m
to-night did their best to screw out of me. If you say anything about it,
all's up between me and Wing. The fact that he picked me out to engineer
the thing, and that he's going to let me in if I push it through, is a
pretty good sign that he thinks something of my business ability, eh?"

"You'd better not tell me, Howard," she said.

"You're too clever to let it out," he assured her; and added with a
chuckle: "If it goes through, order what you like. Rent a house on
Bellevue Avenue--any thing in reason."

"What is it?" she asked, with a sudden premonition that the thing had a
vital significance for her.

"It's the greatest scheme extant," he answered with elation. "I won't go
into details--you wouldn't understand'em. Mr. Wing and some others have
tried the thing before, nearer home, and it worked like a charm. Street
railways. We buy up the little lines for nothing, and get an interest in
the big ones, and sell the little lines for fifty times what they cost
us, and guarantee big dividends for the big lines."

"It sounds to me," said Honora, slowly, "as though some one would get
cheated."

"Some one get cheated!" he exclaimed, laughing. "Every one gets cheated,
as you call it, if they haven't enough sense to know what their
property's worth, and how to use it to the best advantage. It's a case,"
he announced, "of the survival of the fittest. Which reminds me that if
I'm going to be fit to-morrow I'd better go to bed. Mr. Wing's to take me
to New York on his yacht, and you've got to have your wits about you when
you talk to the old man."

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

Volume 6.

CHAPTER VI

CLIO, OR THALIA?

According to the ordinary and inaccurate method of measuring time, a
fortnight may have gone by since the event last narrated, and Honora had
tasted at last the joys of authorship. Her name was not to appear, to be
sure, on the cover of the Life and Letters of General Angus Chiltern; nor
indeed, so far, had she written so much as a chapter or a page of a work
intended to inspire young and old with the virtues of citizenship. At
present the biography was in the crucial constructive stage. Should the
letters be put in one volume, and the life in another? or should the
letters be inserted in the text of the life? or could not there be a
third and judicious mixture of both of these methods? Honora's counsel on
this and other problems was, it seems, invaluable. Her own table wa