"I never succeeded in fascinating 'em, no matter what line I took," said her father with feeling.
"Women don't care much for you, do they? Well, cheer up, Daddy, dear. They've never loved me. Once in a while, they're very nice to me, and we purr and purr and rub noses, but all the time we are watching each other out of our green eyes, and then one day there's the swift stroke of the velvet paw and the deep mark of claws."
"Mighty little purr and velvet for me," Fleming's petticoat reminiscences were invariably gloomy, "mostly claws."
Fuschia's unfeeling smile curved nearly up to her eyes. "How is that Idaho property anyway?" she asked with apparent irrelevance.
"Fine, my dear, fine. I think Cress may really make something on it himself, but in any event, he'll have no difficulty in unloading it."
"I'll need a pile of money for my campaign." She took an orange from the basket and began tossing it from one hand to the other. "I've brought a good deal of study to bear on the arrangement of this checker-board. I always like to get on to the game just as much as possible. Why have I been traveling about with those miserable little stock companies putting up with all kinds of hardships? Just to get experience. Now I'm ready for New York!" She mused a moment, and then took up the subject with fresh enthusiasm. "It's helped me a lot, all this newspaper notoriety about myself and Mr. Hepworth. Puts me before the public as nothing else could. Just look at these pictures!" She plunged her hand down into the rustling sea, and held out a Sunday supplement to him. "There's a lovely picture of the auto tumbling over a cliff and me landing in a tree. Simply great! Now just as soon as I get to New York, Mrs. Hepworth's got to be a sister to me."
"How do you know she'll cotton to you?" asked Fleming.
"What's that got to do with it?" His daughter opened her eyes in surprise. "I need her, for through her, I mean to have my portrait painted by Gresham. And his prices! La, la! Sure, you can put your hands on real money and plenty of it?"
"Fuschia, my child," her father laid aside his "dope sheet" and bent impressively toward her, "this new proposition has more in it than even you can spend, and you know what that means. It's one of those spectacular properties that make a poet of a man. You can talk it beautifully, splash on the color, you know, and it writes as well as it talks. Shows up superbly in a prospectus, photographs like an artist's dream. Just the thing to capture the eastern imagination. You see, it matters very little whether the property is intrinsically all right or not. That is always problematical, and to be left in the hands of Providence. The great thing is to know what is going to capture the eastern imagination. That's what you're really dealing with, not the proposition itself, by Jingo, but the eastern imagination."
"That's just what I tried to tell that unborn babe of a press agent this morning," cried Fuschia, nodding her head in emphatic agreement. "I got him because he was a Mayflower Yankee, just out of Harvard, and yet he's got no more idea of how to deal with his own people than a new-laid kitten. He came bounding to me an hour or two ago with a lot of stuff he'd been working over nights with wet towels around his head and a pot of black coffee at his elbow.