o themselves a larger share of prosperity.

"If we could have hung on to grandfather's old ranch, we'd not one of us
been working for other folks to-day. He had a hundred and sixty acres of
as pretty a bit of land as there is in Sacramento Valley--part of it is
now in the city limits, too. But father was sort of slack in some
ways,--didn't realize what a big future California had,--so he sold off
most of the ranch for almost nothing, and mother had to part with the
rest."

He flipped a trowelful of mortar and whistled as if to express thus his
sense of fate.

"Too bad," Adelle replied. "They say you ought never to sell any land.
It's all likely to be more valuable some day."

"Sure!" the mason rejoined sourly. "That's why most of us work for a few
of you!"

"What do you mean?" Adelle asked, puzzled by the economic theory implied
in this remark.

But before Clark could explain, Adelle was summoned to the house. As she
went up the slippery path she thought about what the mason had said,
about his being a Clark, too. She felt herself on much closer terms of
knowledge and sympathy with this workman of her own name than with the
fashionable women who had come for luncheon to Highcourt.

Hitherto Adelle had met in the journey of life mainly coarse-minded
persons--I do not mean by this, nasty or vulgar people, but simply men
and women who were content to live on the surfaces and let others do for
them what thinking they needed--people upon whom the experience of
living could make little fine impression. In the rooming-house, with her
aunt and uncle and the transient roomers, naturally there had been no
refinement of any sort. Nor, in spite of its luxury and its boast of
educating the daughters of "our best families," had the expensive
boarding-school to which the trust company in their blindness condemned
their ward added much to Adelle's spiritual opportunities. Pussy
Comstock, for all her sophistication, was no better, and as for the "two
Pols" and Archie Davis, the reader can judge what fineness of mind or
soul was to be found in them. Even the officers of the Washington Trust
Company, who were of indubitable respectability and prominence in their
own community,--everything that bankers should be,--had neither mental
nor spiritual elevation, and coarsely pigeonholed their ideas about life
as they had done with Adelle. The thinking of the best spirits in
Bellevue has been exemplified in the utterance upon labor that