Caroline,
chuck it--chuck it all and be just the fine human woman that there is
in you!"

She was trembling with suppressed wrath. Never before--not to her
face, at least--had such criticism been directed at her.

"And ultimately be Mrs. Harvey--no, thank you!" she replied, in a
choking, caustic voice. "But while you are at it, have you any further
suggestions for my conduct?"

"Yes," said he determinedly. "You have been spending too much
money, and spending it on utterly worthless purposes. This social
duel--that's just what it is--between you and Mrs. Allistair, besides
being nonsense, will be absolutely ruinous if you keep it up. Mrs.
Allistair is as unprincipled in a social way as her husband has been
in a business way; her ambition will hesitate to use no means, you
know that--and, don't forget this, she can spend fifty dollars to your
one!"

"I believe," with blazing hauteur, yet still controlled, "that I
possess something superior to Mrs. Allistair's dollars."

"Yes," groaned the Judge, "your confounded old-family business!"

"And speaking of money," continued Mrs. De Peyster in her cuttingest,
most withering, most annihilatory grand manner, "perhaps I should
have spent my money worthily, like Judge Harvey, upon a gift of Thomas
Jefferson letters to the American Historical Society."

The shaft of sarcasm quivered into the center of Judge Harvey's sorest
spot. Those recently discovered letters of Thomas Jefferson which
Judge Harvey had presented to the Historical Society, and which had
been so widely discussed as throwing new light upon the beginnings
of the United States Republic, had a month before been pronounced and
proved to be clever but arrant forgeries. The newspaper sensation
and the praise that had attended the discovery and gift--warming and
exalting Judge Harvey's very human pride--had been followed by an
anti-climax of gibes and jeers at his gullibility. Whenever the hoax
was spoken of, Judge Harvey writhed with personal humiliation, and
with anger against the person who had recalled his discomfiture, and
with a desire for vengeance against the perpetrator of the swindle.

"Remember this, that the first experts pronounced those letters
genuine," he retorted in a hot, trembling voice. "And I'm going to
get that scoundrel--you see! Only to-day I had word from the Police
Commissioner that his department at last had clues to that fellow
Preston. And, besides," he ended cuttingly, "though I was d