“You needn’t come wheedlin’ around me,” she cried.  “I don’t believe a word of it, not a word.  I’ll believe it when I see the color of your cash.  You’re dreadful soft-spoken, an’ so is your wife an’ your sister an’ your daughters.  Dreadful soft-spoken!  Plenty of soft soap runnin’ all over every time you open your mouth.  I don’t want soft soap.  Soft soap won’t buy me bread an’ butter, nor pay my debts.  Folks won’t take any soft soap from me instead of money.  They want dollars an’ cents, an’ that’s what I want every time, dollars an’ cents, an’ not soft soap.  Yes, it’s dollars an’—­cents—­and not so-ft soa-p.”  Suddenly the dress-maker, borne high on a wave of hysteria, disclosing the innate coarseness which underlay all her veneer of harmless gentility and fine manners, raised a loud, shrill laugh, ending in a multitude of reverberations like a bell.  There was about this unnatural metallic laughter something fairly blood-curdling in its disclosure of overstrained emotion.  She laughed and laughed, while the room was silent except for that, and every eye was fixed upon her.  Poor, little Estella Griggs, of all that accusing company of Arthur Carroll’s petty creditors, had the floor.  She laughed and laughed.  She threw back her head.  Her plumed hat was tilted rakishly one side; her frizzes tossed high above her forehead, revealing the meagre temples; her skinny throat seemed to elongate above her ribboned collar; her thin cheeks, folded into a multitude of lines by her distorting mirth, glowed with a hard red; her eyes gleamed with a glassy brilliance.  Then, suddenly, that long, skinny throat seemed to swell visibly.  She choked and gurgled, then came a wild burst of sobbing.  Hysteria had reached its second stage.  It was frightful.

“Good God!” said one of the horsemen, under his breath.

“That’s so,” said the other.  “Let’s git out of this.”

They elbowed their way out of the room.  “See you again,” one of them said, curtly, to Carroll as he passed.

“See you to-morrow about that little affair of ours, an’ by G—­, you’ve got to pony up, you can take your oath on that, an’ don’t you forget it,” whispered the other in Carroll’s ear, with a fierce emphasis, and yet he half grinned with a masculine sympathy in this ultra crisis.

“It’s gitting too thick,” said the other horseman.  “See you to-morrow, and, by G—­, you’ve got to do somethin’ or there’ll be trouble.”

Carroll nodded.  He was ashy white.  He had strong nerves, but he was delicately organized, man though he was, and with unusual self-control.  He felt now a set of sensations verging on those displayed by the laughing, sobbing woman before him.  He was conscious of an insane desire to join in that laugh, in those sobbing shrieks.  His throat became constricted, his hands became as ice.  The tragic absurdity of the situation filled him at once with a monstrous mirth and grief.  The antitheses of emotion struggled together within him.  He looked at the little, frantic creature before him, and opened his mouth to speak, but he said nothing.  Anna Carroll caught his elbow.