"Yes--you are rather by way of being a cad, beautiful. But I can't help liking you, somehow. I dare say it's because you're honest with me. Nobody--nobody," Miss Hugonin lamented, a forlorn little quiver in her voice, "_ever_ seemed to be honest with me except you, and now I know you weren't. Oh, beautiful, aren't I ever to have any real friends?" she pleaded, wistfully. Kennaston had meant a deal to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. The thought nauseated her. "My dear," he answered, kindly, "you will have any number of friends now that you are poor. It was merely your money that kept you from having any. You see," Mr. Kennaston went on, with somewhat the air of one climbing upon his favourite hobby, "money is the only thing that counts nowadays. In America, the rich are necessarily our only aristocracy. It is quite natural. One cannot hope for an aristocracy of intellect, if only for the reason that not one person in a thousand has any; and birth does not count for much. Of course, it is quite true that all of our remote ancestors came over with William the Conqueror--I have sometimes thought that the number of steerage passengers his ships would accommodate must have been little short of marvellous--but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most of our leisure class were either deserving or dishonest persons--who either started life on a farm, and studied Euclid by the firelight and did all the other priggish things they thought would look well in a biography, or else met with marked success in embezzlement. So money, after all, is our only standard; and when a woman is as rich as you were yesterday she cannot hope for friends any more than the Queen of England can. You could have plenty of flatterers, toadies, sycophants--anything, in fine, but friends." "I don't believe it," said Margaret, half angrily--"not a word of it. There _must_ be some honest people in the world who don't consider that money is everything. You know there must be, beautiful!" The poet laughed. "That," said he, affably, "is poppycock. You are repeating the sort of thing I said to you yesterday. I am honest now. The best of us, Margaret, cannot help being impressed by the power of money. It is the greatest power in the world, and we cannot--cannot possibly--look upon rich people as being quite like us. We must toady to them a bit, Margaret, whether we want to or not. The Eagle intimidates us all." "I _hate_ him!" Miss Hugonin announced, with vehemence. Kennaston searched his pockets. After a moment he produced a dollar bill and showed her the Eagle on it.