ence--the usual
preliminary to a dispute. Gaylord was quite Trudy's equal as to
clothes, not only in style but in forgetfulness to pay for them.
Still, he was not unusual after one fully comprehended the type, for
they flourished like mushrooms. His had been a rich and powerful
family--only-the-father-drank-you-see variety--the sort taking the
fastest and most expensive steamer to Europe and bringing shame
upon the name of American traveller after arriving. Gaylord had been
the adored and only son, and his adored and older sister had managed
to marry fairly well before the crash came and debts surrounded the
entire Vondeplosshe estate.

He was small and frail, a trifle bow-legged to be exact, with pale and
perpetually weeping eyes, a crooked little nose with an incipient
moustache doing its best to hide a thick upper lip. His forehead
sloped back like a cat's, and his scanty, sandy hair was brushed into
a shining pompadour, while white eyelashes gave an uncanny expression
to his face. Abortive lumps of flesh stuck on at careless intervals
sufficed for ears, and his scrawny neck with its absurdly correct
collar and wild necktie seemed like an old, old man's when he dresses
for his golden-wedding anniversary. Everything about Gaylord seemed
old, exhausted, quite ineffectual. His mother had never tired boasting
that Gaylord had had mumps, measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, St.
Vitus dance, double pneumonia, and typhoid, had broken three ribs, his
left arm, his right leg, and his nose--all before reaching the age of
sixteen. And yet she raised him!

Coupled with this and the fact of his father's failure people were
lenient to him.

"He's Vondeplosshe's boy," they said; so they gave him a position or a
loan or a letter of introduction, and thought at the same time what a
splendid thing it was Vondeplosshe was out of it instead of having to
stand by and see his son make a complete foozle. For some time Gaylord
had been scampering up and down the gauntlet of sympathy, and as long
as he could borrow more money in Hanover than he could possibly earn
he refused to go to work.

Originally he would have been almost as rich as the Gorgeous Girl
herself, but as it was he was poor as Trudy Burrows, only Trudy was a
nobody, her family being a dark and uncertain quantity in the wilds of
Michigan.

Whereas Gaylord was Vondeplosshe and he could--and did--saunter past a
red-brick mansion and remark pensively: "I was born in the r