Present."

"Selah belongs to me, thank God!"

"She belongs to herself. You are robbing her of her own life."

"No woman ever belonged to herself, Madam, especially a young and beautiful woman. She is an ineffable estate which all men buy with love and hold with all the strength they have."

"For shame, sir! You are a brigand keeping your daughter in a cave."

"My house is not so fine as Selah deserves, but it is not a cave," he retorted, flattening himself sidewise in order to pass.

"All the same you are a brigand, robbing your own flesh and blood of life and happiness," she thrust at him as he went by, waddling on herself after the manner of a fat old duck.

This was Susan Walton, the one celebrated character Jordantown had produced since the Civil War, and she was a source of embarrassment rather than pride. According to the ethics of that place no woman should be known beyond her own church and parlour, much less celebrated. Judge Regis was a distinguished jurist, of course, and Marshall Adams had been a famous leader of forlorn hopes in the Confederate Army. But it is one thing to be distinguished at the bar or famous in battle fifty years ago, and quite another thing to be celebrated in the present. Susan was that thing. It was said of her that she had kept her husband, an elegant soft old gentleman, in Congress for a quarter of a century and up to the very day of his death by being a thorn in the side of the political life of the state. She kept scrapbooks in which she pasted dangerous and damaging information about politicians and prominent men generally. Whenever one of them became a candidate in opposition to her husband, she prepared an awful obituary of him from her encyclopedia of past records; and he usually withdrew from the race or was defeated. Few men live who can face their former deeds in a political campaign. She made public speeches at a time when no other woman in the South would go further than give her "experience" in church or read a missionary report before the Woman's District Conference. She was for temperance and education even before the days of Local Option and when the public school system consisted of eight weeks in the summer. She was the only woman who had ever had the honour, if it was an honour, to address the State Legislature when a bill was pending there concerning Child Labour; and she did it in the high falsetto voice of a mother who calls her sons out of a bait game in the public square. It was said that she actually did address that dignified body as "boys," and that the "boys" liked it. She had the brains of a man and the temper of an indignant but tender-hearted woman. This is an exact description of her literary style, which was not literary, but it was versatile in wit and sarcasm and outrageous veracity. She used it as an instrument of torture and vengeance in the public prints upon the characters of political demagogues, liquor interests, and the state treasury. And what she said was violently effective. Her victims might persist in the error of their ways, but not one of them ever recovered from the face-scratching fury of her attack.

Add to this the fact that she was a suffragist in the days when there was only one other woman in the state who believed in citizenship for women, and that she never ceased to "agitate" for suffrage, and you receive a faint impression of this old termagant celebrity who had put Jordantown "on the map" and had given it a reputation for broadmindedness at a distance which it in no way deserved.

Susan did not herself press the point of being a celebrity in her own appearance. She did not look the part. She did not even try. She was sixty years old, wore black frocks which touched the pavements behind as she walked and were raised some eight inches above it in front, owing to that perfect frankness with which age is always willing to confess its stomach. She had worn the same bonnet for five years, tied under her protruding chin. Sometimes she changed the ribbons, but she never changed the "shape."

She nodded to the three men seated near the open window in the bank. Then she paused at the bottom of the steps which led to the second floor and sighed.

"This staircase was built for men to climb," she grumbled as she began the ascent. She stood on the step below and put her right foot on the one above, but she did not alternate with the left. The gears in her left knee were not strong enough to bear the necessary lift. Her feet made a flat all-heel-and-toe sound as she went up, very emphatic. When she reached the top her face was red, and she was "out of breath." But she went on panting down the hall, looking at the lettering on the doors of the various offices. Printed on a large ground-glass door she saw "Mike Prim." She wrinkled her nose, adjusted her spectacles, poked out her neck and stared at it.

"Humph! Mike Prim! Nothing else! What does he do? How does he make a living? Every man in this town knows, and not a single woman!" she said to herself.

She came to the door at the end of the hall upon which was printed, "John Regis, Attorney-at-law."

She opened it without knocking and stood upon the threshold.

"Well, John Regis, you must think you are still a young man, keeping your office at the top of this ladder staircase," she complained, raising her handkerchief and dabbing her face.

"Come in, Susan, and take this chair by the window," said the Judge. Rising from his desk and coming forward, he conducted her elegantly to the chair.

"It's forty years since I was here," she said, looking about her, "and you've not changed a thing. You are scarcely changed yourself, John."

"The man is changed, Susan. Forty years make more difference in a man than they do in things," he answered gently.

"The same books, all so thick and awful looking. I remember that day I thought you must be the wisest man in the world—to know all that was in them."

"I didn't know, and I don't know yet," he put in, smiling.

"The same chairs, the same brown prints on the wall. And that little vase, isn't it the one you had on your desk that day?" she asked, bending forward to look at it more closely.

"The very same. You put a rose into it that day, do you remember?"

"No, but I do remember that I was in love with you, John. A woman of sixty may admit that now!" she laughed.

"I wish you had admitted it then. I tried hard enough to win you, Susan. We should have been a team!"

"No, we should not. We are both headstrong. We should have obstructed each other. I married the right man."

"I suppose so. Certainly you never could have henpecked me into Congress the way you did Jim Walton! Why did you do it?" he asked, showing the ends of a sword smile as he regarded her.

"Well, you see I couldn't go myself," she laughed.

"So you sent your husband, next best thing."

"It wasn't so bad. I helped him, you know."

"Wrote all his speeches, kicked up all of his dust for him, didn't you?"

"Not all, but I helped."

"With your scrapbooks, for example?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"If you had been a man, Susan, you'd not have survived some of the things you've said and done."

"If I'd had the rights you men keep from us I'd never have done them!" she retorted quickly.

"I don't know," he replied, wagging his head and smiling. "Having rights, including the ballot, would not change the nature of a woman! Tell me, Susan, have I escaped the scrapbooks? I've wondered many times if you were keeping record of me, too."

"You never did—anything I could put in. And if