"My money must support the family. Father lost everything he had."
"I—I didn't know that you had any money." He laughed uncomfortably. "I'm one of these chaps who has to blurt things out, Miss Wilkinson, and so I'll tell you just what I thought. Of course I didn't really want Peter V. Wilkinson to fail—I was sorry when I heard about it. But when I knew it had to happen, that it was inevitable—Oh, confound it, I was glad, and for my own selfish reason."
"Very kind of you to gloat over our misfortune," was her brief comment, uttered by no means seriously.
"I thought," went on Beekman, grimly, "that it would put us more on an equal footing, that perhaps I would have the right to——"
"Oh, the right, did you say? I never thought you worried much over that," she said with truly feminine perversity.
There was a pause. Beekman was the first to speak.
"A terribly complicated matter, this making love to a rich girl. In the first place——"
"Is this an argument before a court?" she inquired, playfully.
"Before the last court of appeals," he answered quickly. "And the gist of it is this: How the deuce can a rich girl ever know that anybody ever loves her?"
"Do you suppose she cannot tell?"