She interrupted herself, and gazed at the picture again.
"Is it a good likeness?" she asked at last, with her eyes still fixed on the portrait.
"It's so like him that I wouldn't speak to it," White answered.
"I see what you mean," the old lady responded. "Yes, if the man really looks like that, nobody would want to speak to him. I wouldn't have this artist—what's his name?—Mr. Brashleigh?—I wouldn't have him paint my portrait for the world. Why, if he did, and my friends once saw it, there isn't one of them who would ever dare to ask me to dinner again."
White smiled, and quickly responded, "As I said before, you know, even the gentleman you wanted to take you in to dinner is probably not as black as he is painted."
"But I wouldn't want that man to take me in to dinner," returned Miss Marlenspuyk, promptly, indicating the portrait with a wave of her hand. "Paint is all very well; besides, it is only on the outside, and women don't mind it; but it is that man's heart that is black. It is his inner man that is so terrible. He fascinates me—yes—but he frightens me too. Who is he?"
"I told you," White answered. "He is Mr. Cyrus Poole, the president of the Niobrara Central Railroad, and one of the coming men in the Street. He turned up in Denver ten years ago, and when he had learned all that Denver had to teach him he went to Chicago. He graduated from the Board of Trade there, and then came to New York; he has been here two years now, and already he has made himself felt. He has engineered two or three of the biggest things yet seen in the Street. As a result there are now two opinions about him."
"If this portrait is true," said the old maid, "I don't see how there can be more than one opinion about him."
"There were three at first," White rejoined. "At first they thought he was a lamb; now they know better. But they are still in doubt whether he is square or not. They say that the deal by which he captured the stock of the Niobrara Central and made himself president had this little peculiarity, that if it hadn't succeeded, instead of being in Europe on his honeymoon, Cyrus Poole would now be in Sing Sing. Why, if half they said about him at the time is true—instead of hanging here on the line, he ought to have been hanged at the end of a rope. But then I don't believe half that I hear."
"I could believe anything of a man who looks like that," Miss Marlenspuyk said. "I don't think I ever saw a face so evil, for all it appears frank and almost friendly."