"Well, it's taught me to size men up pretty sharply," said Swazey, continuing. "I've seen them in the raw, I've seen them in all sorts of tests. I've sort of got a pretty guess what they'll do or not do. Then, of course, I've had a knack of making money out of what I touch--it's a gift." "Are you working your way through here?" said Stover. All feeling of patronage was gone; he felt as if a torrent had cleared away the dust and cobwebs of tradition. "Lord, no," said Swazey, smiling. "Why, boy, I've got a business that's bringing me in between four and five thousand a year--running itself, too." Stover sat up. "What!" "I've got an advertising agency, specialties of all sorts, seven men working under one. I keep in touch every day. Course I could make more if I was right there. But I know what I'm going to do in this world. I've got my ideas for what's coming--big ideas. I'm going to make money hand over fist. That's easy. Now I'm getting an education. Here's the answer to it all." He drew out of his pocketbook a photograph and passed it over to Stover. "That's the best in the world; that's the girl that started me and that's the girl I'm going to marry." Dink took the funny little photograph and gazed at it with a certain reverence. It was the face of a girl pretty enough, with a straight, proud, reliant look in her eyes that he saw despite the oddity of the clothes and the artificiality of the pose. He handed back the photograph. "I like her," he said. "Here _we_ are," said Swazey, handing him a tintype. It was grotesque, as all such pictures are, with its mingled sentimentality and self-consciousness, but Stover did not smile. "That's the girl I've been working for ever since," said Swazey. "The bravest little person I ever struck, and the squarest. She was waiting in a restaurant when I happened to drop in, standing on her own feet, asking no favor. She's out of that now, thank God! I've sent her off to school." Dink turned to him with a start, amazed at the matter-of-fact way in which Swazey announced it. "To school--" he stammered. "_You've_ sent _her_." "Sure. Up to a convent in Montreal. She'll finish there when I finish here." "Why?" said Stover, too amazed to choose his methods of inquiry. "Because, my boy, I'm going out to succeed, and I want my wife to know as much as I do and go with me where I go." The two sat silently, Swazey staring at the tintype with a strange, proud smile, utterly unconscious of the story he had told, Stover overwhelmed as if the doors in a great drama had suddenly swung open to his intruding gaze.