“It’s as good as anything else,” the leading lady replied, “so long as you’ve got to work for your living.” “Most of us have to do that.” “Unless we are clever enough to get somebody else to do the work for us,” she sneered. “Then I think we lose most of the fun.” Miss Walters stared at him skeptically. “What’s the use of your taking that lofty tone with me?” Brainard laughed good-naturedly. He found in this case, as he had in so many others, that a little personal contact with an enemy modifies and humanizes any antagonism. “Eat with an enemy and lose your hate,” is an old proverb, the truth of which he was proving. In spite of the hardness and vulgarity of Miss Lorilla Walters, actress and stenographer, there was something pathetic in her commonplace struggle with life, which he felt through her brief admissions. She had been fighting all her life for herself with somewhat coarse weapons, the only ones she knew how to use, and her appearance, now that she had lost the advantage of youth and was declining towards middle age, her cheap clothes, her defiant manner,—all told of the losing game. He was already beginning to wonder what he could do for Krutzmacht’s old stenographer, wondering whether by any chance she could be fitted into the People’s company, when his amiable meditations were disagreeably interrupted by the actress. “It’s no use your playing the great philanthropist with me,” she said truculently. “I know what you are.” “What?” “A crook.” “You think so?” “I happen to know it.” “The trouble always has been from the moment I entered Krutzmacht’s office that afternoon that you have persisted in this wrong idea. You took me for a common thief then, and you think me a successful swindler now. Well, it happens that I am neither. So you can’t understand!” She looked over the comfortable room, which for the moment they had to themselves, as Farson had taken Hollinger into the library. “You seem to have done very well by yourself,” she observed. “I was Krutzmacht’s legitimate agent then, when I entered his office, and I have been his executor so to speak every since,”—and as she shrugged her shoulders skeptically, he added, “I haven’t a cent of my own—really not a cent; I am poorer than you!” “You want me to believe that song? . . . How about the theater and the mine in Arizona? You see I have been following you up.” “They belong to somebody else.” “Indeed—to whom?” “I shan’t tell you that!” “Because you can’t. . . . They belong to _me_.” “Prove your claim then!” “And you will hand them over on a platter with a fine bow? . . . You _are_ smooth!” She looked into Brainard’s smiling face with an expression of perplexity. “But until you can prove your claim, beyond doubt, I shall continue in possession both of the mine and of the theater as guardian of the property. And I shall fight you with all the resources I have until I am convinced that your claim is sound.”