“He doesn’t know anything,” said Klein.  “That’s his trouble.  He’s clever, but he doesn’t know much.  I guess he only began to read books a couple years ago.  They excite him too much.  He wouldn’t read a fairy story.  He’d think he was wasting time.”

“Get some one to help him out.”

“Who’d I get?”

“Look about.  I’ve got to go home and pack a bag.  Ask Miss Cox what time that Newport boat leaves.”

“Newport!  Great heavens, Ben!  What is this?  A little week-end?”

“A little weak brother, Leo.”

“David in trouble again?”

Moreton nodded.  “He thinks he’s going to marry William Cord’s daughter.”

Klein, who was Ben’s friend as well as his assistant, blanched at the name.

“Cord’s daughter!” he exclaimed, and if he had said Jack-the-ripper’s, he could not have expressed more horror.  “Now isn’t it queer,” he went on, musingly, “that David, brought up as he has been, can see anything to attract him in a girl like that?”

Ben was tidying his desk preparatory to departure—­that is to say, he was pushing all the papers far enough back to enable him to close the roller top, and he answered, absently: 

“Oh, I suppose they’re all pretty much the same—­girls.”

“Why, what do you mean?” said Leo, reproachfully.  “How can a girl who’s been brought up to be a parasite—­to display the wealth of her father and husband, and has never done a useful thing since she was born—­Why, a woman was telling me the other day—­I got caught in a block in the subway and she was next me—­awfully interesting, she was.  She sewed in one of these fashionable dressmaking establishments—­and the things she told me about what those women spend on their clothes—­underclothes and furs and everything.  Now there must be something wrong with a woman who can spend money on those things when she knows the agony of poverty right around her.  You can’t compare that sort of woman with a self-respecting, self-supporting girl—­”

At this moment the door opened and Miss Cox entered.  She wore a short-sleeved, low-neck, pink-satin blouse, a white-satin skirt, open-work stockings, and slippers so high in the heels that her ankles turned inward.  Her hair was treated with henna and piled untidily on the top of her head.  She was exactly what Klein had described—­a self-respecting, self-supporting girl, but, on a superficial acquaintance, men of Cord’s group would have thought quite as badly of her as Klein did of fashionable women.  They would have been mistaken.  Miss Cox supported her mother, and, though only seventeen, denied herself all forms of enjoyment except dress and an occasional movie.  She was conscientious, hard-working, accurate, and virtuous.  She loved Ben, whom she regarded as wise, beautiful, and generous, but she would have died rather than have him or anyone know it.

She undulated into the room, dropped one hip lower than the other, placed her hand upon it and said, with a good deal of enunciation: