as modern and
competent as a cross-roads store. This isn't a dream. These are facts.
You know how my mind works. Like a cold chisel. I can see this whole
country--and Europe, too, after the war--God, yes!--stretched out before
us like a patient before expert surgeons. You to attend to its heart,
and I to its bones and ligaments. I can put you where no other woman
has ever been. I've a hundred new plans this minute, and a hundred
more waiting to be born. So have you. I tell you it's just a matter of
buildings. Of bricks and stone, and machinery and people to make the
machinery go. Once we get those--and it's only a matter of months--we
can accomplish things I daren't even dream of. What was Haynes-Cooper
fifteen years ago? What was the North American Cloak and Suit Company?
The Peter Johnston Stores, of New York? Wells-Kayser? Nothing. They
didn't exist. And this year Haynes-Cooper is declaring a twenty-five per
cent dividend. Do you get what that means? But of course you do. That's
the wonder of it. I never need explain things to you. You've a genius
for understanding."

Fanny had been sitting back in her chair, crouching almost, her
eyes fixed upon the man's face, so terrible in its earnestness and
indomitable strength. When he stopped talking now, and stood looking
down at her, she rose, too, her eyes still on his face. She was twisting
the fingers of one hand in the fingers of the other, in a frightened
sort of way.

"I'm not really a business woman. I--wait a minute, please--I have a
knack of knowing what people are thinking and wanting. But that isn't
business." "It isn't, eh? It's the finest kind of business sense. It's
the thing the bugs call psychology, and it's as necessary to-day as
capital was yesterday. You can get along without the last. You can't
without the first. One can be acquired. The other you've got to be born
with."

"But I--you know, of late, it's only the human side of it that has
appealed to me. I don't know why. I seem to have lost interest in the
actual mechanics of it."

Fenger stood looking at her, his head lowered. A scarlet stripe, that
she had never noticed before, seemed to stand out suddenly, like a
welt, on his forehead. Then he came toward her. She raised her hand in
a little futile gesture. She took an involuntary step backward,
encountered the chair she had just left, and sank into it coweringly.
She sat there, looking up at him, fascinated. His hand, on the wing of
the great