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homely face such as they wear in the farm kitchens of Cahoga County, and a set of fashionable clothes upon her such as they sell to the ladies of Plutoria Avenue.
    This was ‘mother,’ the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight years younger than himself. And she too was in the papers and the public eye; and whatsoever the shops had fresh from Paris, at fabulous prices, that they sold to mother. They had put a Balkan hat upon her with an upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see her emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back jacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatever she wore, the lady editors of
Spring Notes
and
Causerie du Boudoir
wrote it out in French, and one paper had called her a
belle châtelaine
, and another had spoken of her as a
grande dame
, which the Tomlinsons thought must be a misprint.
    But in any case, for Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance it was a great relief to have as his wife a woman like mother, because he knew that she had taught school in Cahoga County and could hold her own in the city with any of them.
    So mother spent her time sitting in her beetle jacket in the thousand-dollar suite, reading new novels in brilliant paper covers. And the Wizard on his trips up and down to the rotunda brought her the very best, the ones that cost a dollarfifty, because he knew that out home she had only been able to read books like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walter Scott, that were only worth ten cents.
    “How’s Fred?” said the Wizard, laying aside his hat, and looking towards the closed door of an inner room. “Is he better?”
    “Some,” said mother. “He’s dressed, but he’s lying down.”
    Fred was the son of the Wizard and mother. In the inner room he lay on a sofa, a great hulking boy of seventeen in a flowered dressing-gown, fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box of chocolates on a chair beside him, and he had the blind drawn and his eyes half-closed to impress himself.
    Yet this was the same boy that less than a year ago on Tomlinson’s Creek had worn a rough store suit and set his sturdy shoulders to the buck-saw. At present Fortune was busy taking from him the golden gifts which the fairies of Cahoga County, Lake Erie, had laid in his cradle seventeen years ago.
    The Wizard tip-toed into the inner room, and from the open door his listening wife could hear the voice of the boy saying, in a tone as of one distraught with suffering:
    “Is there any more of that jelly?”
    “Could he have any, do you suppose?” asked Tomlinson coming back.
    “It’s all right,” said mother, “if it will sit on his stomach.”
    For this, in the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All those things can be eaten which will sit on the stomach. Anything that won’t sit there is not eatable.
    “Do you suppose I could get them to get any?” questioned Tomlinson. “Would it be all right to telephone down to the office, or do you think it would be better to ring?”
    “Perhaps,” said his wife, “it would be better to look out into the hall and see if there isn’t someone round that would tell them.”
    This was the kind of problem with which Tomlinson and his wife, in their thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver, grappled all day. And when presently a tall waiter in dress-clothes appeared, and said, “Jelly? Yes, sir, immediately, sir; would you like, sir, Maraschino, sir, or Portovino, sir?” Tomlinson gazed at him gloomily, wondering if he would take five dollars.
    “What does the doctor say is wrong with Fred?” asked Tomlinson, when the waiter had gone.
    “He don’t just say,” said mother; “he said he must keep very quiet. He looked in this morning for a minute or two, and he said he’d look in later in the day again. But he said to keep Fred very quiet.”
    Exactly! In other words Fred had pretty much the same