“Mr. Collenquest is an old friend of papa’s,” she continued.  “They were at the same college, and both belonged to what they call ‘the wonderful old class of seventy-nine,’ and there’s nothing in the world papa wouldn’t do for Mr. Collenquest or Mr. Collenquest for papa.  I had never seen him before and had rather a wild idea of him from the caricatures in the paper—­you know the kind—­with dollar-signs all over his clothes and one of his feet on the neck of Honest Toil.  Well, he wasn’t like that a bit—­in fact, he was more like a bishop than anything else and the only thing he ever put his foot on was a chair when he and papa would sit up half the night talking about the wonderful old class of seventy-nine.  Papa is rather a quiet man ordinarily, but that week it seemed as though he’d never stop laughing; and I’d wake up at one o’clock in the morning and hear them still at it.  Of course, they had long serious talks, too, and Mr. Collenquest was never so like a bishop as when the conversation turned on stocks and Wall Street.  When he boomed out things like ‘the increasing tendency of associated capital in this country,’ or ’the admitted financial emancipation of the Middle West,’—­you felt somehow you were a better girl for having listened to him.  What he seemed to like best—­besides sitting up all night till papa was a wreck—­was to take walks.  He was as bad about horses as papa was about automobiles—­and of course papa had to go, too —­and naturally I tagged after them both—­and so we walked and walked and walked.

“Well, one day they were talking about investments, and stocks, and how cheap money was, and how hard it was to know what to do with it, and I was picking wild-flowers and wondering whether I’d have my Manton red, or green with gilt stripes, when I heard something that brought me up like an explosion in the muffler.

“‘I know you are pretty well fixed, Fred,’ said Mr. Collenquest, ’but I never knew a man yet who couldn’t do with forty or fifty thousand more.’

“‘I don’t care to get it that way, Bill,’ said my father.

“’I tell you Great Western is going to reach six hundred and fifty,’ said Mr. Collenquest.

“I picked daisies fast, but if there ever was a girl all ears, it was I.

“’I am giving you a bit of inside information that’s worth millions of dollars,’ said Mr. Collenquest in that solemn tone that always gave me the better-girl feeling.

“‘My dear old chap,’ said papa, ’I don’t want you to believe I am not grateful for this sort of proof of your friendship; and you mustn’t think, because I have strong convictions, that I arrogate any superior, virtue to myself.  Every man must be a law to himself.  I have never speculated and I never will.’

“Mr. Collenquest heaved a regular bishop’s sigh, and stopped and put one foot on a log as though it was a toiler.

“‘This isn’t speculation, Fred,’ he said.  ’This is a fact, because I happen to be rigging the market myself.’