"It seems as if what we call business is a fight—a terrible fight, too terrible to look on at."

"It is." The man's confirming dictum came quick and sharp on the heels of her wavering commentary.

"I feel as if money were evil." "So the preacher says," Marshall echoed gayly, "the root of all evil-or is it the love of it? I bet we could use a pocketful of it, allee samee."

"Do you know what Porson has made me see?"

"He's made me see a number of things. One is, that he'll be the better for a taste of brimstone. I could wish he'd had it years ago.'

"He's made the world hideous."
"Oh, come, Janie! not the world."

"Yes, the world, because it wants to get on. And we shall be just like him the minute we begin to fight for money to lift us above other people-well, the people out there." She did not need to indicate the court, even with a glance. The discord of acclamation was floating toward them through the flat, and both of them thought absently that it was hailing a new consignment of ice-cream. "I'm convinced that Porson hasn't one decent humane impulse left."

"Well, if he has, I've failed to spot it. However, let's be charitable. Let's say he never had any to begin with."

Re

"He can't have been a monster. member, he supported his mother" "From that date,'" Marshall quoted rhetorically, "the date of his obtaining a position in the shoe-store, his mother ceased sewing for a living, and young Elisha supported her in a modest way, always bettering with his rising fortunes.""

"That's it," said Janie. "He was human to start with, but now he's made himself into a machine. It goes whirling over the green grass of the world, cutting off heads."

"Can't put that in," said Marshall, who had cocked his head with an air of listening toward business ends. "Too flowery!"

"And the worst of it is, he's made me see he's not an exception. He's only noteworthy because he's got more brain than the others--more of that hideous power of

tending money and making it breed. The men that fought him-they're the same kind, only they didn't win."

"The fierce light that beats upon a financier," remarked Marshall.

But she was moving him. He might stave her off, yet he, too, felt a decent recoil after the bad company they had been keeping. He, too, was morally jaded, though he would not own it. He, as became a man, was taking "the world but as the world," and yet his longings clove to the green hills of peace. His homesick eyes could not discern them in the distance. The world seemed suddenly turned into a great industrial battlefield where homely virtues were trodden out under the foot of the mercenaries hired to fight for some Napoleon no more greedy than they, but more masterful.

"We've got our punishment for meddling with him," said Janie bitterly. "We've painted a portrait, and the picture's going to stay with us. It's hanging right here on our wall. You see it. I see it. The eyes follow us, even when we aren't looking at it."

"Don't," said Marshall involuntarily. "Oh, it's a true portrait. I own that. We've caught the exact likeness-of a man who isn't a man any more. He's a horribly intelligent force. He can make me believe all the other men that copy him and fight him are hideous forces, too. We shall be, Marsh, if we try to keep on our feet in this awful scramble and rush. Why, I don't dare to wish we could go to Europe or even move out of here, because it means fighting for money"

The bell in the hall rang with a jarring dissonance. Janie started to her feet, and Marshall threw down his paper knife and went to the tube.

"Yes," she heard him say. "Who is it? Come up. Four flights."

Almost immediately he had returned to her and arrested her flight to the dark back parlor where, remembering her disarray, she was betaking herself. His face itself stopped her. It was blazing, with what emotion she could not yet tell, wonder, perhaps bitterness, an ironic gayety. His hand was heavy on her wrist.

"Who do you think it is?" he asked rapidly.

She shook her head.

"Porson himself."

"Elisha Porson?"

his face intensifying.

"The fool!" he breathed.

for the day before his task of incubating the eggs of riches and fighting off the others

"What have I told you about the cleverest of men? Take them out of their own grooves and they go to pieces. He knows leather, he knows the market; but here he is walking straight into my mouth to lie down in it."

"What does he want, Marsh?" she whispered. All her own acumen had deserted her. She asked the question as simply as a child.

"Want?" Marshall repeated savagely. A terrible anticipatory triumph was in his look. "He's read the first number, perhaps the second, and he wants to buy me offthe fool!"

The steps halted at the door. Janie fled into the back room and sank on a chair. She was effectually awakened, as if by a piercing call from some emergency. It was reasonable to her, as to her husband, that Porson should want to bribe them, and even that he should innocently try it. She saw her husband with the hoard of gold laid open before him, and knew proudly he would refuse to look.

shall had worked so long over that composite portrait that Porson's features had acquired for them an exaggerated significance, and now that he had walked into their very presence, her heart beat hard at the thought that, despite hospitable honor, they might enrich the image by one line more. He laid his battered hat on the table, the tile that figured invariably in the caricatures of him, and passed a knotted hand wearily through his thin hair with the gesture fitted to locks that had begun by being thick. He started a little, and lifted his head alertly.

"Who's in there?" he asked, pointing a thumb at the back room.

"My wife," said Marshall, at once. "I prefer to see you alone," Porson announced, with the air of one who is accustomed to getting what he asks for. It was not the full, noble note of command. His high querulous voice would never compass that. It bespoke rather the habit of a dominance necessary and tedious.

At once Janie, from no considered im pulse except as the result of the directness of her own nature, bent always on the straightest path, rose and came forward

Then the door closed and the varying steps, Porson's shuffling slightly as those of an old man not very painstakingly shod, and her husband's decisive, as if all his youth and scorn of paltering found expression there, came in together.

"Sit here," said Marshall, again abruptly, and took his own place at the desk.

The gas, whether by Marshall's intention or not shone full on Porson's face, and Janie, bending forward there in the dark, trembled at it, seeing it with an added significance in the light of her own home. She had studied his portrait in its various stages of development, the boy in the daguerreotype, with the inconsequent mouth and smooth hair, the youth beginning to show the peering shrewdness of his later years as he realized where accumulation might place him, the middle-aged man with the mean lines of greed and the rigor

and with a somewhat accented courtesy to mark his tenderness for her and insure her against rebuff, drew forward a chair. She stood still in the illuminated radius, a small figure, her pale golden hair drooping about her childlike face, and looked at Porson, half with an inevitable aversion and half appealingly because she wanted very much to stay. Porson regarded her for a moment, not, Marshall angrily noted, as if he saw her distinctive charm, but as if she were a figure in the path. He got up then, as if by an afterthought, not grudgingly, but because he seemed to be remembering that rising to greet a woman was a custom mysteriously decreed, and one that, leading to unknown ends, he might not neglect.

"How do you do?" he conceded, in his rasping voice. But he looked at Marshall immediately with the unaltered requirement that the figure should be removed.

"My wife is my literary partner," said

"I'll tell you what it is, Marsh," she said.

Marshall, answering the glance. "She helps me collect my material and pronounces on the stuff. It's as much her work as mine."

Janie, who knew him so well, read in his air, rather than his voice, the uneasiness of thinking it would be incalculable disappointment if Porson should refuse the gauge thrown down and say he would not speak at all. She took the matter into her own hands.

"I'll go out, Marshall," she said quickly. "Mr. Porson won't mind my being in the next room, even if I do hear. Our flat is so tiny," she explained to the visitor, with an unwilling smile-it came before she had time to think how she hated Porson-"we hear from one end of it to the other."

At that Porson turned his small eyes on her and seemed, for purposes of his own, to estimate and accept her.

"Well! well!" he said, with an impatient VOL. XLV.-20

movement of the hands. "Well! well! But"-he raised the discordant voice a little "this interview is confidential."

"Certainly," said Janie, with dignity. "That is understood."

She withdrew again into her solitude of the back room and sat there in a palpitating intentness.

"I don't know," Marshall was saying obstinately. "I don't know whether it's confidential. It depends on the sort of thing you've got to say."

Porson stopped him by another of those rather uncertain gestures of the hands that, wavering as they were, certainly had the effect of power. He leaned forward in his chair now and let the dramatic hands drop between his knees, while he reflected. "You" he began slowly, "you've printed two numbers."

"Yes," said Marshall.

There was an ugly frown between his

181

brows. Janie, seeing it spring there and knit itself, thrilled with admiration of him and eagerness of sympathy with what he would say. Porson would propose some unworthy pact, and her husband would repudiate it. She was glad to be before the stage of that drama.

Porson looked up at Marshall with one of his quick glances that, however much they shifted, seemed to gather whatever they needed in their course.

"How much you got in type now?" he asked.

Marshall laughed a little with that ironic note fitted to his scornful look.

"Mr. Porson," said he, "what have you come to ask?"

Porson straightened now, and gazed at him. To Janie, from her oblique vantage ground, he looked like a shambling old man. Marshall, confronting the direct beam of the small eyes, found it a holding power.

"The question's here," said Porson. He opened his mouth slightly, tightened the skin of his cheek and rubbed it with a forefinger, a trick Marshall knew in sundry farmers of his acquaintance. He saw at once that it was a characteristic gesture, and put it down in his mental notebook. "I took up your two first numbers," said Porson simply, "the first of the evening, and read 'em through. I thought I'd drop in before it went any further."

"Anything wrong with my facts?" asked Marshall incisively.

Porson seemed about to answer, but he drew himself back as if with a tardy recognition that this was a species of tribunal, and that he was not obliged to incriminate himself.

"Well," he said, with deliberation, "I don't know's I've got anything to say on that score. What I pitched upon

Marshall involuntarily glanced toward the inner room, and Janie, though she knew he could not see her, nodded at him in a community of delighted interest at Porson's way of expressing himself. They had both known he had a vocabulary of country phrases. He was confirming their cleverness with every word.

"What I pitched upon was this. You say towards the end of number two that later you'll go into particulars about the Blackstone Avenue land grab, and how

Porson's head clerk got ahead of him for once. Now I take it you make quite a handle of that?"

Marshall nodded, watching him.
"I go into it rather fully," he said.
"What article's it come in?"
"Number four."

"Well, Mr. Bruce," said Porson, looking him in the face, "I want you to cut that out."

Marshall laughed. Janie knew what he thought he had discovered. She, too, had hit upon it. Old Porson must have a very human foible at the bottom of his bag of tricks. He was not only a money king, avid of accumulation and the spread of his base regnancy; he was vain. He could not endure to have the world told that any man had got ahead of him.

"I should be much obliged," he was continuing, "if you'd tell me how you went into that."

"Delighted," said Marshall dryly. "I've got the article right here." He opened a drawer, and after a frowning search brought out several crumpled galleys of proof. These he whirled into order, and gave them to Porson, pointing out the significant paragraphs. Porson read slowly and painstakingly. Marshall, watching him, felt convinced that if these had been columns of figures, he could have run over them lightly with an accustomed ease; but even the plainest literature was dubitable ground.

"Yes," he said at last. "Yes. I thought that's the way you'd fix it. Well, Mr. Bruce, you've got your facts pretty clear.” Marshall nodded.

"Yes," he echoed. "I've got my data. You see, Mr. Porson, men in your occupation keep leaving documentary evidence behind them. There aren't any suppositions in these articles of mine. They're columns of cold facts. You've furnished the incidents yourself. I've only trailed along after you and picked 'em up."

But Porson did not seem to hear. He was considering, thinking out the best move to make. Finally he nodded slightly, as if in confirmation to himself, and sat up.

"Well," said he, "I guess I'll have to tell you the story of that deal.”

Marshall smiled a little. The amended story would mean that Porson was explaining himself. That was an immense tri