Why, indeed, could not Mr. Spaulding do for her what he had already done for his brother out in Milwaukee? She said nothing of her plans, but little by little resumed her regular morning drives with Mr. Alfred Spaulding down to his office, a matter in which she had been more or less remiss of late. Alfred Spaulding, in fact, objected to taking his carriages into Wall Street at all, and had forsworn the elevated railway only because his more practical wife--more practical in this thing, at any rate--insisted that he should get at least half an hour's open air each day. Cordelia greatly surprised that absent-minded gentleman one morning by timidly putting a little cut-glass vase on his desk, into which she slipped an American Beauty rose. Although she had talked to him a great deal, and about many things, it was nearly a week before she approached the matter that lay nearest her heart. "Women sometimes--er--put their money into stocks, don't they?" Cordelia asked tentatively, as they bowled briskly down Fifth Avenue one bright morning. "Yes, and nearly always lose it, too," was Mr. Spaulding's discouraging and somewhat curt reply. "But if they are certain about the right thing?" "They never are. No one is." "But if they have a friend in Wall Street, a friend who knows--" ventured Cordelia. "Then the friend never knows. My advice is for women to keep out of Wall Street." "But aren't there any stocks that are safe? I mean, aren't there any good ones _you_ feel certain about, for instance?" "Of course; but those are the kind you never make your money out of--at least not at the rate women want to make it. They're slow and steady." "But you've been in Wall Street so long! Surely there's something you feel to be safe and yet going to go up, too?" The ghost of a smile crept over his worn face. "Miss Vaughan, if I had that delightful power, I'd make a million before I came home for dinner to-night." "But didn't you make nearly a thousand dollars for your brother Louis?" she asked, after a pause. "Yes, I did; and it caused me more bother and worry than making eighty times that much out of my own money. Louis is a pretty poor man, you know." "Yes?" said Cordelia. "It meant a good deal to him. If I hadn't carried him over on my own shoulders he'd have been hard hit." "I don't think I should mind the risk." "One never does, till one tries it." "I _want_ to try." Then after a moment's pause she said: "Mr. Spaulding." "Well?" "Mr. Spaulding, I've two thousand dollars," she had not quite that sum, but she knew that she could easily make it up by means of a loan from his wife--"and I intend to speculate with it. Won't you invest it for me?" "Miss Vaughan, I've made it a rule, an inexorable rule, never to take a woman's money in the Street." "Please!" "You know lessons there usually cost about a thousand dollars a second." "I'd be sorry to go to some one I didn't know," she pouted girlishly, and then she added, "or didn't trust."