In the ripple that stirred across the court room at the examiner’s abrupt conclusion, John Valiant, who had withstood that pitiless hail of questions, rose, bowed to him and slowly crossed the cleared space to his counsel. The chairman looked severely over his eye-glasses, with his gavel lifted, and a statuesque girl, in the rear of the room, laid her delicately gloved hand on a companion’s and smiled slowly without withdrawing her gaze, and with the faintest tint of color in her face. Katharine Fargo neither smiled nor flushed readily. Her smile was an index of her whole personality, languid, symmetrical, exquisitely perfect. The little group with whom she sat looked somewhat out of place in that mixed assemblage. They had not gasped at the tale of the Corporation’s unprecedented earnings, the lavish expenditure for its palatial offices. The recital of the tragic waste, the nepotism, the mole-like ramifications by which the vast structure had been undermined, had left them rather amusedly and satirically appreciative. [Pg 13]Smartly groomed and palpably members of a set to whom John Valiant was a familiar, they had had only friendly nods and smiles for the young man at whom so many there had gazed with jaundiced eyes. To the general public which read its daily newspaper perhaps none of the gilded set was better known than “Vanity Valiant.” The very nickname—given him by his fellows in facetious allusion to a flippant newspaper paragraph laying at his door the alleged new fashion of a masculine vanity-box—had taken root in the fads and elegancies he affected. The new Panhard he drove was the smartest car on the avenue, and the collar on the white bulldog that pranced or dozed on its leather seat sported a diamond buckle. To the space-writers of the social columns, he had been a perennial inspiration. They had delighted to herald a more or less bohemian gathering, into which he had smuggled this pet, as a “dog-dinner”; and when one midnight, after a staid and stodgy “bridge,” in a gust of wild spirits he had, for a wager, jumped into and out of a fountain on a deserted square, the act, dished up by a night-hawking reporter had, the following Sunday, inspired three metropolitan sermons on “The Idle Rich.” The patterns of his waistcoats, and the splendors of his latest bachelors’ dinner at Sherry’s—with such items the public had been kept sufficiently familiar. To it, he stood a perfect symbol [Pg 14]of the eider ease and insolent display of inherited wealth. And the great majority of those who had found place in that roomy chamber to listen to the ugly tale of squandered millions, looked at him with a resentment that was sharpened by his apparent nonchalance.