"And doesn't he ever lose?" Cordelia asked.
"Of course, my dear, sometimes. But Mrs. Herrington--her husband is in Wall Street, too--told me they never _have_ to lose unless they like; unless they want to lead the others on, and that sort of thing, you see. But I never bother about business. Alfred doesn't seem to like it."
"It must take years to understand it all," Cordelia ventured, toying absent-mindedly with the sugar-tongs.
"I think some men are born businesslike, my dear, the same as they're born bow-legged, or with big feet."
She wondered why Cordelia smiled, and then went on: "Why, only a little over a month ago Alfred's brother Louis, you know, sent him three thousand dollars from Milwaukee, to invest. Alfred was going to send it back, but I just _made_ him do it. He put it in some kind of steel. Then he worried so much about it that he took it all out again in less than a week. Even then he made over eight hundred dollars for poor Louis. Just think what it might have been if he'd only left it in right along."
It was this innocent and quite accidental piece of information which gave a new turn to the tide of Cordelia's thoughts.
In her own little yellow-covered bank-book she had a balance of some nineteen hundred dollars. Why should not this, she asked herself, be sent to that mysterious land of magic, Wall Street, and in time come back to her doubled, perhaps trebled? For many months of late she had indefinitely felt the need of more substantial resource than that already at her command.
Why, indeed, could not Mr. Spaulding do for her what he had already done for his brother out in Milwaukee?
She said nothing of her plans, but little by little resumed her regular morning drives with Mr. Alfred Spaulding down to his office, a matter in which she had been more or less remiss of late. Alfred Spaulding, in fact, objected to taking his carriages into Wall Street at all, and had forsworn the elevated railway only because his more practical wife--more practical in this thing, at any rate--insisted that he should get at least half an hour's open air each day.
Cordelia greatly surprised that absent-minded gentleman one morning by timidly putting a little cut-glass vase on his desk, into which she slipped an American Beauty rose. Although she had talked to him a great deal, and about many things, it was nearly a week before she approached the matter that lay nearest her heart.