beside me struck me forcibly as a supreme trait. Where she
had given, she did not withdraw. She had conferred it instantly on Maude.
Did I feel that loyalty towards a single human being? towards Maude
herself--my wife? or even towards Nancy? I pulled myself together, and
resolved to give her credit for using the word "smart" in its
unobjectionable sense. After all; Dickens had so used it.

"A lawyer must needs know something of what he is about, Mrs. Scherer, if
he is to be employed by such a man as your husband," I replied.

Her black eyes snapped with pleasure.

"Ah, I suppose that is so," she agreed. "I knew he was a great man when I
married him, and that was before Mr. Nathaniel Durrett found it out."

"But surely you did not think, in those days, that he would be as big as
he has become? That he would not only be president of the Boyne Iron
Works, but of a Boyne Iron Works that has exceeded Mr. Durrett's wildest
dreams."

She shook her head complacently.

"Do you know what I told him when he married me? I said, 'Adolf, it is a
pity you are born in Germany.' And when he asked me why, I told him that
some day he might have been President of the United States."

"Well, that won't be a great deprivation to him," I remarked. "Mr.
Scherer can do what he wants, and the President cannot."

"Adolf always does as he wants," she declared, gazing at him as he sat
beside the brilliant wife of the grandson of the man whose red-shirted
foreman he had been. "He does what he wants, and gets what he wants. He
is getting what he wants now," she added, with such obvious meaning that
I found no words to reply. "She is pretty, that Mrs. Durrett, and
clever,--is it not so?"

I agreed. A new and indescribable note had come into Mrs. Scherer's
voice, and I realized that she, too, was aware of that flaw in the
redoubtable Mr. Scherer which none of his associates had guessed. It
would have been strange if she had not discovered it. "She is beautiful,
yes," the lady continued critically, "but she is not to compare with your
wife. She has not the heart,--it is so with all your people of society.
For them it is not what you are, but what you have done, and what you
have."

The banality of this observation was mitigated by the feeling she threw
into it.

"I think you misjudge Mrs. Durrett," I said, incautiously. "She has never
before had the opportunity of meeting Mr. Scherer of appreciating him."

"Mrs. Durrett is an old friend of