“Get out, will you!” she stormed, “and let me change my clothes.” Instead he put out the hostile Teen, and closing the door, locked it. “Now, Patty, you’re going to talk to me. Has the fire reached your father’s home yet?” A sniff was his only answer. It was enough. “Then you’re not going back to it. You stay here.” He spoke with autocracy, but his hands pleaded as he said: “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that——” “You can’t tell me anything. And if you lay your grimy hands on me, I’ll scratch your eyes out.” He stood off and gazed at her, helpless as a mastiff looking down at a kitten with back arched and claws unsheathed. He could have crunched her bones with ease, but she held him at bay by her very petty prettiness. He was so poor of spirit and resource that he stooped to say: “Since you’re so interested in Harry Chalender, you may be interested to know that the business of blowing up those buildings was his own idea.” He thought that this would either reinstate him in her respect or at least debase Harry Chalender there. But she dumbfounded him by her always unexpected viewpoint: “It was a splendid idea!” “Then why do you blame me for what I was going to do?” “Because you destroyed my father’s fortune wantonly—for spite—without any reason.” “It was to save the city. The building would have burned soon anyway.” “It would not have burned at all! It lies there now untouched. The wind shifted and carried the fire away from it.” He dropped to a chair, bludgeoned like an ox, and as bovine in his enjoyment of this hellish witticism of fate. Patty always loved to spurn him when he was down and she triumphed now: “Besides, if you must bring Harry Chalender into it, I know that even if Harry had blown up all the other buildings in the world, he would have spared my father’s—especially if I had asked him to.” RoBards nodded. That was probably true. But what was the uncanny genius of Chalender? He was a very politician among women as well as men. He allied himself with great causes and carried them greatly through, yet always managed to see that he and his friends profited somehow. For years he and his clique had been storming the public ear for a city water supply, and had made prophecy of just such a calamity as this. And now he and his partisans could stand above the smoking pyre of the city and crow a gigantic, “I told you so!” As RoBards sat inert and lugubriously ridiculous, Patty regarded him with a studious eye. She dazed him by saying after a long hush: “Since you don’t want me to go back to my father’s house, I’ll stay here.” He would have risen and seized her to his breast with a groan of rapture if she had said this in the far-off ages before the last few minutes of their parley. But now he grew even more contemptible in his own mind. There was no note of pity or of love in her voice, and he was so wretched that he muttered: