they haven't the guts." He had got that word from Bessie.
Immediately Bessie Osborne made a will of her own, and having done so wandered into his office and told him about it. After which she proceeded to inspect herself in a small mirror, and waited for the storm to break with her usual placidity. It did break, and in the midst of it he looked up to find her making the most hideous grimaces at him. He was startled into silence.
"Sorry!" she said, smiling at him. "I'd forgotten my facial exercises for today. Toning the muscles, you know. Well, go on."
He never quite recovered his former speed after that. When she got up to go she might have been listening to a rather stupid lecture, for all the effect it had had on her. She drew her wrap about her and picked up her bag.
"How splendid it must be always to know you are right!" she said brightly. "You and God Almighty—like old what's his name, the Kaiser." She surveyed him. "It's rather a pity I got all father's humor and his wickedness, isn't it, and you only got his virtues. A little sin would have helped you, Henry."
Then she wandered out.
But if she had her father's humor and what she called his wickedness, she also had a bit of that clear hard brain of his which had mixed up men, their actions and reactions, to the making of his fortune. She knew that her check had not been cashed, and that Kay had been right about her cowboy. Then the fellow must have more than a handsome face. He certainly had the intestinal investiture Henry had referred to.
But Bessie's sympathies at that time were divided. Herbert had come out of the affair with a dignity she had hardly expected. He had neither withdrawn himself nor assumed an attitude of artificial indifference. Now and then she saw him on the golf links, apparently intent on his game, or even once in a while at a club dance. If he added little to the gayety at such times, he never had done so. He was as carefully dressed as ever, as temperate, as courteous. She
