leigman's confidential clerk. Not that
M---- smiled over any such paradox: the countess called herself simply
Mrs. von Arno.

M---- is a picturesque town on the Mississippi, devoted in general to the
manufacture of agricultural implements. The largest plough-factory is
Seleigman's: he does business all over the world. A clerk who wrote
French, German and Italian fluently was a godsend. This clerk, moreover,
had an eminently concise and effective style, and displayed a business
capacity which the old German admired immensely. As much because of her
usefulness as the modest sum she was able to invest in the business, he
offered her a small share in it four years after she first came to M----.
She had come to M---- because Mrs. Greymer lived there. Therese Greymer
had known the countess from her school-days. When her husband died she
came back to her father's house, but spent her summers in Germany. Then
old Mr. Dare died suddenly, leaving Therese with her little brother to
care for, and only a few thousand dollars in the world. About this time
the countess separated from her husband. "So I am poor," said she, "but it
will go hard if I can't take care of you, Therese." Thus she became Mr.
Seleigman's clerk. M---- forgave her the clerkship, forgave her even her
undoubted success in making money, on account of Mrs. Greymer. It had
watched Therese grow from a slim girl, with black braids hanging down her
white neck as she sat in the "minister's pew" of the old brick church,
into a beautiful pale woman in a widow's bonnet. Therese went now every
Sunday to the same church where her father used to preach. The countess
accompanied her most decorously. She was a pagan at heart, but it pleased
Therese. In church she spent her time looking at her friend's profile and
calculating the week's sales.

The countess had a day-dream: the dreams which most women have had long
ago been rudely broken for her, and the hopes which she cherished now had
little romance about them. She knew her own powers and how necessary she
was to Seleigman: some day she saw the firm becoming Seleigman & Von Arno,
the business widening, and the ploughs, with the yellow eagle on them, in
every great city of Europe. "Then," said the countess to herself, standing
one March morning, four years after she had first come to M----, by the
little dining-room window--"then we can perhaps persuade the workmen to
buy stock in the concern and have a few gleams of sense abou