"It's nearer three thousand, with acetylene lamps, top, baskets, extra tires, French tooter, freight, insurance, extra tools and a leather coat."
"You've got the thing down fine," I said. "You speak like a folder."
"Well, I didn't have any three thousand dollars," she continued, undisturbed; "all I had was an allowance of a hundred a month, a grand piano, a horse (you remember my, blood mare, Gee-whizz?) a lot of posters, and a father."
"He seems to me the biggest asset of the lot," I observed.
"I thought so, too, till I tried him," she said. "He had the automobile fever, too—only the negative kind—wanted to shoot them with a gun."
"Surely it's dangerous enough already, without adding that."
"For a time I didn't know what to do," she went on. "I thought I'd have to try the stage, or write one of those Marie Bashkirtseff books that shock people into buying them by thousands—and whenever I saw a Manton on the road my eyes would almost pop out of my head. Then, when I was almost desperate, Mr. Collenquest came on a visit to papa."
"I see now why you said Wall Street," I remarked.
"Mr. Collenquest is an old friend of papa's," she continued. "They were at the same college, and both belonged to what they call 'the wonderful old class of seventy-nine,' and there's nothing in the world papa wouldn't do for Mr. Collenquest or Mr. Collenquest for papa. I had never seen him before and had rather a wild idea of him from the caricatures in the paper—you know the kind—with dollar-signs all over his clothes and one of his feet on the neck of Honest Toil. Well, he wasn't like that a bit—in fact, he was more like a bishop than anything else and the only thing he ever put his foot on was a chair when he and papa would sit up half the night talking about the wonderful old class of seventy-nine. Papa is rather a quiet man ordinarily, but that week it seemed as though he'd never stop laughing; and I'd wake up at one o'clock in the morning and hear them still at it. Of course, they had long serious talks, too, and Mr. Collenquest was never so like a bishop as when the conversation turned on stocks and Wall Street. When he boomed out things like 'the increasing tendency of associated capital in this country,' or 'the admitted financial emancipation of the Middle West,'—you felt somehow you were a better girl for having listened to him. What he seemed to like best—besides sitting up all night till papa was a wreck—was to take walks. He was as bad about horses as papa was about automobiles—and of course papa had to go, too —and naturally I tagged after them both—and so we walked and walked and walked.
"Well, one day they were talking about investments, and stocks, and how cheap money was, and how hard it was to know what to do with it, and I was picking wild-flowers and wondering whether I'd have my Manton red, or green with gilt stripes, when I heard something that brought me up like an explosion in the muffler.