“Yes, I recall the occasion now,” the prize ring magnate said with a pleasant smile. “I didn’t remember that was our first meeting—I meet so many people everywhere—nor that I happened to be making the acquaintance also of the famous puritan poet. . . . The trouble with you, my friend, if you will permit me to indulge in a last bit of advice, is that you are so terribly conventional in your judgments of character, in your expectations of what people are to be. That is a very common limitation. You expected to find in me a bloody and brutal bounder, smelling of whisky and dazzling with diamonds. Instead you found an intelligent gentleman, interested in literature and life. The prize ring, Mr. Brainard, is as much an arena of Art in its way as the popular theater to which you are devoting so much effort and such large sums of money. And I was engaged in it as a business, as I am now engaged in the theatrical business. A financier, even of the prize ring, is not obliged to dirty himself with vulgar contacts. That explains the lofty idealism of some of our most prominent citizens. You plan and dream from above—the degrading associations are left to others, as doubtless you have already learned in the management of your own properties. . . . Well, I must not keep Miss Walters waiting below. Good night, my foolish Idealist! Good luck and more wisdom to you before our next meeting.” They descended to the hall which they found empty. Farson was getting the actress a last cigarette. As they waited, Hollinger observed musingly: “You doubtless know about the marriage laws in California?” “No, I don’t.” “They are extremely,—what shall I say? Lax—liberal. You see our people out there are so unconventional and accidental in their habit of life, that the courts are forced to take the most liberal view of these personal matters. And we are as a people chivalrous towards women—much more so than you are here. So the courts are inclined to decide the question of marriage largely on whether the woman ought to have been married, rather than on the mere fact of the ceremony. That accounts for the large number of posthumous wives and their claims that turn up after the death of a rich man on the Coast.” “Am I to regard this as a threat?” Brainard inquired. “Bless you, my dear boy, don’t be so sensitive! Advice, just impertinent, uncalled-for advice, which I am so fond of giving. I should have left all that to Miss Lorilla’s lawyers—they are the proper persons to expound the California statutes.” “You don’t believe for one instant that Miss Walters was really married to old Krutzmacht?” Hollinger shrugged his shoulders. “_Quien sabe_? as the Mexicans say. I have no doubt she ought to have been.” “That is a very different matter.” Hollinger again shrugged his shoulders. In the pause that followed, Hollinger began to muse aloud softly, as if he were presenting a case to himself: