lt letters. Thence she led her mother, and
found herself treading on the marble floors of the richly appointed
waiting room in a secret excitement which she could with difficulty
conceal. She was, indeed, very uncertain about the next
development. . . . Her mother had to be reckoned with.

A young man asked courteously what could be done for them. "We want to
see the head of the firm," said Mrs. Hardy. "We want to buy a house."
It occurred to Irene that in some respects her mother was extremely
artless, but the issue was for the moment postponed.

They were shown into Conward's office. Time had been when they would
have seen no further than a head salesman; but times were changing, and
real estate dealers were losing the hauteur of the days of their great
success. Conward gave them the welcome of a man who expects to make
money out of his visitors. He placed a very comfortable chair for Mrs.
Hardy; he adjusted the blinds to a nicety; he discarded his cigarette
and beamed upon them with as great a show of cordiality as his somewhat
beefy appearance would permit. The years had not been over kind to
Conward's person. His natural tendency to corpulence had been abetted
by excessive eating; his face was red and flabby, his lips had no more
colour than his face; and nature, in deciding to deprive him of a
portion of his hair, had very unkindly elected to take it in patches,
giving his head a sort of pinto effect. These imperfections were
quickly appraised by Irene, but his manner appealed to Mrs. Hardy, who
outlined her life history with considerable detail, dwelling more than
once upon the perfections of the late Dr. Hardy--which perfections she
now showed a disposition to magnify, as implying a certain distinction
unto herself--and ended with the confession that the West was not as
bad as she had feared, and anyway it was a case of living here or dying
elsewhere, so she would have to make the best of it. And here they
were. And might they see a house?

Conward appeared to be reflecting. As a matter of fact, he saw in this
inexperienced buyer an opportunity to reduce his holdings in
anticipation of the impending crash. His difficulty was that he had no
key to the financial resources of his visitors. They had lived in good
circumstances; they were the family of a successful professional man,
but, as Conward well knew, many successful professional men had a
manner of living that galloped hard on the heels of