And after exacting a few more signatures from the widow, who by this time had become adept in signing "Ellen Trigg Clark," the trust officer nodded to his visitors in dismissal. It would be difficult to say what Adelle was thinking about during this interview. She sat perfectly still as she always did: one of her minor virtues as a child was that she could sit for hours without wriggling or saying a word. She did not even stare about her at the lofty room with its colored glass windows and shiny mahogany furniture as any other young person might. She gazed just above the bald crown of the trust officer's head and seemed more nearly absorbed in Nirvana than a young American ever becomes. But there is little doubt that the long interview in the still, high room of the bank building did make an impression upon the trust company's ward. She trailed after her aunt down the marble stairs, for the trust officer did not trouble himself about their exit from his office as he did with solid clients who had going estates, and the widow was too timid to summon the bronze car from its hole in the wall. They passed through the great banking room on the main floor, where, because of the largeness and the decorum of this sanctuary of property, a crowd of patrons seemed to make no disturbance. Adelle sat in reverie all the way out to Alton in the street-car and did not wake up until they turned from the Square into the dingy side street. Then she said, apropos of nothing,-- "It's a pretty place." "What place?" snapped the widow, who realized that a whole working day had been lost "for nothing," and the roomers' beds were still to make. "That trust place," Adelle explained. "Um," her aunt responded enigmatically, as one who would say that "pretty is as pretty does." It had not appeared to her as a place of beauty. But to Adelle, who had seen nothing more ornate than the Everitt Grade School of Alton, the Second Congregational Church, and the new City Hall, the interior of the Washington Trust Company, with its bronze and marble and windows that shed soft violet lights on the white floors, awakened an unknown appetite for richness and splendor, color and size. That was what she had been thinking about without realizing it while the trust officer talked to her aunt. She called this barbaric profusion of rich materials "pretty," and felt, very faintly, a personal happiness in being connected with it in some slight manner. VIII