.

"It isn't anything she does, or doesn't do, particularly; it is the
atmosphere in which she lives and moves and has her being. If it weren't
for her father's money, she would be--well, it is rather hard to say
just what she would be. But she always makes me think of the bonanza
people--the pick and shovel one day and a million the next. I believe
she is a frank little savage, at heart."

"I don't," the brother contended, doggedly. "She may be a trifle new and
fresh for Wahaska, but she is clever and bright, and honest enough to
ignore a social code which makes a mock of sincerity and a virtue of
hypocrisy. I like her all the better for the way she flared out at me.
There isn't one young woman in a thousand who would have had the nerve
and the courage to do it."

"Or the impudence," added Mrs. Raymer, when her son had left the room.
Then: "I do hope Edward isn't going to let that girl come between him
and Charlotte!"

The daughter laughed.

"I should say there is room for a regiment to march between them, as it
is. Miss Gilman took particular pains to let him know what train they
were leaving on, and I happen to know he never went near the station to
tell them good-by."

XVI

GOOD SAMARITANS

Since she had undertaken to show Wahaska precisely how to deport itself
in the conventional field, Miss Grierson took a maid and a chaperon with
her when she went to Florida. But when she returned in April, the maid
had been left behind to marry the gamekeeper of one of the millionaire
estates on Lake Worth, and little Miss Matthews, the ex-seamstress
chaperon, had been dropped off in Illinois to visit relatives.

This is how it chanced that Margery, unwilling to set the Wahaskans a
bad example, had telegraphed her father to meet her in St. Louis. Also,
it shall account as it may for the far-reaching stroke of fate which
seated the Griersons at Griswold's table in the Hotel Chouteau cafe, and
afterward made them his fellow travellers in the north-bound
sleeping-car _Anita_.

When Jasper Grierson travelled alone he was democratic enough to be
satisfied with a section in the body of the car. But when Margery's
tastes were to be consulted, the drawing-room was none too good. Indeed,
as it transpired on the journey northward from St. Louis, the _Anita's_
drawing-room proved to be not good enough.

"It is simply a crude insult, the way they wear out their old,
broken-down cars on us up here!" she was protesting