ironically. “This flattery makes me suspect you've come to get something.”
“On the contrary,” said I. “I want to give something. I want to give you my coal mines.”
“I thought you'd see that our offer was fair,” said he. “And I'm glad you have changed your mind about quarreling with your best friends. We can be useful to you, you to us. A break would be silly.”
“That's the way it looks to me,” I assented. And I decided that my sharp talk to Roebuck had set them to estimating my value to them.
“Sam Ellersly,” Langdon presently remarked, “tells me he's campaigning hard for you at the Travelers. I hope you'll make it. We're rather a slow crowd; a few men like you might stir things up.”
I am always more than willing to give others credit for good sense and good motives. It was not vanity, but this disposition to credit others with sincerity and sense, that led me to believe him, both as to the Coal matter and as to the Travelers Club. “Thanks, Langdon,” I said; and that he might look no further for my motive, I added: “I want to get into that club much as the winner of a race wants the medal that belongs to him. I've built myself up into a rich man, into one of the powers in finance, and I feel I'm entitled to recognition.”
“I don't quite follow you,” he said. “I can't see that you'll be either better or worse for getting into the Travelers.”
“No more I shall,” replied I. “No more is the winner of the race the better or the worse for having the medal. But he wants it.”
He had a queer expression. I suppose he regarded it as a joke, my attaching apparently so much importance to a thing he cared nothing about. “You've always had that sort of thing,” said I, “and so you don't appreciate it. You're like a respectable woman. She can't imagine what all the fuss over women keeping a good reputation is about. Well, just let her lose it!”
“Perhaps,” said he.
“And,” I went on, “you can have the rule about the waiting list suspended, and can move me up and get me in at once.”
“We
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