Emmet took the comment with good humour. "No, I was n't an easy mark for women, either. I tell you my main idea was to get ahead, to save some money. I could n't stand poverty; I had seen too much of it. When I was a boy, I carried the washing for my mother after school hours. In summer I played baseball and hung around the race-track. If I had n't been so heavy, I 'd have become a jockey and made my fortune quicker; but anyhow I had ten thousand dollars salted away by the time I was twenty-five. I 'm thirty now." Leigh was secretly somewhat amused by this prologue, which seemed to spring partly from the egotism of a self-made man, partly from an instinctive unwillingness to embark upon the confession to which he was committed. However, he was far from being bored. "I'm about thirty myself," he remarked, "and I'm worth about thirty cents. But that's a digression." "Well, as I was saying," Emmet resumed, "I wasn't an easy mark for women. I had too much at stake to get tangled up that way, but I was thinking that it was pretty near time for me to find a wife. There's a lady in this town--you 'll hardly believe it--I did n't myself, at first--that took a fancy to me. She was rich and fashionable, and all that, the sort of woman I would n't have thought of in any such way; but gradually I began to notice that she took my car nearly every day. Even when she told me straight out that she preferred to ride with me, I did n't suspect anything, for she always had a pleasant word for all the boys. But after a while I woke up to the fact that she knew just when I would be at the City Hall, and managed her shopping so as to ride home with me. After that I began to take particular notice. When I took her fare, I was embarrassed by the look in her eyes. She had fine eyes, and a way of sizing me up that seemed to mean something. Sometimes our hands would touch for a moment, and then it was n't by accident; and by Christmas time I knew as well as if she had told me that if she was n't in love with me, she thought she was." "You were a lucky dog," Leigh said, filling an impressive pause with the first chance comment that came to him. Afterward he wondered at the obstinate torpidity of his mind, for not even the reference to her deliberate look and fine eyes gave him the clew. All this talk of early hardship and of street-cars had put the narrator for the time on another level from that he now occupied in the world, and made his past seem his present. The very confession, and the manner of it, belittled the confessor, and Leigh took his characterisation of his admirer as rich and fashionable with a grain of salt, making some allowance for the point of view, some for natural vanity and a desire to impress him.