This time she was not interrupted once. When she ended, he exclaimed: "Good! I don't see how you did it so well." 

 "Nor do I," said she. 

 "You say you are only a beginner." 

 "I couldn't have done it so well for anyone else," said she. "You are—different." 

 The remark was worded most flatteringly, but it did not sound so. He saw that she did not herself understand what she meant by "different." He understood, for he knew the difference between the confused and confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own—simple, luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in the light-flooded region around it. 

 "Have I made the meaning clear?" he asked. 

 He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have indicated a partial defeat in the object he had—to put the complex thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered, "Yes." 

 He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? To test her, he said: 

 "What do you think of it?" 

 "That it's wicked," replied she, without hesitation and in her small, quiet voice. 

 He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there—this inconsequential and negligible atom—typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty—they, too, would utter an impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle raillery in it as he said: 

 "No—not wicked. Just business." 

 She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him sphynxlike. 

 "Just business," he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters look cheap 

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