, when I
overheard two of the women talking about Obermuller and me one night.

"He found her and made her," one of 'em said; "just dug her out of the
ground. See what he's done for her; taught her every blessed thing she
knows; wrote her mimicking monologues for her; gave her her chance,
and--and now--Well, Tausig don't pay salaries for nothing, and she gets
hers as regularly as I draw mine. What more I don't know. But she
hasn't set foot on the stage yet under Tausig, and they say
Obermuller--"

I didn't get the rest of it, so I don't know what they say about
Obermuller. I only know what they've said to him about me. 'Tisn't
hard to make men believe those things. But I had to stand it. What
could I do? I couldn't tell Fred Obermuller that I was making over his
play, soul and as much body as I could remember, to Tausig's secretary.
He'd have found that harder to believe than the other thing.

It hasn't been a very happy week for me, I can tell you, Maggie. But I
forgot it all, every shiver and ache of it, when I came into the office
that morning, as usual, and found Mason alone.

Not altogether alone--he had his bottle. And he had had it and others
of the same family all the night before. The poor drunken wretch
hadn't been home at all. He was worse than he'd been that morning
three days before, when I had stood facing him and talking to him,
while with my hands behind my back I was taking a wax impression of the
lock of the desk; and he as unconscious of it all as Tausig himself.

The last page I had dictated the day before, which he'd been
transcribing from his notes, lay in front of him; the gas was still
burning directly above him, and a shade he wore over his weak eyes had
been knocked awry as his poor old bald head went bumping down on the
type-writer before him.

The thing that favored me was Tausig's distrust of everybody connected
with him. He hates his partners only a bit less than he hates the men
outside the Trust. The bigger and richer the Syndicate grows, the more
power and prosperity it has, the more he begrudges them their share of
it; the more he wants it all for himself. He is madly suspicious of
his clerks, and hires others to watch them, to spy upon them. He is
continually moving his valuables from place to place, partly because he
trusts no man; partly because he's so deathly afraid his right hand
will find out what his left is doing. He is a full partner of Braun
and Lowentha