“A hundred thousand dollars!” gasped Hazel. “Why—why—Berny!”
She stopped, almost trembling in the excitement of her stunned incredulity.
“A hundred thousand dollars!” Hannah echoed, each word pronounced with slow, aghast unbelief. “Oh, it can’t be that much!”
“It’s that much now,” said Berny, her calmness accentuated to the point of nonchalance, “and if I want I can make them double it, raise it to a quarter of a million. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t so much when you’ve got millions in trunks. What’s that to the Ryans?”
She looked at her sisters with a cool, dispassionate glance, feeling that it had been worth while to tell them. Hannah’s face was a pale, uninteresting mask of shocked surprise—the kind of face with which one would imagine Hannah’s greeting such intelligence. But through the astonishment of Hazel’s a close and intimate understanding of the possibilities of the situation, an eagerness of rising respect for it and for the recipient of such honors, was discernible and appealed to Berny’s vanity and assuaged her more uncomfortable sensations.
“You could get a quarter of a million?” Hazel persisted. “How do you know that?”
Berny looked at her with disdain which was softened by a slight, indulgent smile.
“My dear, if they want it bad enough to offer one hundred thousand, they want it bad enough to offer two. The money is nothing to them, and I’m a good deal. I shouldn’t be surprised if I could get more.” She thought of Bill Cannon’s participation in the matter, and let an expression of sly, knowing mysteriousness cross her face. But Bill Cannon’s participation was a fact she did not intend to mention. He was a part of the story that she had decided to suppress.
“But two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” said Hazel. “Why, it’s a fortune! The interest on it alone would make you rich. You could go to Europe. You could have a house on Pacific Avenue. Just fancy! And three years ago you were working for twenty a week in the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company. Do you remember when they agreed to give you that you thought you were on velvet? Twenty dollars a week! That looks pretty small now, doesn’t it?”
“But she doesn’t intend to take it, Hazel McCrae!” said Hannah in a deep voice of shocked disapproval. “You talk as if she was going to accept their outrageous offer.”