"Such money?" returned Giles. "Is it different from other money? What do you mean?"
"Isn't her husband the head of some trust or other?"
"Why, yes, I believe so: the Feather-bed Trust, or the Air-and-Sunlight
Trust—something of that sort; I've never looked into it closely."
"Yet you accept what it offers you."
"And give a good return for it. Yes, she had paid me already for my sketches—a prompt and business-like way of doing things that I should be glad to encounter oftener."
Abner shook his head sadly. "I thought we might come to be real friends."
"And I hope so yet. Anyway, it takes a little money to keep the tea-pot boiling."
Abner drifted back to the shelter of his canopy and darkly accused himself for his acceptance of such hospitality. He ought to go, to go at once, and never to come back. But before he found out how to go, Clytie Summers came along and hemmed him in.
Clytie was not at all afraid of big men; she had already found them easier to manage than little ones. Indeed she had pretty nearly come to the conclusion that a lively young girl with a trim figure and a bright, confident manner and a fetching mop of sunlit hair and a pair of wide, forthputting, blue eyes was predestined to have her own way with about everybody alike. But Clytie had never met an Abner Joyce.
And as soon as Clytie entered upon the particulars of her last slumming trip through the river wards she began to discover the difference. She chanced to mention incidentally certain low-grade places of amusement.