“So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would you keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you adulterate milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison minds. For money! Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to business. But we are not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I don’t like having to get money. I don’t like money, but I need it. I’ve things to do with it.” “My case again,” he capped her. “I’ve things to do with it.” He saw that she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not. “Politics,” he added. “Power! Power!” He repeated the word ecstatically, not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because he had so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his slashing common sense. Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something of what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly. She could only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview between an employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there permitting his exultation, was for an interruption. Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She hadn’t it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then let go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand. True, he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what she had to say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur him, to her point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of the virtues of bleeding her patient. She thought, too, that his was the easier part.