tion and seated their judicial candidates. One expects a friendly
leaning from the men one put in office."

"Isn't the judiciary supposed to be the final, incorruptible bulwark of
the nation?" she pretended to want to know.

"I believe it is supposed to be."

"Isn't it rather--loading the dice, to interfere with the courts?"

"I find the dice already loaded. I merely substitute others of my own."

"You don't seem a bit ashamed of yourself."

"I'm ashamed of the Consolidated"--he smiled.

"That's a comfortable position to be able to take." She fixed him for a
moment with her charming frown of interrogation. "You won't mind my
asking these questions? I'm trying to decide whether you are too much
of a pirate for me. Perhaps when I've made up my mind you won't want
me," she added.

"Oh, I'll want you!" Then coolly: "Shall we wait till you make up your
mind before announcing the engagement?"

"Don't be too sure," she flashed at him.

"I'm horribly unsure."

"Of course, you're laughing at me, just as you would"--she tilted a
sudden sideways glance at him--"if I asked you WHY you wanted to marry
me."

"Oh, if you take me that way----"

She interrupted airily. "I'm trying to make up my mind whether to take
you at all."

"You certainly have a direct way of getting at things."

He studied appreciatively her piquant, tilted face; the long, graceful
lines of her slender, perfect figure. "I take it you don't want the
sentimental reason for my wishing to marry you, though I find that
amply justified. But if you want another, you must still look to
yourself for it. My business leads me to appreciate values correctly.
When I desire you to sit at the head of my table, to order my house, my
judgment justifies itself. I have a fancy always for the best. When I
can't gratify it I do without."

"Thank you." She made him a gay little mock curtsy "I had heard you
were no carpet-knight, Mr. Ridgway. But rumor is a lying jade, for I am
being told--am I not?--that in case I don't take pity on you, the lone
future of a celibate stretches drear before you."

"Oh, certainly."

Having come to the end of that passage, she tried another. "A young man
told me yesterday you were a fighter. He said he guessed you would
stand the acid. What did he mean?"

Ridgway was an egoist from head to heel. He could voice his own praises
by the hour when necessary, but now he side-stepped her little trap to
make him praise himself at second-h