coloured again, and put her horse to the trot.

"Onwards and upwards," he cried. "Veni, vidi, vici, ascendi."

"It seems to me," she laughed, "that so much education is thrown away on
the stock market."

"Whether you will be any happier higher up," he went on, "God knows.
Sometimes I think you ought to go back to the Arcadia you came from. Did
you pick out Spence for an embryo lord of high finance?"

"My excuse is," replied Honora, "that I was very young, and I hadn't met
you."

Whether the lion has judged our heroine with astuteness, or done her a
little less than justice, must be left to the reader. Apparently he is
accepting her gentle lashings with a meek enjoyment. He assisted her to
alight at her own door, sent the horses home, and offered to come in and
give her a lesson in a delightful game that was to do its share in the
disintegration of the old and tiresome order of things--bridge. The lion,
it will be seen, was self-sacrificing even to the extent of double dummy.
He had picked up the game with characteristic aptitude abroad
--Quicksands had yet to learn it.

Howard Spence entered in the midst of the lesson.

"Hello, Brent," said he, genially, "you may be interested to know I got
that little matter through without a hitch to-day."

"I continue to marvel at you," said the lion, and made it no trumps.

Since this is a veracious history, and since we have wandered so far from
home and amidst such strange, if brilliant scenes, it must be confessed
that Honora, three days earlier, had entered a certain shop in New York
and inquired for a book on bridge. Yes, said the clerk, he had such a
treatise, it had arrived from England a week before. She kept it looked
up in her drawer, and studied it in the mornings with a pack of cards
before her.

Given the proper amount of spur, anything in reason can be mastered.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 3, by Winston Churchill

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