es_ and _Causerie du Boudoir_
wrote it out in French, and one paper had called her a _belle
chatelaine_, and another had spoken of her as a grande dame, which the
Tomlinsons thought must be a misprint.

But in any case, for Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, it was a great
relief to have as his wife a woman like mother, because he knew that
she had taught school in Cahoga County and could hold her own in the
city with any of them.

So mother spent her time sitting in her beetle jacket in the
thousand-dollar suite, reading new novels in brilliant paper covers.
And the Wizard on his trips up and down to the rotunda brought her the
very best, the ones that cost a dollar fifty, because he knew that out
home she had only been able to read books like Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Walter Scott, that were only worth ten cents.

* * * * *

"How's Fred?" said the Wizard, laying aside his hat, and looking
towards the closed door of an inner room. "Is he better?"

"Some," said mother. "He's dressed, but he's lying down."

Fred was the son of the Wizard and mother. In the inner room he lay on
a sofa, a great hulking boy of seventeen in a flowered dressing-gown,
fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box of
chocolates on a chair beside him, and he had the blind drawn and his
eyes half-closed to impress himself.

Yet this was the same boy that less than a year ago on Tomlinson's
Creek had worn a rough store suit and set his sturdy shoulders to the
buck-saw. At present Fortune was busy taking from him the golden gifts
which the fairies of Cahoga County, Lake Erie, had laid in his cradle
seventeen years ago.

The Wizard tip-toed into the inner room, and from the open door his
listening wife could hear the voice of the boy saying, in a tone as of
one distraught with suffering.

"Is there any more of that jelly?"

"Could he have any, do you suppose?" asked Tomlinson coming back.

"It's all right," said mother, "if it will sit on his stomach." For
this, in the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All those
things can be eaten which will sit on the stomach. Anything that won't
sit there is not eatable.

"Do you suppose I could get them to get any?" questioned Tomlinson.
"Would it be all right to telephone down to the office, or do you think
it would be better to ring?"

"Perhaps," said his wife, "it would be better to look out into the hall
and see if there isn't someone round tha