ing the damages if Pierce wins," he suggested hopefully.

"Yes. I could even do that."

"What do you want me to do, Boy-ee?" cried his father, in desperation.
"Give up a business worth half a million a year, net?"

"I'm not asking anything, sir. Only let me do the best I can, in the way
that looks right to me. I've got to go back to the office now.
Good-night, Dad."

The arch-quack looked after his son's retreating figure, and his big,
animal-like eyes were very tender.

"I don't know," he said to himself uncertainly,--"I don't know but what
he's worth it."

CHAPTER XXXVII

McGUIRE ELLIS WAKES UP

On implication of the Highest Authority we have it that the leopard
cannot change his spots. The Great American Pumess is a feline of
another stripe. Stress of experience and emotion has been known to
modify sensibly her predatory characteristics. In the very beautiful
specimen of the genus which, from time to time, we have had occasion to
study in these pages, there had taken place, in a few short months, an
alteration so considerable as to be almost revolutionary.

Many factors had contributed to the result. No woman of inherent
fineness can live close to human suffering, as Esme had lived in her
slum work, without losing something of that centripetal self-concern
which is the blemish of the present-day American girl. Constant
association with such men as Hugh Merritt and Norman Hale, men who saw
in her not a beautiful and worshipful maiden, but a useful agency in the
work which made up their lives, gave her a new angle from which to
consider herself. Then, too, her brief engagement to Will Douglas had
sobered her. For Douglas, whatever his lack of independence and
manliness in his professional relations, had endured the jilting with
quiet dignity. But he had suffered sharply, for he had been genuinely in
love with Esme. She felt his pain the more in that there was the same
tooth gnawing at her own heart, though she would not acknowledge it to
herself. And this taught her humility and consideration. The Pumess was
not become a Saint, by any means. She still walked, a lovely peril to
every susceptible male heart. But she no longer thirsted with
unquenchable ardor for conquests.

Meek though a reformed pumess may be, there are limits to meekness.
When Miss Eleanor Stanley Maxwell Elliot woke up to find herself
pilloried as an enemy to society, in the very paper which she had tried
to save, she experienced