“Wished your wish?” he finished for her. “Yes! I noticed!”
He laid his hands on her shoulders, and they stood together, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes.
“But,” she sighed softly, “it is the best!”
Chapter Two.
The Girl Who Wished for Money.
Claudia Berrington prided herself that if she had many faults, she had at least one supreme virtue—she was honest! She condescended to no subterfuges, no half-truths, no beatings about the bush. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth fell from her coral lips with a nakedness which astonished her hearers, and this despite the fact that few people had less consideration for honesty for honesty’s sake. There was no “I can, because I ought” in Claudia Berrington’s composition; her outspokenness was simply a means to an end. Very early in life her sharp wits had mastered the fact that honesty was the best policy, and that to speak the truth was at once to disarm criticism and to avoid the danger of pitfalls.
To Claudia’s supreme delight, she discovered that her adopted virtue was quite an asset in society. It was so uncommon, so arresting to meet a girl who really said what she meant, that it made quite a sensation, when found. People said to one another: “Have you heard Claudia’s latest?” and hung upon her lips in delighted anticipation of shocks. And Claudia duly shocked them, and enjoyed the process.
Openly, at the New Year’s party, Claudia had confessed that the one overwhelming ambition of her heart was to be rich, and as there seemed only one way in which a helpless young woman could obtain a limitless command of money, had declared herself ready to marry the highest bidder in the market. “A German Jew stock-broker, or a Maharajah of ‘something-core,’ or a soap-boiler bereft of h’s. Anyone will do!” she had cried, “if he can only give me enough.” And in a tête-à-tête with a girl friend over her bedroom fire the same night, she had repeated and defended the same statement.