"Don't you see, if I sell one hundred thousand dollars' worth of stock, I get the same as twenty-five thousand dollars for it, and with that buy fifty thousand dollars' worth of stock? Of course I get it at the same price as others--fifty per cent." "Did they understand you'd get fifty thousand instead of twenty-five thousand?" she asked. He chuckled again. "If they didn't they will," he admitted. She pondered over that thoughtfully for a while. "Is that straight business?" she inquired. "Of course it's straight business or I wouldn't be doing it. It is perfectly legitimate. You just don't understand." "No," she confessed, "I guess I don't; only I thought it was just twenty-five per cent." "It is twenty-five per cent.," he insisted, and then he gave it up. "You'd better quit thinking," he advised. "It'll put wrinkles in your brow, and I'm the one that has the wrinkles scheduled. I've just contracted for one hundred thousand dollars' worth of advertising, and I've got to go out to sell enough stock to bring in the cash. Also, I've rented a factory, and to-morrow I'm going to let out contracts for bottling machinery, vats and fixtures. I've already ordered the office furniture. You ought to see it. It's swell. I'm having some lithographed stationery made, too, embossed in four colors, with a picture of Doctor Quagg in the corner." "How much stock has the doctor?" she asked. "Ten thousand." "Is that all he's going to have?" she wanted to know. "Why, certainly, that's all he's going to have. I made the bargain with him and he's satisfied." "Ten thousand dollars' worth out of a half-million-dollar corporation? Why, Jim, for his medicine, upon which the whole business is built, he only gets--how much is that of all of it?" "One fiftieth, or two per cent.," he told her. "Two per cent.!" she gasped. "Is that straight business, Jim?" "Of course it's straight business," he assured her. "Of course," and he smiled, "Doc didn't stop to figure that he only gets two per cent. of the profits of the concern. He figures that he's to draw dividends on the large hunk of ten thousand dollars' worth of stock, and he's satisfied. Why aren't you?" "I don't know," she replied slowly, still with the vague feeling that something was wrong. "Really, Jim, it don't seem to me that straight business is any more fair than crooked business." Wallingford was hugely disappointed. "And that's all the appreciation I get for confining myself to the straight and narrow!" he exclaimed. "Oh, I didn't mean that, Jim," she said, with instant contrition. "You don't know how glad I am that now, since we're married, you have settled down to honorable things; and you'll make a fortune, I know you will." "You bet I will," he agreed. "In the meantime I have to go out and dig up seventy-five thousand dollars more of other people's money to put into this concern; _which will give me another seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of stock_! Straight business pays, Fannie!"