"David in trouble again?"

Moreton nodded. "He thinks he's going to marry William Cord's
daughter."

Klein, who was Ben's friend as well as his assistant, blanched at the
name.

"Cord's daughter!" he exclaimed, and if he had said Jack-the-ripper's,
he could not have expressed more horror. "Now isn't it queer," he went
on, musingly, "that David, brought up as he has been, can see anything
to attract him in a girl like that?"

Ben was tidying his desk preparatory to departure--that is to say, he
was pushing all the papers far enough back to enable him to close the
roller top, and he answered, absently:

"Oh, I suppose they're all pretty much the same--girls."

"Why, what do you mean?" said Leo, reproachfully. "How can a girl
who's been brought up to be a parasite--to display the wealth of her
father and husband, and has never done a useful thing since she was
born--Why, a woman was telling me the other day--I got caught in a
block in the subway and she was next me--awfully interesting, she was.
She sewed in one of these fashionable dressmaking establishments--and
the things she told me about what those women spend on their
clothes--underclothes and furs and everything. Now there must be
something wrong with a woman who can spend money on those things when
she knows the agony of poverty right around her. You can't compare
that sort of woman with a self-respecting, self-supporting girl--"