Langdon Jesse and his one-time associate and co-partner in lamb-shearing "deals," Frederick Judd, met at luncheon in a restaurant in the financial district a few days later.

Judd, one of the powers of "the Street," was past fifty-five, and he had no great toleration for the vacuities of young men. This fact, however, placed no inhibition on the admiration—it could scarcely be called a liking—which he felt for Langdon Jesse; for Jesse, whatever else he may have been, certainly was not vacuous in the matter of business; and it was from the angle of their success in business that Judd exclusively judged men. Jesse, well under forty, already was a veteran of the stock market; and on at least one occasion he had deftly "trimmed" no less a person than his former associate, Mr. Judd; wherefore Judd, with the breadth of vision of the financial general in considering the strategy of the general who has beaten him, admired Jesse, who had been virtually his pupil, all the more; resolving, at the same time, not to permit his quondam pupil to "trim" him again.

Jesse, accepting the nodded invitation, took a seat at the table at which Judd, alone, was eating his heavy luncheon. They exchanged market talk in brief, brittle phrases, for a while. Then Jesse, his too-prominent lips curving, and seeming to be gazing over the top of Judd's bare poll, said:

"Sumptious, isn't she?"

Judd, used to Jesse's adversions to the sumptuosity of women—many women—went on doggedly eating. After a space he replied with a monosyllable:

"Who?"

Jesse did not answer for a moment; nor did Judd seem to be particularly worried over that fact.

"I dropped into your—er—your place on the Drive on Sunday night," said Jesse, fastening an abnormally long cigarette into a remarkably long cigarette holder of amber and gold.

Judd, his fork poised in the air, looked up at Jesse. There was a question in his red-rimmed eyes; but Judd made it a point not to submit questions of any consequence until he had turned them over in his mind several times.

"So I heard," said Judd, with no obvious interest, pronging away again with his fork.

"Who told you," asked Jesse, with a sharp glance at Judd. "Not——"

"How the devil should I remember who told me?" replied Judd in a matter-of-fact tone. "What's the difference who told me, anyhow?"

But it made considerable difference, as a matter of fact, to Jesse; his self-satisfaction and his serene belief in his ability to make an immediate "impression" were very great; and when Judd told him he had "heard" he had been at the Riverside Drive house he took it for granted that Judd had "heard" it from the person on whom his thoughts were dwelling; Louise Treharne, that is to say.

"Oh, no particular difference," said Jesse, blowing a cloud of acrid Turkish cigarette smoke at Judd, which caused Judd to scowl. "I thought perhaps——"

Judd knew perfectly well what he thought; but Judd often failed even to mention things that he knew perfectly well.

"You take in those bear-garden affairs at Tony's—at Mrs. Treharne's," catching himself, "right along, don't you?" said Judd. "How the devil you can endure that pack of imbecile, loquacious what-are-theys is more than I can make out. One of those Sundays nights cured me."

Jesse, however, had not the least intention of being side-tracked.

"Well, she is—er—well, ripping; isn't she?" he said, after a pause.

Judd, perceiving the futility of evasion, gave way.

"Yes—if that's what you want me to say—and all ice, besides," said Judd. "You're up against it there, son," he went on, judicially. "Or are you looking for a death by freezing? Why, I'm afraid that she's going to fracture one of her upper vertebrae even when she nods to me! And that's all the recognition she ever gives me—a nod."

"She doesn't strike me as being so hopelessly Arctic as all that," said Jesse, inordinately proud of what he considered his keen judgment of women. "Did you ever happen to meet a woman with auburn hair who possessed a—er—a frozen or freezing temperament? And, by the way, why do you dwell upon her rigidity, so to speak, when she nods 'even to you?' Why 'even to you?'"

Judd, a little choler showing in his purpling face, broke out:

"Because a man naturally expects a little manners, a little common politeness, from people he's taking care of, doesn't he? She's living in my house, by God!"

"That," said Jesse, quietly, "is precisely what I am getting at: since she is living in your house—if she knows it is your house—she can't be so—er—well, stupendously straight-laced, can she? And, by frozen, of course you meant straight-laced."

"I meant exactly what I said," replied Judd, sulkily. "Stop twisting my words around, will you? I said that she was ice, and that is what I meant to say. You're on a blind trail, Jesse, if that's what you're getting at. Take it from me. You're a hit with 'em, I know, and all that sort of rot. But this one is more than your match. She'll shrivel you good and plenty if you try anything on with her. At that, why can't you let her alone? There are plenty of the other kind—your kind. What's the matter, anyhow? Have all the show girls moved out of New York?"

Jesse didn't relish the slap. It was not exactly a truthful slap, moreover. Jesse had withdrawn his devotions to "show girls" several years before; since doing which he had quarried in entirely different quarters.

"Let the girl alone—that's my advice," went on Judd, seized for the moment by a flickering sense of fairness. "I don't fancy her particularly—because she's so damned haughty with me, I suppose, and looks down upon me from a mountain. But she's all right. I know that, and I'm telling it to you for your information. Better forget it. There isn't a chance on earth for you, anyhow."

Jesse didn't appear to be in the least thrown off the quest by the advice.

"Are you sure," he inquired of Judd after a short silence, "that she knows just where you figure in the Riverside Drive establishment?"

"Well, you could see for yourself that she is more than seven years of age, couldn't you?" briefly replied Judd.

"But," observed Jesse, obviously seeking to get hold of all of the threads of the situation, "she is only recently out of school, I understand, and perhaps she hasn't yet fully grasped——"

"I don't know what she has grasped, and I don't care a damn," thrust in Judd, tired of the colloquy. "She must know a good deal about the way things stand or she wouldn't treat me as if I were rubbish. I can see how I stick in her throat. When it comes to that, why shouldn't I? She's only a schoolgirl, if she is a head taller than I am. Her mother made an idiotic mistake in having the girl around the place. But that's none of my affair. I take the game as it stands. Only I advise you to stand clear. You might as well be decent for once in your life. Unless, of course," and Judd shot a glance of inquiry at Jesse, "you mean to turn respectable—it's about time—and go in for the marrying idea?"

Jesse's somewhat waxy, excessively smooth face flushed at Judd's afterthought.

"I marry?" he said, with a distinctly disagreeable laugh. "Well, it may come to that, some day or other. But can you see me marrying the daughter of your acknowledged——" He fumbled for the word; "mistress" was what he wanted to say, but he discarded it out of sheer timidity; "—your acknowledged companion?" he finished.

"Be good enough to keep out of my personal affairs, Jesse," said Judd, coldly. "I don't dip into your private concerns. You may take my advice or leave it. But you want to go pretty slow, if you're asking me. Nobody has yet forgotten that West Indian affair of yours; just remember that."

With Judd, one shot called for another. Jesse gave a start and paled slightly at Judd's allusion to "the West Indian affair." Judd waited only long enough to see that the shot found its mark; then, with an amused leer, he rose from the table, his luncheon finished, and lumbered away with a nod.

Jesse, discarding his cigarette, bit off the end of a cigar and fumed. The "West Indian affair" was a sore subject with him solely because the world knew all about it. He had not the least feeling of self-condemnation over it; it was the thought that, for once, he had been found out that caused him to rage internally when the matter was adverted to; for the newspapers had been full of it at the time of the occurrence.

"The West Indian affair," Jesse well knew, had not been forgotten, as Judd had said, nor was it likely to be forgotten. It threw a raking light upon his general attitude toward and his treatment of women. A year before, after one of his periodical triumphs in the cotton market, in which, to quote the newspapers' way of putting it, he had "cleaned up millions," Jesse had made a midwinter cruise of the West Indies on his yacht. A girl of unusual beauty, whom he had met by accident on an automobile tour on Long Island, had been his companion on the cruise. She was inexperienced, of humble parentage, and he had overborne her objections by vaguely intimating something as to a marriage when they should arrive in the West Indies. She had protested when, upon the yacht's touching at many ports, he had of course shown not the least inclination to make good his merely intimated promise; and, in his wrath over her attitude, he had not only committed the indefensible crime, but he had made the stupendous mistake, viewed from the politic point of view, of deserting the girl in a West Indian city, without money or resources, without even her clothing, and sailing back to New York alone.

The girl, thus stranded amid new and unfriendly surroundings, had but one resource—the American consul. The consul provided for her passage back to New York. The correspondents of the New York newspapers in the West Indian city had got hold of the details, adding a few neatly whimsical touches of their own, and for days the newspapers had reeked with the story. There had been talk of prosecuting Jesse for abduction, but he had employed the underground method, rendered easily available to him owing to his wealth, to smother that suggestion. But the grisly affair had thrown a cloud over Jesse from which he knew, raging as he knew it, there was no emerging. Several of his clubs—the good ones—had dropped him; men and women of the world to which he aspired, and in which he had been making progress, cut him right and left; his name had been erased from most of the worth-while invitation lists; and the hole in his armor was wide open to the shafts of the kind Judd had just discharged at him.

Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried. That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose life he had destroyed.

Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. That situation, he was confident, had been thrust upon her. But this consideration, and the additional one that she was, as he could not have failed to note, nobly undergoing the ordeal, which might have aroused the admiration and excited the sympathy of a man of merely average fairness, had touched no compassionate chord in Langdon Jesse. Adopting the trivial and far-fetched methods of analysis which are employed by men who consider themselves expert in their knowledge of women, he had calmly concluded that in all likelihood Louise Treharne's manner was a skillfully-studied pose. At any rate he meant to find out. He meant to "know her better." It was thus that his determination framed itself in his mind; he would "know her better."

In gaining the attention of women, he believed in the gentle siege and then the grand assault; it was, in truth, the only "system" with which he had any familiarity, and it had generally proved successful.

Jesse returned to his office, summoned his car, went to his suite at the Plaza, gave himself over to the grooming activities of his man for an hour; then, resuming his car, he went to the house on Riverside Drive.

Louise, in brown walking suit and brown turban, her cheeks ruddy from a long and rapid walk from one end of the Park to the other, had just returned when Jesse's card was brought up. She was studying the card, trying to devise an excuse—for she shrank from the thought of seeing him—when her mother, ready for her motor airing, entered the room.

"I just caught sight of Mr. Jesse's car from my window," said Mrs. Treharne to Louise. Louise observed that her mother was in the same fluttered state that she had been in when she had found Jesse talking to her on the previous Sunday night. "He has sent his card to you? Of course you are going to see him?"

"I think I shall not see him, mother," said Louise, ringing for Heloise with the purpose of sending word that she was indisposed, not at home—anything.

Mrs. Treharne looked annoyed and there was irritation in her question:

"Why not, my dear?"

"I don't care for him, mother," said Louise, frankly. "In fact, I believe I rather dislike him. Do you think he is the sort of man I should meet?"

Louise was intensely disappointed that her mother should care to have her meet Jesse. She tried to assure herself that her mother did not know or realize the character of the man as she herself had heard it briefly described by Laura; but she found that a bit difficult to believe.

"Tell me, please, Louise, why you ask me such a question as that," said Mrs. Treharne, irritatedly. "What do you know about Mr. Jesse? Who has been telling you things about him?"

Louise, remaining silent, plainly showed that she did not care to answer her mother's question.

"It was Laura, no doubt," went on Mrs. Treharne. "Laura, I begin to fear, is growing garrulous. You must not permit her to put absurd ideas into your head, my dear. I must speak to her about it."

"Pray do not, mother," said Louise, earnestly. "She is one of the dearest women in the world, and everything that she tells me, I know, is not only perfectly true, but for my good. It is not anything said to me by Laura that makes me dislike the idea of receiving Mr. Jesse. It is simply that I don't like him. There is a boldness, an effrontery, a cynicism, about him that make me distrust him. I don't care for his type of man. That is all."

"You must not fall into the habit of forming sudden prejudices, my dear," said her mother, diplomatically assuming an air of grave persuasiveness. "Mr. Jesse no doubt has had his fling at life. What worth-while man of his age hasn't? But he is a man of mark. He has made his way as few men have. Of course you found him handsome, distinguÉ? Most women do, my dear. And I could see that he was greatly struck with you. You will soon be twenty, Louise; and Mr. Jesse, perhaps I should remind you, is a great parti."

Louise felt herself crimsoning. Her mother did know Jesse's record, then. That was manifest from her words. And yet she was calmly exalting him as an "eligible!"

The girl so shrank from having any further conversation with her mother on the subject just then that she turned to her and said:

"I would not see him of my own volition, mother; but if you very much wish it, I shall see him."

"For heaven's sake, Louise, don't look so terribly austere and crushed over it!" broke out Mrs. Treharne. "The man will not kidnap you! I very much wish that you should be sensible and receive eligible men, of course. Isn't that a perfectly natural wish?"

Louise, without another word, not stopping to remove her turban or even glance in the glass, went down-stairs to receive Jesse. Her mother fluttered past the drawing-room door a moment later, merely stopping for a word of over-effusive greeting to Jesse before joining the waiting Judd in his car. Jesse, whether by accident or from foreknowledge, had timed his visit well. He was quite alone on the floor with Louise Treharne. She caught the gleam of his upraised eyes and noted the bold persistence of the question in them when, still in his fur overcoat, he turned from the contemplation of a picture to greet her.

"Ah," he said with an attempt at airiness, slipping out of the overcoat and extending his hand, "our Empress already has been out?" glancing at her turban and her wind-freshened cheeks. "That is unfortunate. I was about to place my car at her disposal——"

He withdrew his hand, not seeming to notice that Louise had failed to see it.

"Yes, I have been walking," put in Louise, in no wise stiffly, but with an air of preoccupied withdrawal which she genuinely felt. "As to what you call me, I believe I should prefer to be known by my name."

Jesse, remembering what Judd had said as to the likelihood of his being frozen or shrivelled, laughed inwardly. He rather enjoyed being rebuffed by women—at first. It made the game keener. None of them, he remembered now with complaisancy, continued to rebuff him for very long.

"Pardon me, Miss Treharne," he said, with a certain languishing air which Louise found even more offensive than his initial familiarity. "I thought, when the title was so spontaneously applied to you on Sunday night, that perhaps you found it agreeable. But it is difficult to gauge—women." He dwelt upon the word "women," thinking that, considering how recently she had left school, it might flatter her.

Louise chose to talk commonplaces. Her bed-rock genuineness made it impossible for her to affect an interest in a visitor which she did not feel. And her lack of interest in Jesse was complicated by her growing dislike for him.

"I am doubly disappointed," said Jesse after a pause which he did not find embarrassing. Nothing embarrassed Jesse when he had his mind definitely set upon a purpose. "First, I had hoped, as I say, that, not having been out, you would honor me by accepting the use of my car. Second, I am desolated because you are wearing a hat. I had been promising myself another glimpse of your superb hair. Is it banal to put it that way? I am afraid so. But consider the temptation! Was it Aspasia or Cleopatra whose hair was of the glorious shade of yours—or both?"

"Mr. Jesse," said Louise, now quite dÉgagÉ, facing him squarely and speaking with the greatest deliberation, "I seem to find, from my two limited conversations with you, that you are suffering under some sort of a misapprehension as to me. You will discover that yourself, I think, if you will take the trouble to recur to several things you already have said to me after an acquaintanceship, all told, of perhaps ten minutes. Suppose we seek a less personal plane? I am too familiar with my hair to care to have it made a subject of extended remarks on the part of men whom I scarcely know. There are less pointed themes. Permit me to suggest that we occupy ourselves in finding them."

"By God, a broadside!" said Jesse to himself, not in the least abashed; his admiration always grew for women who trounced him—at first. "I didn't think she had it in her! And Judd, the fat imbecile, called her an iceberg! She is a volcano!"

Aloud, he said, with a neatly-assumed air of subjection and penitence:

"Well delivered, Miss Treharne. But I merit it. I have made the error of supposing—"

"That my comparatively recent return from school, and the open-mindedness naturally associated with that," Louise quietly interrupted, "made me a fair target for your somewhat labored and not particularly apt compliments. Yes, you erred decisively there."

"Again!" thought Jesse, bubbling with finely-concealed delight. "She is an empress right enough, whether she likes to be called that or not! What a prize!"

Aloud, he said with an air of chastened gravity:

"You do me scant justice there, Miss Treharne, but that is easily passed, seeing how chagrinedly conscious I am that I deserved your rebuke in the first instance. You are fond of motoring?" changing the subject with no great deftness.

"No," replied Louise, sufficiently out of hand. "I don't in the least care for it." The conversation was irksome to her and she would not pretend that it was not.

"I inquired," said Jesse, looking chapfallen though he did not in the least feel so, "because I had been hoping you might do me the honor to accept the use—the steady use—of one of my cars. I have several," this last with an ostentation that rather sickened Louise. But she could not allow the carefully veiled suggestion in his words to pass.

"Mr. Jesse," she said, reverting to her tone of deliberation and again gazing straight at him, "aside from the fact that, as I have told you, I don't in the least care for motoring, will you be good enough to suggest to me just one fairly intelligible reason why I should accept your proffer of the use—'the steady use'—of one of your cars? It may be that you will have some reason to offer for what, otherwise, I should deem a distinct impertinence."

Jesse's eyes gleamed with the joy of it. "What a prize!" he thought again.

"I seem, Miss Treharne," he said with a laugh which he purposely made uneasy, "to be stumbling upon one blunder after another. There is no reason for my having offered you the use of one of my cars—and I hasten to withdraw the offer, since it seems to offend you—other than my friendship of long standing with your mother and my desire—my hope, I was about to say—that you, too, might consider me worthy of your friendship."

It was rather adroitly turned, but it completely missed fire.

"I don't seem to recall that it is necessary for one to adopt one's mother's friends as one's own," said Louise, without the least hesitancy. His assumption of an easily-penetrated ingratiating manner had thoroughly disgusted her; she wanted him to take his departure; and she chose the most straightout means to that end. There was no possible way for her to know that Jesse enjoyed the early taunts of some women much as he relished the cocktails with which he preceded his dinners, and for very much the same reason—they were appetizers.

He rose with an air of irresolution which he was far from feeling.

"I fear," he said, resignedly, "that something has happened—or perhaps that something has been said—to predispose or prejudice you against me, Miss Treharne. It is a conclusion to which I am driven."

He paused, then faced her with an appearance of frankness which he was adept at assuming.

"Miss Treharne," he went on, cleverly adopting a tone with a tremolo note in it, "you will grant, I think, that men—men, that is to say, who cut any sort of figure in affairs"—a flourish here—"often are misjudged. Without in the least desiring to pose as one who has been a victim of such misjudgment, I feel, nevertheless——" Here he stopped, having carefully calculated his stopping point, and, with impulsively extended hands, he went on with a beautifully acted semblance of real feeling: "Miss Treharne, I merely ask you to give me a chance to prove myself; a chance at least to wear the candidate's stripes for your friendship."

Despite her youthfulness and her utter inexperience with men of Jesse's type, Louise, aided by an unusually subtle intuition, and mindful of what she had heard of Jesse, caught the hollow ring in his tone, detected the false shifty light in his now furtive, eager eyes.

She rose.

"You are quite overpoweringly in earnest over what seems to me a very trivial matter, Mr. Jesse," she said with a little laugh that sounded harsh even to her own ears.

"You gravely underestimate the value of your friendship in calling it trivial, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, rising also; for at length he was ready to accept the dismissal which a less thick-skinned man, even of his type, would have taken long before.

"I have not been in the habit of placing any sort of an appraisal upon the value of my friendship," she replied, succinctly.

He thrust his arms into the sleeves of his greatcoat of fur and strolled, with a downcast air, to the drawing-room door.

"This is not your normal mood, Miss Treharne," he said, turning upon her a smile that he meant to be wan. "You see what unresentful justice I do you. There are to be other days. I shall find you in a humor less inclined to magnify my candidly professed demerits. I hope to have an opportunity to prove to you that I have at least a few merits to balance the faults."

The hint was sufficiently broad, but Louise appeared to be momentarily obtuse. At any rate she did not extend the invitation he too patently fished for. Her reticence in that respect, however, did not in the least abash Jesse.

"At least I have the cheering knowledge that this door is open to me," he said, entering the foyer on his way out. "Have I not?"

Unavailingly Louise strove to steady herself in order to thrust back the color which she felt mounting to her face.

"It is not my door," she said in a low tone; and instantly was keenly sorry for having said it.

"Oh, I quite understand that," he said, with an air of lightness, though at the moment he did not dare to turn and look at her. "But it is all the same, since it is your mother's, is it not?"

She made no reply. She felt that she deserved the barb for having given him the opportunity to discharge it. He bowed low, essayed the smile that he considered his most engaging one, and went out to his waiting car.

For the second time after having been in the presence of Langdon Jesse, Louise went to her rooms and threw all the windows wide; then stood in the wintry eddies and permitted the cold, sweet air to enwrap and purify her.

When Mrs. Treharne, after leaving Louise and Jesse together, stepped into the car with Judd, she found that adipose man of finance chuckling softly to himself. She deigned not to inquire of him the reason for his chuckling—knowing, of course, that presently he would be volunteering that information himself.

"That was Jesse's car in front of the house, wasn't it, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly as the car pulled away from the curb.

"Yes," she replied, alert of a sudden, but disdaining to appear so.

"Jesse is calling to see—er—your daughter, eh?" Judd asked, continuing his rumbling manifestations of joviality.

"He is," replied Mrs. Treharne, carefully screening her impatience to catch Judd's drift. "But I fail to see why that fact should incite you to give vent to such a harrowing series of low comedy chuckles."

"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, soothingly, but not in the least diminishing his choppy cachinnatory performance.

Mrs. Treharne, with an air of disgust which merely screened her worried curiosity, permitted him to continue for a while. Then she said, with an air of gravity intended to drag him back to his naturally sullen state, but assumed also for the purpose of sounding him:

"Jesse was plainly struck with Louise on Sunday night last. Her position now, of course, is hideous. Jesse may be the solution."

Judd straightened himself in his seat and suddenly stopped chuckling. Then he glanced with quizzical keenness out of slitted eyes at his companion.

"Meaning, I suppose," he said, "that you have an idea that Jesse might take it into his head to marry her?"

"What else could I mean?" she asked him huskily.

"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, leaning back in his seat again. "Of course. Certainly. I fully understand you," and he closed his eyes as if about to lapse into a refreshing nap.

Mrs. Treharne, distinctly wrought up, grasped one of the lapels of his seal-lined greatcoat and shook him determinedly.

"Be good enough to explain to me, and at once, precisely what you mean," she said rapidly, a growing hoarseness in her tone.

Judd, for his part, promptly relapsed into his chuckling.

"It is nothing, my dear—nothing at all, I assure you," he said, between wheezes. "Only it strikes me as rather diverting that anybody should consider Jesse in the light of a matrimonial eligible. When, by the way, did you gather the idea that Jesse was a marrying man? Since that—er—somewhat widely-exploited little affair of his in the West Indies last year? Or more recently?"

Judd generally won in the little skirmishes they had in the motor car. The fact that he had won again was plainly indicated by the fact that she remained silent for the remainder of the ride.