The Lady and the Lord | Page 6

good thing was. I
didn't know yet myself, for one thing. But I had to tell him something.
"Suddenly I remembered a second cousin of mine who used to be
secretary, or something like that, in a zinc works at Pittsburgh, and that
gave me another idea. Poor old Amos always used to be pestering my
cousin at Pittsburgh to give him information so that he could play the
market, and the only time he ever did give him any Amos played it and
lost. He lost nearly all we had.
"So what I said was that I had received some private information from
a man who used to be a friend of my late husband. Before my husband
died he had promised him that he would look after me, and this was his
way of doing it. He had told me to raise every cent I could, and buy
certain shares and hold them for a rise.
"Lord Tipperary got awfully excited. He hadn't ever gambled on the
Stock Exchange, and the idea of doing it simply tickled him to death.
He wanted to know the name of the shares at once, so that he could 'go
up to town and get the money on.' He said it was 'awfully sporting' of
me to want to 'put all my money on one horse,' and he didn't like it in
the least when I refused to tell him which shares they were.
"But I couldn't tell him, for the simple reason that I didn't know the
name of any shares, and I'd have to look them up first in a newspaper.
So I got out of it for the time being by saying that the information had

been given to me under a strict pledge of secrecy, and that I couldn't
think of divulging it to anybody.
"That afternoon he drove me round to Mr. Lewisohn's office, and he
introduced me properly, as he had promised to do. We had a long talk
with the lawyer, but nothing much came of it, except that he promised
to be as quick as he could about my business.
"Lord Tipperary asked him at once how long he thought it would be
before he had my affairs settled up, and he said: 'Some weeks.' Then
Lord Tipperary looked at me with the most comical expression of
concern, and I had to laugh outright; and Lewisohn seemed awfully
surprised that Lord Tipperary should take so much interest in my
affairs, but he didn't say anything--at least, not then.
"After we left the office that boy did nothing but pester me to let him
into the secret; and at dinner-time he said: 'Look here, Mrs. Crothers,
it's an awful shame your not being able to get any money out of old
Lewisohn for a month or two; you'll probably miss having the flutter
through it. Can't we work it this way. I'll go up to town and open an
account with a firm of brokers that I know of, and arrange it so that you
can buy the shares on my account without my knowing the name of
them; then we'll go shares in the profits. How's that?
"'Then, to-morrow morning I'll go round to old Lewisohn before I go to
town, and tell him to be sure and let me have a few thousands at once,
so that we sha'n't be stuck for money. He's arranging to borrow some
money for me, and he can easily let me have a few thousands right
away.'
"Remember, it was pounds he was talking about, and not dollars! And
there was poor little me, with only a few shillings in the wide world,
and a great, fat hotel-bill running up! Do you wonder I began to feel
excited? Of course, I agreed to that arrangement, and the next morning
I went round to the Public Library to look up Pittsburgh.
"I read up all about Pittsburgh in a fat sort of encyclopedia; and though
reading about it in that book bored me almost to tears, and reminded

me in some indescribable way of Monday morning's breakfast at a
boarding-house--I can't tell you why, but it did!--I managed to
concentrate my mind on it sufficiently to remember afterward that the
National Zinc Amalgamation was one of the biggest concerns there.
"Then I went back to the hotel and sat in the lobby, studying out the
financial column of a morning paper. The American papers are bad
enough, if you open them at the financial page, and I don't believe the
jargon they put in them really means anything at all; but the English
papers are infinitely worse; and I'm sure I nearly cried trying to
understand it.
"There were two different things named in one column that might,
either of