“Of course, you’ll come.  You are just the man I’ll need to back me up.  I shan’t shirk; I’ll take the mother into the library and break the ice, while you are squaring things with the young women.  Penelope won’t care the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion’s that you are fitter to cope with than I am.  After, if you can give me a lift with Mrs. Hepzibah, I’ll call you in.  Come on; it’s getting pretty late to go visiting.”

Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed.  It was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.

“I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes,” he began.  “Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?”

Penelope “arranged” it, not without another added pang of curiosity, whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.

“Is it to be a Quaker meeting?” asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence had grown awe-inspiring.

Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.

“One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I,” he said; and then he went on to explain.  “It’s about your Western Pacific stock, you know.  To-day’s quotations put it a point and a half above your purchase price, and we’ve come to persuade you to unload, pronto, as the member from the Rio Blanco would say.”

“Is that all?” said Penelope, stifling a yawn.  “Then I’m not in it:  I’m an infant.”  And she rose and went to the piano.

“You haven’t told us all of it:  what has happened?” queried Elinor, speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.

He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the probabilities.

“Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be,” he qualified.  “But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of dividends.  Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of those who administer it.  In fact, I happen to know that it was designed and carried through for that very purpose.”

She smiled.

“I have understood you were in the opposition.  Are you speaking politically?”

“I am stating the plain fact,” said Kent, nettled a little by her coolness.  “Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into office than we have here in this State at the present moment.”

He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of an equal antagonist.

“I can’t agree with your inference,” she objected.  “As a people we are neither obsequious nor stupid.”

“Perhaps not.  But it is one of the failures of a popular government that an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of shrewd rascals.  That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this bill.  I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the faintest suspicion that it was a ’graft’.”