"Oh yes, but you must wonder. You're a shrewd one, Young Lady;
judging the thing by me, you must wonder."

Virginia was glad she was not compelled to state her theory. Loud
and common and impossible were terms which had presented themselves,
terms which she had fought with kind and good-natured and generous.
Their purchases she had decided were to be used, not for a knock,
but as a crashing pound at the door of the society of his town. For
her part, Virginia hoped the door would come down.

"And if you knew that probably this stuff would never be worn at
all, that ten to one it would never do anything more than lie round
on chairs--then you _would_ think I was queer, wouldn't you?"

She was forced to admit that that would seem rather strange.

"Young Lady, I believe I'll tell you about it. Never do talk about
it to hardly anybody, but I feel as if you and I were pretty well
acquainted--we've been through so much together."

She smiled at him warmly; there was something so real about him when
he talked that way.

But his look then frightened her. It seemed for an instant as though
he would brush the tiny table aside and seize some invisible thing
by the throat. Then he said, cutting off each word short: "Young
Lady, what do you think of this? I'm worth more 'an a million
dollars--and my wife gets up at five o'clock every morning to do
washing and scrubbing."