“You don’t know what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said, “but if you were a junior salesman you’d know.  It’s not only the sale—­though that’s a rake-off of fifteen dollars to me—­but it’s because it’s you that’s bought them.  Gee!” gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious sincerity held a queer touch of pathos.  “What it must be to be you—­just you!”

She did not laugh.  She felt as if a hand had lightly touched her on her naked heart.  She had thought of it so often—­had been bewildered restlessly by it as a mere child—­this difference in human lot—­this chance.  Was it chance which had placed her entity in the centre of Bettina Vanderpoel’s world instead of in that of some little cash girl with hair raked back from a sallow face, who stared at her as she passed in a shop—­or in that of the young Frenchwoman whose life was spent in serving her, in caring for delicate dresses and keeping guard over ornaments whose price would have given to her own humbleness ease for the rest of existence?  What did it mean?  And what Law was laid upon her?  What Law which could only work through her and such as she who had been born with almost unearthly power laid in their hands—­the reins of monstrous wealth, which guided or drove the world?  Sometimes fear touched her, as with this light touch an her heart, because she did not know the Law and could only pray that her guessing at it might be right.  And, even as she thought these things, G. Selden went on.

“You never can know,” he said, “because you’ve always been in it.  And the rest of the world can’t know, because they’ve never been anywhere near it.”  He stopped and evidently fell to thinking.

“Tell me about the rest of the world,” said Betty quietly.

He laughed again.

“Why, I was just thinking to myself you didn’t know a thing about it.  And it’s queer.  It’s the rest of us that mounts up when you come to numbers.  I guess it’d run into millions.  I’m not thinking of beggars and starving people, I’ve been rushing the Delkoff too steady to get onto any swell charity organisation, so I don’t know about them.  I’m just thinking of the millions of fellows, and women, too, for the matter of that, that waken up every morning and know they’ve got to hustle for their ten per or their fifteen per—­if they can stir it up as thick as that.  If it’s as much as fifty per, of course, seems like to me, they’re on Easy Street.  But sometimes those that’s got to fifty per—­or even more—­have got more things to do with it—­kids, you know, and more rent and clothes.  They’ve got to get at it just as hard as we have.  Why, Miss Vanderpoel, how many people do you suppose there are in a million that don’t have to worry over their next month’s grocery bills, and the rent of their flat?  I bet there’s not ten—­and I don’t know the ten.”

He did not state his case uncheerfully.  “The rest of the world” represented to him the normal condition of things.