Settling herself comfortably back in the carriage, Shirley
questioned Jefferson with eagerness, even anxiety. She had been
impatiently awaiting the arrival of the newspapers from "home,"
for so much depended on this first effort. She knew her book had
been praised in some quarters, and her publishers had written her
that the sales were bigger every day, but she was curious to learn
how it had been received by the reviewers.

In truth, it had been no slight achievement for a young writer of
her inexperience, a mere tyro in literature, to attract so much
attention with her first book. The success almost threatened to
turn her head, she had told her aunt laughingly, although she was
sure it could never do that. She fully realized that it was the
subject rather than the skill of the narrator that counted in the
book's success, also the fact that it had come out at a timely
moment, when the whole world was talking of the Money Peril. Had
not President Roosevelt, in a recent sensational speech, declared
that it might be necessary for the State to curb the colossal
fortunes of America, and was not her hero, John Burkett Ryder, the
richest of them all? Any way they looked at it, the success of the
book was most gratifying.

While she was an attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley
Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features
were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed
the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her
face something far more appealing--soul and character. The face of
the merely beautiful woman expresses nothing, promises nothing. It
presents absolutely no key to the soul within, and often there is