"I'll tell you who you are," I retorted with some heat. "You're a figure-model that a sculptor named Delisle took to Paris. You're the old running-mate of Adams in the Southam heir case. You're the wife of a Haytian half-caste Jew with a Spanish title. You're the woman who worked with Andrus, the wildcat mine-swindler who is now doing time in Sing Sing. And just at present you're the accomplice of a gang headed by a certain Coke Whelan, a wire-tapper well known to the police." Her face showed no anger and no resentment as I unburdened myself of this unsavory pedigree. Her studious eyes, in fact, became almost contemplative. "And supposing that's all true?" she finally asked. "What of it?" She sat and looked at me, as cool as a cucumber. I could no longer deny that as a type she interested me. Her untamed audacities were something new to my experience. She seemed still in the feral state. Her mere presence, as she sat there in the lucid morning light, exerted over me that same spell which keeps children rooted before a circus-animal's cage. "What of it?" she quietly repeated. "I'm afraid there's nothing of it," I admitted, "except in the one point where it impinges on my personal interests. I intend to get that thirty thousand dollars back." The resolution of my tone seemed only to amuse her. "But why come to me?" she asked, turning back to her breakfast. "Supposing I really was a cog in some such machinery as you speak of, how much would be left on one small cog when so many wheels had to be oiled?" "I have no great interest in your gang and its methods. All I know is a tremendous wrong's been done, and I want to see it righted." "From what motive?" she asked, with that barbaric immediacy of approach peculiar to her. "From the most disinterested of motives--I mean from the standpoint of that rather uncommon thing known as common honesty." She looked at me, long and intently, before she spoke again. I had the feeling of being taken up and turned over and inspected through a lense of implacable clarity. "Do you know this young man who lost his money on what he took for a fixed race?" "I have met him," I answered, a little discomfited at the recollection of how tenuous that acquaintanceship was. "And have you known him long?" I was compelled to confess to the contrary. "And you understand the case, through and through?" "I think I do," was my curt retort. She turned on me quickly, as though about to break into an answering flash of anger. But on second thoughts she remained silent. "If life were only as simple as you sentimental charity-workers try to make it!" she complained, studying me with a pitying look which I began most keenly to resent. She swept the room with a glance of contempt. "If all those hay-tossers who come to this town and have their money taken away from them were only as lamb-like as you people imagine they are!"