like a second Adam and Eve, the verbal victory had been hers. And it
had been Sally who had achieved triumph in the one battle which Mrs.
Meecher, apparently as a matter of duty, always brought about with each
of her patrons in the first week of their stay. A sweet-tempered
girl, Sally, like most women of a generous spirit, had cyclonic
potentialities.

As she seemed to have said her say, Fillmore kept on expanding till he
had reached the normal, when he ventured upon a speech for the defence.

"What have I done?" demanded Fillmore plaintively.

"Do you want to hear all over again?"

"No, no," said Fillmore hastily. "But, listen. Sally, you don't
understand my position. You don't seem to realize that all that sort of
thing, all that boarding-house stuff, is a thing of the past. One's got
beyond it. One wants to drop it. One wants to forget it, darn it! Be
fair. Look at it from my viewpoint. I'm going to be a big man..."

"You're going to be a fat man," said Sally, coldly.

Fillmore refrained from discussing the point. He was sensitive.

"I'm going to do big things," he substituted. "I've got a deal on at
this very moment which... well, I can't tell you about it, but it's
going to be big. Well, what I'm driving at, is about all this sort of
thing"--he indicated the lighted front of Mrs. Meecher's home-from-home
with a wide gesture--"is that it's over. Finished and done with. These
people were all very well when..."

"... when you'd lost your week's salary at poker and wanted to borrow a
few dollars for the rent."

"I always paid them back," protested Fillmore, defensively.

"I did."

"Well, we did," said Fillmore, accepting the amendment with the air of
a man who has no time for chopping straws. "Anyway, what I mean is, I
don't see why, just because one has known people at a certain period in
one's life when one was practically down and out, one should have
them round one's neck for ever. One can't prevent people forming an
I-knew-him-when club, but, darn it, one needn't attend the meetings."

"One's friends..."

"Oh, friends," said Fillmore. "That's just where all this makes me so
tired. One's in a position where all these people are entitled to call
themselves one's friends, simply because father put it in his will that
I wasn't to get the money till I was twenty-five, instead of letting me
have it at twenty-one like anybody else. I wonder where I should have
been by now if I could have got that money