"Thank you. I tell you, Miss Forbes, Benham is a wideawake city. We have all the modern improvements. But the rich man gets the cream every time. I heard millionaire Carleton Howard, the railroad magnate, say the other day from the platform, that there is no country in the world where the poor man is so well off as in this. Yet it's equally true that the rich are all the time getting richer and the poor poorer. He neglected to state that." He laughed scornfully, and his eyes sought Constance's face for approval. She knew little concerning millionaires or the truth of the proposition he was advancing, but it interested her to perceive that he was evidently on the side of the unfortunate, for she cherished a keen pity for the ignorant poor almost as a heritage. Her father had been a country physician--an energetic, sympathetic man, whose large vitality had been spent in relieving the sufferings of a clientage of small tillers of the soil over an area of fifteen miles. He had often spoken to her with pathos of the patient struggles of the common people. Her own susceptibility to human suffering had been early quickened by the destiny of her mother, who had been thrown from a sleigh shortly after Constance's birth, and had remained a paralytic invalid to the day of her death, requiring incessant care. "When I run for Congress," he resumed, scowling slightly as he fixed his gaze on the murky cloud surmounting Benham, "it'll be on a platform advocating government ownership of railroads, telegraphs, water-works, electric street cars, and all the other fat things out of which our modern philanthropists with capital squeeze enormous profits at the expense of their fellow-citizens. I'm against all that sort of thing. Buy a gas plant to-day and consolidate it with another to-morrow. Profit to the promoter two hundred per cent., without leaving the office. What does the consumer get? Cheaper gas and greater efficiency. That's the fine-sounding tag; and some of the horny-handed multitude are guileless enough to believe it. It won't be long though now before I make my own pile," he added, not quite relevantly. "I'd have made it before this if they hadn't hindered me." Constance perceived that he expected her to inquire what this meant, and she was curious to know. So she asked.