"I don't know why you should want to live any other kind," was the prompt rejoinder. "To be a rising young business man in a rich little inland city, beloved of the gods and goddesses—especially of the goddesses.... Say, by Jove! here comes one of them, right now. Heavens! isn't she a pomegranate!"
A handsome limousine had rolled silently up to the club carriage entrance, and the young woman in question was descending from it. Only a miser of adjectives—or a Debritt—would have tried to set forth her triumphant charm in a single word. She was magnificent: a brown-eyed blonde of the Olympian type, exuberantly feminine in the many dazzling luxuriances of ripe-lipped, full-figured maidenhood. The salesman saw his companion make a move to rise, but the beauty passed on into the club-house without looking their way.
"You know her, I suppose; you know everybody in town," Debritt said, after the cashier had again settled himself in the lounging-chair.
Smith's nod was expressive of something more than a fellow townsman's degree of intimacy.
"I ought to," he admitted. "She is Miss Verda Richlander, the daughter of our one and only multimillionaire. Also, I may add that she is my very good friend."
Debritt's chuckling laugh proved that his prefigurings had already outrun the mere statement of fact.
"Better and more of it," he commented. "I'm going to congratulate you before you can escape—or is it a bit premature?"
"Some of the Lawrenceville gossips would tell you that it isn't; but it is, just the same. Mr. Josiah Richlander has but one measure for the stature of a man, and the name of it is money. The fellow who asks him for Miss Verda is going to have a chance to show up his bank-account and the contents of his safety-deposit box in short order."
"In that case, I should imagine you'd be lying awake nights trying to study up some get-rich-quick scheme," joked the guest.
"Perhaps I am," was the even-toned rejoinder. "Who knows?"