This was Roger's song of victory over his recent success with the largest operation (on behalf both of his father and of himself) that he had ever undertaken. It seemed as if all the world must know of that--must ring with it, in fact; yet it was this very hour which Benevolence had now chosen for the precipitation of her golden shower. Susan Bates gave a little gasp. "Then--then you don't need it?" "Never less," replied Roger, with a quivering nostril and a high, slow bow. Susan Bates looked sidewise at Minnie Peters and asked her to behave herself. But she gave a few hysterical sobs on her own part, and Minnie Peters echoed them with a faithful promptitude. "Just like a woman," thought Roger, as he sat alone after Susan Bates's departure. He drew a hundred lines on an imaginary sheet of paper with a dry pen. "Like a woman; yes," he added, under the promptings of a feeling for more exact justice, "a woman in ten thousand." A few mornings later, when this woman in ten thousand was standing in the bleak porch of the new house to await the return of her horses from their last walk up and down, another carriage slipped into its place and another woman alighted on the curbstone. Susan Bates immediately squared her shoulders, banished all expression from her face, and began the descent of the steps with her eyes fixed upon the gaps in the broken building line over the way. "That woman! She has never entered _my_ house, and she never shall; and she should never enter this." Statira Belden had come to do the decencies; Eliza Marshall received her with the grim inexpressiveness of a granite bowlder. "My husband is resting quietly to-day," she said, in response to Mrs. Belden's inquiries. He was--unconscious under chloral, after three nights of open-eyed torment. Mrs. Belden passed one of her large, smooth gloves over the other and praised the house. "It is one of the handsomest on the street," replied Eliza Marshall, firmly. "And one of the best built. We feel completely at home in it already." But, in truth, the poor soul was homesick, heartsick, as lost and forlorn as a shipwrecked sailor on the chill coast of Kamtchatka. Mrs. Belden smoothed down her yellow locks and deplored, in her thickly sweet accents, the unfortunate condition of the business. "My husband's own affairs are going very well," returned Eliza Marshall, looking forward with unblinking eyes. "My son has charge of them. There was a full account of his success in the Sunday paper." Her tone was one of brazen triumph. Yet Eliza Marshall abhorred speculation with all the dread of the middle-aged female conservative. One dollar through legitimate trade rather than ten through such paths as Roger had of late been so fearfully treading. Mrs. Belden had heard something of Truesdale's intended departure for the Orient. "He finds Chicago uncongenial, no doubt."