In reply to this she received a letter in which her charge that her business had been taken from her was repelled as "a most grievous wrong," and "a great injustice." She was reminded that two years before she had consulted with the writer and another member of the oil combination "as to selling out your interest, at which time you were desirous of selling at _considerably less price_, and upon time, than you have now received in cash, and which sale you would have been glad to have closed if you could have obtained satisfactory security for the deferred payments. As to the price paid for the property, it is certainly three times greater than the cost at which we could now construct equal or better facilities." The letter concluded with an offer to return the works upon the return of the money, or, if she preferred, to sell her one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred shares of the stock at the price that had been paid her. These propositions were left open to her for three days. The "cost of the works" is not the standard of value in such transactions. Six millions of dollars, according to a member of the committee of Congress which investigated the oil trust in 1888, is the value of the "works" on which they issued $90,000,000 of stock, which sold in the stock market at a valuation of $160,000,000. The offer to sell back the refinery was like the offer to let her have cars. To accept it was to pass openly and consciously into slavery. Two years before, when she was weak with grief, inexperience, and the fear that she might not succeed in her gallant task of paying her husband's debts and saving the livelihood of the children, she had thought of selling out at a sacrifice. They knew this because she had asked their advice, and now cheapened her down by reference to the valuation of that moment of despair. All the life energies of herself and her husband, the various advantages of position, the benefit of their pioneership since 1860, and of having established a place in so lucrative a business, all the good-will of customers, all the elements that contributed to the ability to earn the nearly $25,000 a year she was making, were brushed out of the bargain by the mere assertion of a figure at which it was alleged better works could be built. By the time the offer was made she had, moreover, put the sum she had received into such investments, she told the court, as she had been able to find, and the money to accept the offer was no longer in her hands. Indignant with these thoughts, and the massacred troop of hopes and ambitions that her brave heart had given birth to, she threw the letter into the fire, where it curled up into flames like those from which a Dives once begged for a drop of water. She never reappeared in the world of business, where she had found no chivalry to help a woman save her home, her husband's life-work, and her children. But when the men who had divided her property among them invoked the assistance of the