a shade. And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the
paper spread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him,
but away from the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra,
when she wasn't working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with
her elbows on the table reading Marie Corelli--only now, of course,
after the fortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic
Schools.

So this night,--I don't know just what it was in the paper that
caused it,--Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk
about Carnegie.

"This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth," said Jeff, closing up his
eyes in calculation, "as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you
was to sell him up. And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of
them, to sell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million--"

I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa
if you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean
sold up, put up for auction, as it were. It was the only way to test
him.

"And now look at 'em," Jeff went on. "They make their money and what
do they do with it? They give it away. And who do they give it to?
Why, to those as don't want it, every time. They give it to these
professors and to this research and that, and do the poor get any of
it? Not a cent and never will."

"I tell you, boys," continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but
in Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an