"I'll get there yet," said Gardiner. His chance was coming. There are more ways of succeeding than one.
"How is it you bow to a reporter on the Chronicle, my dear?" asked a friend of Edith Atherton's. "I understand that is what he is."
"I do it because he might have been my brother," said Edith Atherton.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that his father nearly married my mother," said Edith; "but he was too autocratic, and he married an Englishwoman. I don't wonder George Gardiner could not hit it off with him. Poor boy! I wish he could."
Certainly he was far finer-looking than either Hunt or Gawthrop—that is the way her friend interpreted the girl's sigh.
"And he's cleverer too," said the older woman acutely, "nevertheless——"
And "nevertheless" was very easy to interpret.
"Which will it be, I wonder?" said her friend.
The solution lay on the knees of the gods, and in the hands of Shanghai Smith.