“My dear Billy, perhaps Ronald would dispense with a dowry if he liked her well enough; he is fool enough for anything. But you wouldn’t save a penny by that--I should take it all over as commission!” Mr. Massarene was dumb from astonishment. He had known many sharp dealers in the Far West, but nobody who had ever for coolness equalled his fair friend and patroness. He slapped his hand on his knee with vulgar effusion in his mingled feelings of amazement and admiration. “Well, my lady, damn me if there’s many boys in Bowery who could afford to give points to _you_!” She laughed. Of course it was only a joke; but the joke made her feel for the moment a little insecure and uncomfortable, as you might feel if you found a packet of dynamite in your sandwich-case. “Of course the marriage would be a very good thing for Ronald,” said his sorceress, with her frankest accents--her frankness was one of her chief weapons--“but it would be good for you too, Billy. It would place you. There are people who jib at you still, you know; when once you were one of us, they wouldn’t dare.” Mr. Massarene was silent. He thought if there were still people who jibbed at him, he had paid very dearly for the patronage of this fair sponsor. He was beginning to feel his feet a little on his new ground and to be a little less easily led about; but at the same time he was as much in love as a cold-blooded, circumspect, puritan-minded man could be, and she dazzled his sight and his senses and led him whither she would. He made a faint endeavor to assert his independence. “Lord Hurstmanceaux has never even condescended to know me. It seems odd he should be anxious to enter my family.” “Enter your family!” echoed Mouse, with a laugh of derision which brought the blood into his puffy pale cheeks. “Oh, my good Billy, don’t try on those grandiose phrases! I never said _he_ wanted anything of the kind; I said _I_ mean you to give him your daughter, and you know when I mean a thing I have it done.” Mr. Massarene was cowed; he felt an awkward, ignorant, vulgar booby under the flashing fires of her contemptuous eyes. There was nothing left in him of the stolid self-assurance and self-admiration with which he had spoken at the public meeting a few days earlier. Before the mocking presence of his enchantress he felt only a stupid, illiterate, helpless booby and boor. He felt that men respected his riches; he felt that Mouse Kenilworth only meant to annex them. “My daughter is not an easy person to control,” he said with hesitation, “and I think she and you don’t hit it off, my lady, do you?” “No,” said his guest shortly; “but that don’t matter. There’s no law that I know of to love one’s brother’s wife. Anyhow, that’s what I mean you to do with her. Of course, my brother is a poor man, you know that; but that is no consequence to you. What you want is an assured position, and alliance with us will _poser_ you. Ronnie’s word has great weight in society.”