"Oh! I don't know; you spoke as if you were as old as Anna in the temple. Pray go on." "Well, that's all. I just could not stand it. Aunt Sophie was bent on my marrying--somebody whom I could not bear--and oh! it was an awful bore. I looked around and saw the society women I was supposed to copy, and I'd rather have been dead than like that--eating, clothes, and bridge--that made up the round, with men as the final end and reward. I think I had hardly taken it in, till my eyes were opened once by a man's answer to a question as to who had been in the boxes at a great concert which he had attended and enjoyed: 'Oh! I don't know--the usual sort--women who go to be seen with other women's husbands. The musical people were in the gallery listening.' Next time I went my eyes had been opened and I listened and enjoyed the music. So, when I discovered there were real men in the world doing things, and really something that women could do, too, I found that life had a new interest, that is all." "You know," she said, after a pause in which she was reflecting and I was watching the play of expression in her face and dwelling in delicious reverie on the contour of her soft cheek, "You know, if I ever amount to anything in this world, it will be due to that man." This might have meant either. I thought I knew of a better artificer than even John Marvel or Leo Wolffert, to whom was due all the light that was shed from her life, but I did not wish to question anything she said of old John. I was beginning to feel at peace with all the world. We were dawdling along now and I remember we stopped for a moment in front of a place somewhat more striking looking and better lighted than those about it, something between a pawnbroker's shop and a loan-office. The sign over the door was of a Guaranty Loan Company, and added the word "Home" to Guaranty. It caught my eye and hers at the same moment. The name was that of the robber-company in which my poor client, McNeil, in his futile effort to pay his rent, had secured a small loan by a chattel-mortgage on his pitiful little furniture at something like three hundred per cent. The entire block belonged, as I had learned at the time, to the Argand Estate, and I had made it one of the points in my arraignment of that eleemosynary institution that the estate harbored such vampires as the two men who conducted this scoundrelly business in the very teeth of the law. On the windows were painted legends suggesting that within all money needed by any one might be gotten, one might have supposed, for nothing. I said, "With such a sign as that we might imagine that the poor need never want for money."