tly a conceited ass to fancy you cared a little for me. So,
of course, I was going to marry you and try to make you happy. But how
dear--oh, how unutterably dear it was of you, Margaret, to decline
to be made happy in any such fashion!" And Mr. Kennaston paused to
chuckle and to regard her with genuine esteem and affection.

But still her candid eyes weighed him, and transparently found him
wanting.

"You are thinking, perhaps, what an unutterable cad I have been?" he
suggested.

"Yes--you are rather by way of being a cad, beautiful. But I can't
help liking you, somehow. I dare say it's because you're honest
with me. Nobody--nobody," Miss Hugonin lamented, a forlorn little
quiver in her voice, "_ever_ seemed to be honest with me except you,
and now I know you weren't. Oh, beautiful, aren't I ever to have any
real friends?" she pleaded, wistfully.

Kennaston had meant a deal to her, you see; he had been the one
man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib
artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere
pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart
a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. The
thought nauseated her.

"My dear," he answered, kindly, "you will have any number of friends
now that you are poor. It was merely your money that kept you from
having any. You see," Mr. Kennaston went on, with somewhat the air of
one climbing upon his favourite hobby, "money is the only thing
that counts nowadays. In America, the rich are necessarily our only
aristocracy. It is quite natural. One cannot hope for an aristocracy
of intellect, if only for the reason that not one person in a thousand
has any; and birth does not count for much. Of course, it is quite
true that all of our remote ancestors came over with William the
Conqueror--I have sometimes thought that the number of steerage
passengers his ships would accommodate must have been little short of
marvellous--but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most of
our leisure class were either deserving or dishonest persons--who
either started life on a farm, and studied Euclid by the firelight and
did all the other priggish things they thought would look well in a
biography, or else met with marked success in embezzlement. So money,
after all, is our only standard; and when a woman is as rich as you
were yesterday she cannot hope for friends any more than the Queen
of England