"'Pon my word," Greenfield said, with a laugh, "you talk like an old fogy of the first water. I wouldn't have suspected you of looking at things that way." "Mr. Snaffle is always surprising," Mrs. Sampson said, with her most dazzling smile, "but he is generally right." "Thank you. I can't help at any rate seeing that there are two sides to this thing, and I am too old a bird to be caught with the common chaff that people talk." Mr. Greenfield settled himself comfortably in his chair and laughed softly. The discussion was so purely theoretical that he could be amused without looking upon it seriously. "For my part," he remarked, his big hand playing with a paper-knife on one of the little tables, which, to a practised eye, suggested cards, "I am of the progressive party, thank you. I believe in opening up the country and putting railroads where they will do the most good. A few people get their old prejudices run against, but on the whole it is for the interest of a town to have a railroad, and it is nonsense to talk any other way." Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson leaned forward to lay her fingers upon the speaker's arm. "That is just it, Cousin Tom," she said, with a languishing glance. "You always look at things in so large a way. You never let the matter of personal interest decide, but think of the public good," The flattery was somewhat gross, but men will swallow a good deal in the way of praise from women. They are generally slow to suspect the fair sex of sarcasm, and allow themselves the luxury of enjoying the pleasure of indulging their vanity untroubled by unpleasant doubts concerning the sincerity of compliments which from masculine lips would offend them. Greenfield laughed with a perceptible shade of awkwardness, but he was evidently not ill pleased. "Oh, well," he returned, "that is because thus far it has happened that my personal interests and my convictions have worked together so well. You might see a difference if they didn't pull in the same line." Mrs. Sampson considered a moment, and then rose, bringing out a decanter of sherry with a supply of glasses and of biscuit from a convenient closet in the bottom of a secretary. "That's business," Snaffle said, joyously. "Sherry ain't much for a man of my size, but it's better than nothing." "It is a hint though," the hostess said, filling his glass. "A hint!" he repeated. "Yes; a hint that it is getting late, and that I am tired, and you must go home." "Oh, ho!" he laughed uproariously; "now I won't let you in for that good thing on the Princeton Platinum stock. You'll wish you hadn't turned me out of the house when you see that stock quoted at fifty per cent above par." "Ah, I know all about Princeton Platinum," she responded, showing her white teeth rather more than was absolutely demanded by the occasion; "besides, I've no money to put into anything."