"Oh, that's the how of it, is it? All right; anything you say goes as it lays. But I'm going to make one condition, this time: you'll have to keep cases on the game yourself, and say when. I can't be bothered keeping the run of your society tea-parties." "I don't want you to. Don't be late for dinner: we are going to the Rodneys' for the evening." When she was gone, the president selected another of the overgrown cigars from a box in the desk drawer, lighted it, and tilted back in the big arm-chair to envelop himself in a cloud of smoke. It was his single expensive habit--the never-empty box of Brobdingnagian cigars in the drawer--and the indulgence helped him to push the Yellow-Dog period into a remoter past. After a time the smoke cloud became articulate, rumbling forth chucklings and Elizabethan oaths, mingling with musings idiomatic and profane. "By God, I believe she thought she was fooling me--I do, for a fact! But it's too thin. Of course, she wants to make the women kow-tow, but that ain't all there is to it--not by a jugful. But it's all right: she plays her own hand, and she's bully good and able to play it. If she's after Raymer's scalp, he might as well get ready to wear a wig, right now. I'll back her to win, every time." Accordingly, when Mr. Edward Raymer came out of the president's room at the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank the following morning, he was treading upon air. For in his mind's eye there was a fair picture of a great and successful industry to be built upon the substantial extension of credit promised by the capitalist whose presence chamber he had just quitted. XIX LOSS AND GAIN Striving feebly as one who gathers up the shards and fragments after an explosion, Griswold remembered cloudily the supper of tasteless courses at the Hotel Chouteau, still less distinctly, a drive through the streets to a great, echoing railway station, a glare of lights too painful to be borne, and, last of all, an overpowering weariness shutting down upon him like a sudden closing in of darkness become thick and stifling. Afterward there were vague impressions, momentary breaches in the wall of inclosing darkness when he had realized that he was curiously helpless, and that he was still on the train going somewhere, though he could not remember where. In one of these intervals a woman had stood beside him, and he seemed to remember that she had put her cool hand on his forehead. Of the transition from the train to the bed in the upper room at Mereside, he recalled nothing, though the personalities of two strangers, the doctor and the nurse, obtruded themselves frequently in the later phases of the troubled dream, like figures in a shadow pantomime. Also, that suggestion of the presence of the woman with the cool palm became self-repeating; and finally, when complete consciousness returned, the dream impression was still so sharply defined that he was not surprised to find her standing at his bedside.