"Merely business foresight, my dear Mr. Symes," she smirked complacently. "Some fool, you know, might think he could get a judgment if he didn't like the way we handled him." "And you're sure he couldn't?" "Lord!--no. Not out here." Her leg slipped over her knee and her foot slumped to the floor. She slid lower in the chair, until her head rested on the back, her sprawling legs outstretched, her fingers clasped across her starched waistcoat, upon her face an expression of humorous disdain. "Let me tell you a story to illustrate what you can do and get away with it--to ease your mind if you're afraid of gettin' into trouble on my account. A friend of mine who had a diploma from my school came out West to practise and she had a case of a fellow with a slashed wrist--the tendons were plumb severed. She didn't know how to draw 'em together, so she just sewed up the outside skin. They shrunk, and he lost the use of his hand. Then he goes back East for treatment and comes home full of talk about damage suits and that sort of thing. Well, sir, she just bluffed him down. Told him she had fixed 'em all right, but when he was drunk he had torn the tendons loose and was tryin' to lay the blame on her. She made her bluff stick, too. Funny, wasn't it?" "Excruciating," said Symes. She seemed strangely indifferent to his sarcasm--to his opinion. "I can promise you," she urged, "that I'll be equal to any emergency." "I've no doubt of it," he returned. Symes smoked hard; he was thinking, not of the contract which he intended to peremptorily refuse, but how best, in what words to tell this woman that now more than ever he wished the intimacy between her and his wife to end. At the close of an impatient silence she demanded bluntly-- "Do I get the contract?" With equal bluntness he responded-- "You do not." She straightened herself instantly in the chair and he knew from the look in her eyes that the clash had come. "Do you want a bigger rake-off?" she sneered offensively. "Do you think I'm a petty thief?" She shrugged her shoulder cynically, but answered-- "It's legitimate." "Perhaps; but I don't choose to do it. I refuse to force your confessedly inexperienced and incompetent services upon my men. What you ask is impossible." He expected an outburst but none came; instead, she sat looking at him with a twisted smile. "You'd better reconsider," she said at last, and there was in her voice and manner the taunting confidence of a "gun-man" who has his hand at his hip. Symes spat out a particle of tobacco with angry vehemence and his ruddy face turned redder. "My answer is final." Her composure grew with his loss of it. "I hoped it wouldn't be necessary to remind you of your first visit here, but it seems it is." That was it then--the source of her assurance--she meant to trade upon, to make capital of a professional secret. It was like her to remind him of an obligation, to attain her ends.