sleep with all that going on?" I insisted.

"All what? Oh, them calves. That's nothing! Angus says to her when they
first got money: 'Whatever you economize in, let it not be in diamonds!'
He says nothing looks so poverty-stricken as a person that can only
afford a few. Better wear none at all than just a mere handful, he
says. What do you think of that talk from a man named Angus McDonald?
You'd think a Scotchman and his money was soon parted, but I heard him
say it from the heart out. And yet Ellabelle never does seem to get him.
Only a year ago, when I was at this here rich place down from San
Francisco where they got the new marble palace, there was a lovely
blow-up and Ellabelle says to me in her hysteria: 'Once a Scotchman,
always a Scotchman!' Oh, she was hysteric all right! She was like what I
seen about one of the movie actresses, 'the empress of stormy emotion.'
Of course she feels better now, after the wedding and all this newspaper
guff. And it was a funny blow-up. I don't know as I blamed her at the
time."

I now closed a window and a door upon the noisy September night. It
helped a little. I went back to a chair nearer to this woman with ears
trained in rejection. That helped more. I could hear her now, save in
the more passionate intervals of the chorus.

"All right, then. What was the funny blow-up?" She caught the
significance of the closed door and window.

"But that's music," she insisted. "Why, I'd like to have a good record
of about two hundred of them white-faced beauties being weaned, so I
could play it on a phonograph when I'm off visiting--only it would make
me too homesick." She glanced at the closed door and window in a way
that I found sinister.

"I couldn't hear you," I suggested.

"Oh, all right!" She listened wistfully a moment to the now slightly
dulled oratorio, then: "Yes, Angus McDonald is his name; but there are
two kinds of Scotch, and Angus is the other kind. Of course he's one of
the big millionaires now, with money enough to blind any kind of a
Scotchman, but he was the other kind even when he first come out to us,
a good thirty years ago, without a cent. He's a kind of second or third
cousin of mine by marriage or something--I never could quite work it
out--and he'd learned his trade back in Ohio; but he felt that the East
didn't have any future to speak of, so he decided to come West. He was a
painter and grainer and kalsominer and paperhanger, that kind of
thing--a good,