"It's what one gets that counts," he said profoundly. "I think you are. You speak and write three languages perfectly. That's so much money in your pocket."
Mary Unwin had been almost a year an inmate of the office of Elgar Radway; she had quickly accommodated herself to the routine of her work. She worked always at top speed, as did her employer himself, and was paid eighteen dollars weekly.
Pleasant Work
In itself the tasks set her were not arduous. The people were kindly, and Radway—notorious as a man-about-town—never mixed his pleasures with his work. She was as free from harm when taking his dictation as she would have been with a decent-minded man.
It was to him she preferred the request for an hour off. He was not pleased. "I'm busy," he grunted. "I'm off for a vacation soon, and there's a lot to do. Don't be longer than an hour."
She was the only girl he had ever dictated to who never made grammatical errors or put commas when periods were intended. He looked at her curiously as she went from the office.
As a connoisseur of women he admired her charm, but she was worth more to him in the office than out of it. Radway was a voluptuary of sixty who was finding out that he lived now in a soberer age and could not adapt himself to it. Gibbons's victory pointed the moral.
He did not greatly fear Gibbons. He comforted himself that after a few weeks on the sea he would come back refreshed for the big game.
He was thinking of Gibbons's triumph over the Memphis and Toledo road, only made possible by the treachery of a trusted manager, when Mary Unwin entered the office of her father's one-time friend. Mary was so accustomed to the overenthusiasms of her father that she quite expected to have to wait.
It was likely, she thought, that she might never even be admitted to the capitalists presence. But the office manager seemed almost to be waiting for her. She was accorded uncommon courtesy and found herself in a big walnut-lined room, facing Alfred Gibbons.
Gibbons was often a matter of speculation among the Radway staff. It was known that he had once been Radway's clerk and had left suddenly, breathing threats against his employer. And it seemed he had devoted his life to getting even for some grievance of whose origin none in his office had any, definite idea.
Although he had been sneered at in the beginning, some of the older men in the office were growing to respect him. Some, indeed, saw in him one destined to wrest supremacy from Elgar Radway.
A Girl of Class
Mary looked at him with a curiosity that had nothing to do with his financial position. She looked at him as one who had in the other years been a close friend of her poor, blundering, clever, but unstable father, whom she loved the more because she saw his need.
Gibbons was a spare man of middle height. There was a hint of the bird of prey in his face. She thought if one might say a hawk sneered, that Gibbons resembled a sneering and avid hawk. But he smiled when he saw her and rose from his seat. It was a courtesy the clerk who ushered the girl in reported to his friends in the outer office; it was a mark of great distinction.
Gibbons was not prepared for a beauty. It was true, Unwin had fine features and brilliant eyes, but one remembered Unwin as the man who perpetually failed and looked apologetic. There was a cloud of depression about Unwin, which seemed to make his car-
