Presently the three left for Mrs. Pearmain’s luncheon. The secretary thoughtfully took with him the plans for the new theater. IV Mrs. Donnie Pearmain, as everybody knows, is the only daughter of old Joseph P. Barton, the founder of the milk trust, and derived her very ample personal fortune from that famous financier’s successful manipulation of the milk market. Starting as a plain New Jersey farmer, who peddled his own milk, Barton organized the great trust, and when he died was its largest individual stockholder. It was he, too, who first generally introduced the use of the small glass bottle instead of the large tin can in the distribution of milk, thereby enabling the trust to add at least thirty per cent to the retail price of its product. In spite of these accomplishments, financial and hygienic, Barton was one of the most widely misunderstood and execrated of the older generation of millionaires, doubtless because of the abnormal increase in cost of this necessary article of domestic consumption, and its deterioration in quality, since the formation of the milk trust. Consequently, although Barton’s daughter had married into glue—one of the Pearmain sons—which is, of course, an eminently quiet and respectable fortune that has escaped the keen eyes of the muckrakers, she had never been able wholly to live down the taint of milk. Too many even of the social leaders of the city remembered the small bottles of Barton’s pale-blue fluid, retailed as milk at nine cents a quart, to forgive the social ambitions of Mrs. Donnie Pearmain, in spite of her respectable veneer of glue. The energetic little lady, however, had learned from her rich father his great life axiom—if you can’t do what you want in one way, you can in another. So she attacked the citadels of social leadership by the way first of Philanthropy and now of Art, as the magazine man had accurately related to Brainard. Thanks to her energy as patroness in these allied fields, she was in a fair way of living down at last the odor of milk and attaining the coveted reward of social leadership. Mrs. Pearmain had received Edgar Brainard most graciously in the previous interviews that had been arranged between them by the young secretary, and had shown a most intelligent interest in his scheme of creating a People’s Theater. The young sulfur king appealed to her all the more because he expected no financial assistance in developing his hobby. She would not be called upon to pour any milk into this philanthropy.