she would have been greatly influenced by such a
necessity," she commented blandly.

"I'd like all the same to know how he would have
met the difficulty, for that he would have met it, I
am perfectly assured."

"Well, I, for one, can afford to leave my curiosity
unsatisfied," responded Gerty; then she added in a
voice that was almost serious. "Do you know there's
really something strangely loveable about the man.
I sometimes think," she concluded with her fantastic
humour, "that I might have married him myself with
very little effort on either side."

"And lived happily forever after on the Inter-
national Review?"

"Oh, I don't know but what it would be quite
as easy as to live on clothes. I don't believe poverty,
after all, is a bit worse than boredom. What one
wants is to be interested, and if one isn't, life is pretty
much the same in a surface car or in an automobile.
I don't believe I should have minded surface cars the
least bit," she finished pensively.

"Wait till you've tried them--I have."

"What really matters is the one great thing," pur-
sued Gerty with a positive philosophy, "and money has
about as much relation to happiness as the frame has
to the finished picture--all it does is to show it off to
the world. Now I like being shown off, I admit--but
I'd like it all the better if there were a little more of
the stuff upon the canvas."

"If you were only as happy as I am!" said Laura
softly.

For a moment Gerty looked at her with a
sweetness in which there was an almost maternal

-348-