"But you just said that if they weren't hard to get they were no good to you." "Hard--hard's the word! That's a fact! But we got to have 'em. Selling ladies' goods has got to be made just as noble as killing their husbands and sweethearts on a field of battle. It _is_ as noble. In a properly organized community there ought to be a Distinguished Salesmanship Order just as there's a Distinguished Service Order for our military classes. And Mr. Stan's only asked to graduate for the Distinguished Smiling Order, if I may take the liberty of saying so." "Well, perhaps he'll do better after the Inauguration." "You think that?" Mr. Miller had questioned eagerly. "You think he'll be all right on the night, so to say? Well now, if I thought that it would be a weight off my mind. I hope you'll assist me, Miss Lennard. And thank you very much for your assistance about Mr. Dix. It's a fact that if these people were easy to get everybody'd be getting 'em. Pardon me, after you----" And they had parted, but not before Dorothy had wondered whether Mr. Miller's intelligent look, when he had asked her to help him in the difficulty with Mr. Stan, had meant anything. If you had asked Dorothy Lennard how it was that her Cousin Stanhope had come to find himself at Hallowell and Smiths', she would probably have answered you only half candidly. You would have had to guess (as the chances were that Mr. Miller had guessed) the rest. Poor Stan, she would have told you, so far frankly, was a perfect darling, but he had no brains. Successively he had been ploughed for the army, had tried six months in the city, had spent a year in Canada, three months in a motor works, two months more in hawking from club to club a really brilliant idea for a weekly comic paper, and finally, when at the end of every natural asset he possessed, saving only his good looks, had come upon a piece of Mr. Miller's own publicity--a column article in an evening paper on "The Disappearance of the Slur of Trade." Stan had been much impressed by the new field thus thrown open. Chancing to meet Dorothy at about that time, for the first time since they had been children, he had spoken of the new opening, and Dorothy had offered there and then to introduce him to the writer of the article. From the first moment Stanhope had shown a willingness to be introduced to anybody whomsoever by Dorothy; and perhaps Mr. Miller had less hope than Dorothy supposed that Mr. Stan now hung about the premises for any reason at all except that Dorothy was to be seen there.... It was a case of love among the ruins, or whatever the upset may be called that is the result, not of demolition, but of rebuilding; and now, when the two were not meeting one another in halls full of trestles and plasterers' buckets or on passages down which they had to retreat as counters and glass screens and heavy fittings came along, Dorothy, in Miss Benson's absence, was fighting with Miss Umpleby for possession