This social duel--that's just what it is--between you and Mrs.Allistair, besides being nonsense, will be absolutely ruinous if you keep it up.

Mrs.
Allistair is as unprincipled in a social way as her husband has been in a business way; her ambition will hesitate to use no means, you know that--and, don't forget this, she can spend fifty dollars to your one!" "I believe," with blazing hauteur, yet still controlled, "that I possess something superior to Mrs.Allistair's dollars." "Yes," groaned the Judge, "your confounded old-family business!" "And speaking of money," continued Mrs.De Peyster in her cuttingest, most withering, most annihilatory grand manner, "perhaps I should have spent my money worthily, like Judge Harvey, upon a gift of Thomas Jefferson letters to the American Historical Society." The shaft of sarcasm quivered into the center of Judge Harvey's sorest spot.

Those recently discovered letters of Thomas Jefferson which Judge Harvey had presented to the Historical Society, and which had been so widely discussed as throwing new light upon the beginnings of the United States Republic, had a month before been pronounced and proved to be clever but arrant forgeries.

The newspaper sensation and the praise that had attended the discovery and gift--warming and exalting Judge Harvey's very human pride--had been followed by an anti-climax of gibes and jeers at his gullibility.

Whenever the hoax was spoken of, Judge Harvey writhed with personal humiliation, and with anger against the person who had recalled his discomfiture, and with a desire for vengeance against the perpetrator of the swindle.
"Remember this, that the first experts pronounced those letters genuine," he retorted in a hot, trembling voice.