"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."
"Please!"
"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.