"Women sometimes--er--put their money into stocks, don't they?" Cordelia asked tentatively, as they bowled briskly down Fifth Avenue one bright morning.
"Yes, and nearly always lose it, too," was Mr. Spaulding's discouraging and somewhat curt reply.
"But if they are certain about the right thing?"
"But if they have a friend in Wall Street, a friend who knows--" ventured Cordelia.
"Then the friend never knows. My advice is for women to keep out of Wall Street."
"But aren't there any stocks that are safe? I mean, aren't there any good ones _you_ feel certain about, for instance?"
"Of course; but those are the kind you never make your money out of--at least not at the rate women want to make it. They're slow and steady."
"But you've been in Wall Street so long! Surely there's something you feel to be safe and yet going to go up, too?"
The ghost of a smile crept over his worn face.
"Miss Vaughan, if I had that delightful power, I'd make a million before I came home for dinner to-night."
"But didn't you make nearly a thousand dollars for your brother Louis?" she asked, after a pause.
"Yes, I did; and it caused me more bother and worry than making eighty times that much out of my own money. Louis is a pretty poor man, you know."
"It meant a good deal to him. If I hadn't carried him over on my own shoulders he'd have been hard hit."
"I _want_ to try." Then after a moment's pause she said: "Mr. Spaulding."
"Mr. Spaulding, I've two thousand dollars," she had not quite that sum, but she knew that she could easily make it up by means of a loan from his wife--"and I intend to speculate with it. Won't you invest it for me?"
"Miss Vaughan, I've made it a rule, an inexorable rule, never to take a woman's money in the Street."
"You know lessons there usually cost about a thousand dollars a second."
"I'd be sorry to go to some one I didn't know," she pouted girlishly, and then she added, "or didn't trust."
"Yes, I think probably you would, afterward."
"But I shall," she said determinedly. As to this the man of business made no reply.
The next morning she slipped a bunch of English violets into his little cut-glass vase.
"Won't you?" she pleaded again in her softest voice.
He looked at the flowers, at his waiting mail, and then at the girl--or was she not a woman?--herself.