“My sister had the prettiest little hand in the county. County! Her hand was known all over the State, and many a young newspaper feller touched it—on paper—in the old days. Foot, too!” He meditated a moment on his own very good-looking shoes. “After she married Clarenden, the big railroad man, we saw less of each other, of course, but we were chums to the last. And the instant my eye lit on this lovely work, this masterpiece, though I say it that shouldn’t, I knew there was something in it for me! I didn’t quite know what, of course, until I found out that Mariellen was mixed up in it, and then ’twas clear as day. Had you copy a plaster cast, didn’t she?” He chuckled with pleasure in his perspicacity. “We Senators know all about plaster casts and death-masks and that sort of thing. Unless we want to miss a trick, we have ’em done to us, as soon as the time comes. But what I don’t understand is why Mariellen got cold feet! She’s a girl of some sense, I tell you, or was, until she got a hankering for New York, and what she calls the higher things in art!” The Senator’s last words mimicked to perfection both the girl and myself. It was that kind of mimicry which creates good understanding, and leaves a smile, not a sting. Oh, I could see how he, like the girl, captivated mankind! “Even now,” he continued, “she’s my favorite of the whole bunch, and they’ve all of ’em got plenty of the Bullwinkle pep. Some face, that girl, hey? Pretty ain’t the word!” No, it wasn’t the word. But I couldn’t give any one word that would really cover the case, I admitted. “Mariellen gets the better of everybody. She even puts it over on a smart artist like you. I’d like to take her across my knee! And before I’ve finished with her, I shall make her feel like thirty cents about this job. Gave the marble heart to my marble hand, did she? She’ll be wishing she kept it, the moment she sees I’ve got it. But mark my words, it’ll never be hers, until after I’ve taken the Big Subway for good and for all. And if she tries to bamboozle me out of what I’ve bought and paid for, I’ll—” A peal of the bell and voices in the anteroom caused the speaker to suspend sentence, and I slipped out to find, in eager converse with Gigi, the young person from Missouri. Was the sky raining coincidences, that day? With a gesture absurdly like her uncle’s, she was drawing from that much-embroidered handbag of hers a checkbook not unlike his own in general effect. Had Shakespeare been there, he would have indited a sonnet to the checkbook of beauty, and its likeness to that of brains and power.