"So at St. Louis we resolved to become Spiritualists."
"The very best thing you could have done!" said Mrs. Winslow approvingly.
"And at Quincy," resumed Evalena, "we blossomed out. Oh, but didn't the papers go for us, though!—called us everything."
"D——n the newspapers, anyhow!" exclaimed Mrs. Winslow in a burst of indignation over her own wrongs.
"Oh, no, no, no! that won't do. Make huge advertising bills. That's better—much better. That's what we did, and we made big money too. By and by we came on here to New York, made a huge show, took in a vast pile, and then went to Europe. Oh, that's the only way to do it!"
"Yes," said Mrs. Winslow with a deep sigh. "I have often felt the want of that peculiar tone which going to Europe gives one."
"Well, we did have a gay time, though," said Miss Gray in a dreamy way, as if ruminating over her conquests; "and at Venice—oh, that delicious, ravishing, dreamful Venice!—I bilked a swarthy nobleman from the mountains out of five thousand dollars. At Rome I did a swell American out of everything he had. At Vienna, a Hungarian wine-grower fell, and I trampled upon him as his brutes of peasants beat out the grapes in vintage-time. At Berlin a German student killed himself for me; and at St. Petersburg I fooled the Czar himself. But when I got back to London I got better game than him."
"Bigger game than the Czar? Oh, my!" exclaimed Mrs. Winslow, thinking how she had wasted her sweetness on two detectives like Bristol and Fox.
"Well, bigger game this way," pursued little Miss Gray, reasoning it out slowly. "This Spiritualistic business can only be played on low, ignorant people ordinarily. Get the recognition of so big a man as one of the wealthiest brewers in Great Britain, and then, if Miss Gray has money and can open sumptuous parlors in so fashionable a vicinity as Madison Square, and can own a quarter of a column of the New York papers every day, Miss Evalena Gray's fortune is made. Do you see?"