"I'd like to try having all the money I want for a time!" he laughed hardily. "I almost believe it would have been better for me if I had never heard of Clark's Field!" Adelle exclaimed, with a bitter sense of the futility of her own living. And then she told her cousin very briefly what had happened to her since she first entered the probate court and had been made a ward of the trust company. The mason listened with interest and tried to make out, as well as he could with his meager equipment of experience in such matters and Adelle's bare statement, what had been the trouble with her life. At the end he stated his conclusion,-- "I guess it depends on what sort of stuff you've got in you whether money agrees with you or don't. To some folks it does seem poison, like drink; but the trouble ain't with the money, perhaps, it's with them." "I suppose so," Adelle admitted meekly. "I had no one to show me, and, anyway, I am not the right kind, I suppose. It takes a good deal of a person to spend money right and get the best out of it there is." "Sure!" the mason replied freely; and added with a frank laugh,--"But we all want our chance to try!" "What will you do with your money?" Adelle asked. The young man threw back his head and drew in a long breath as if he were trying to focus in one desire all the aspirations of his thirsty soul, which now he could satisfy. "I'll take a suite at the Palace and have the best booze money can buy!" he said with a careless laugh. "No, don't do that!" Adelle protested earnestly, thinking of Archie. "You won't get much out of your money that way." "I was joking," the young man laughed. "No, I don't mean to be any booze fighter. There's too much else to do." He confessed to his new cousin some of the aspirations that had been thwarted by his present condition,--all his longing for education, experience, and, above all, the desire to be "as good as the next man, bar none, no matter where I be," an aspiration inexplicable to Adelle, a curiously aristocratic sensitiveness to caste distinction that might not be expected in a healthy-minded laboring-man. It was the most American note in his character, and like a true American he felt sure that money would enable him to attain "equality" with the land's best. "When I see some folks swelling around in motor-cars and spending their money in big hotels like it was dirt, and doing nothin' to earn it, and I know those who are starving or slaving every day just to live in a mean, dirty little way--why, it makes me hot in the collar. It makes me 'most an anarchist. The world's wrong the way things are divided up!" he exclaimed, forgetting that he was about to take his seat with the privileged. "Well," Adelle mused dubiously, "now you'll have a chance to do what you want and be 'on top' as you call it." "Mos' likely then," the mason turned on himself with an ironic laugh, "I shan't want to do one thing I think I do now!"