the stick, in a
few years we should have had nothing to say. Why, she's a female
Napoleon. Hilda's the man of the family."

After that, Nancy invariably referred to Mrs. Scherer as Hilda.

If Mrs. Scherer was a surprise to us, her husband was a still greater
one; and I had difficulty in recognizing the Adolf Scherer who came to
our dinner party as the personage of the business world before whom
lesser men were wont to cringe. He seemed rather mysteriously to have
shed that personality; become an awkward, ingratiating, rather too
exuberant, ordinary man with a marked German accent. From time to time I
found myself speculating uneasily on this phenomenon as I glanced down
the table at his great torso, white waist-coated for the occasion. He was
plainly "making up" to Nancy, and to Mrs. Ogilvy, who sat opposite him.
On the whole, the atmosphere of our entertainment was rather electric.
"Hilda" was chiefly responsible for this; her frankness was of the
breath-taking kind. Far from attempting to hide or ignore the struggle by
which she and her husband had attained their present position, she
referred with the utmost naivete to incidents in her career, while the
whole table paused to listen.

"Before we had a carriage, yes, it was hard for me to get about. I had to
be helped by the conductors into the streetcars. I broke my hip when we
lived in Steelville, and the doctor was a numbskull. He should be put in
prison, is what I tell Adolf. I was standing on a clothes-horse, when it
fell. I had much washing to do in those days."

"And--can nothing be done, Mrs. Scherer?" asked Leonard Dickinson,
sympathetically.

"For an old woman? I am fifty-five. I have had many doctors. I would put
them all in prison. How much was it you paid Dr. Stickney, in New York,
Adolf? Five thousand dollars? And he did nothing--nothing. I'd rather be
poor again, and work. But it is well to make the best of it."...

"Your grandfather was a fine man, Mr. Durrett," she informed Hambleton.
"It is a pity for you, I think, that you do not have to work."

Ham, who sat on her other side, was amused.

"My grandfather did enough work for both of us," he said.

"If