“And it is my ambition to make enough money to have him with me,” she announced.  With an air of some importance she continued:  “I’ll tell you a secret:  I’m writing for the magazines—­stories!” She sat back awaiting his enthusiasm.  When she saw that it was not forthcoming she exclaimed:  “My!  How you do rave over the idea!”

“I congratulate you, of course, but—­”

“Now don’t tell me that you tried it once.  Of course you did.  I know it’s a harmless disease, like the measles, and that everybody has it when they’re young.  Above all, don’t volunteer the information that your own life is full of romance and would make a splendid novel.  They all say that.”

Murray O’Neil felt the glow of personal interest that results from the discovery in another of a congenial sense of humor.

“I didn’t suppose you had to write,” he said.  “Dan told me you had invested your fortune and were on Easy Street.”

“That was poetic license.  I fictionized slightly in my report to him because I knew he was doing so well.”

“Then your investment didn’t turn out fortunately?”

Miss Appleton hesitated.  “You seem to be a kindly, trusting person.  I’m tempted to destroy your faith in human nature.”

“Please don’t.”

“Yes, I shall.  My experience may help you to avoid the pitfalls of high finance.  Well, then, it was a very sad little fortune, to begin with, like a boy in grammar-school—­just big enough to be of no assistance.  But even a boy’s-size fortune looked big to me.  I wanted to invest it in something sure—­no national-bank stock, subject to the danger of an absconding cashier, mind you; no government bonds with the possibility of war to depreciate them; but something stable and agricultural, with the inexhaustible resources of nature back of it.  This isn’t my own language.  I cribbed it from the apple-man.”

“Apple-man?”

“Yes.  He had brown eyes, and a silky mustache, and a big irrigation plan over east of the mountains.  You gave him your money and he gave you a perfectly good receipt.  Then he planted little apple trees.  He nursed them tenderly for five years, after which he turned them over to you with his blessing, and you lived happily for evermore.  At least that was the idea.  You couldn’t fail to grow rich, for the water always bubbled through his little ditch and it never froze nor rained to spoil things, I used to love apples.  And then there was my name, which seemed a good omen.  But lately I’ve considered changing ‘Appleton’ to ‘Berry’ or ‘Plummer’ or some other kind of fruit.”

“I infer that the scheme failed.”  O’Neil’s eyes were half closed with amusement.

“Yes.  It was a good scheme, too, except for the fact that the irrigation ditch ran uphill, and that there wasn’t any water where it started from, and that apples never had been made to grow in that locality because of something in the soil, and that Brown-eyed Betty’s title to the land wouldn’t hold water any more than the ditch.  Otherwise I’m sure he’d have made a success and I’d have spent my declining years in a rocking-chair under the falling apple blossoms, eating Pippins and Jonathans and Northern Spies.  I can’t bear to touch them now.  Life at my boarding-house is one long battle against apple pies, apple puddings, apple tapioca.  Ugh!  I hate the very word.”