"It's wonderful to listen to you, Harry."
"I'm talking horse sense, my son. Now consider yourself: down on your luck, don't know how to earn a decent living, refusing to accept anything from your friends, ready (you say) to do almost anything to get some money.... And think of the country heiresses, with plenty of money for two, pining away in—in innocuous desuetude—hundreds of them, fine, straight, good girls, girls you could easily fall in love with, sighing their lives away for the lack of the likes of you.... Now, why not take one, Nat—when you come to consider it, it's your duty—marry her and her bank-roll, make her happy, make yourself happy, and live a contented life on the sunny side of Easy Street for the rest of your natural born days? Can't you see it now?"
"Yes," Duncan admitted, half-persuaded of the plausibility of the scheme. "I see—and I admire immensely the intellect that conceived the notion, Harry. But ... I can't help thinking there must be a catch in it somewhere."
"Not if you follow my instructions. You see, having come from just such a hole-in-the-ground, I know just what I'm talking about. Believe me, everything depends on the way you go about it. There are a lot of things to contend with at first; you won't enjoy it at all, to begin with. But I can demonstrate how it can be managed so that you'll win out to a moral certainty."
Duncan drew a deep breath, sat back and looked Kellogg over very critically. There was not a suspicion of a gleam of humour in his face; to the contrary, it blazed with the ardour of the instinctive schemer, the man who, with the ability to originate, throws himself heart and soul into the promotion of the product of his imagination. Kellogg was not sketching the outlines of a gigantic practical joke; he believed implicitly in the feasibility of his project; and so strongly that he could infuse even the less susceptible fancy of Duncan with some of his faith.
"If I didn't know you so well, Harry," said Duncan slowly, "I'd be certain you were mad. I'm not at all sure that I'm sane. It's raving idiocy—and it's a pretty damned rank thing to do, to start deliberately out to marry a woman for her money. But I've been through a little hell of my own in my time, and—it's not alluring to contemplate a return to it. There's nothing mad enough nor bad enough to stop me. What've I got to do?"
Kellogg beamed his triumph. "You'll try it on, then?"
"I'll try anything on. It's a contemptible, low-lived piece of business—but good may come of it; you can't tell. What've I got to do?"
Slipping back, Kellogg knitted his fingers and stared at the ceiling, smiling faintly to himself as he enumerated the conditions that first appealed to his understanding as essentials toward success.
"First, pick out your town: one of two or three thousand inhabitants—no larger. I'd suggest, at a hazard guess, some place in the interior of Pennsylvania. Most of such towns have at least one rich man with a marriageable daughter—but we'll make sure of that before we settle on one. Of course any suburban town is barred."