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She remembered Booker’s smiling fat face and bald head as she offered him her proposition. He always smiled, and it was a hateful, greasy, fixed sort of smile. She believed he was a Jew. But Jew or Gentile, he was a merciless money-spinner, ready to rob the world of its last dollar.

Her anger surged even now with her thought of the man. He had offered to take the block off her mother’s hands for two thousand dollars cash. It was the limit to which he would go. It was mortgaged for two thousand dollars to him. It was in the very centre of Beacon Glory, next to the Speedway Dance Hall. And even though the city was dead flat as a reaction from its early boom, the property was worth not a cent less than ten thousand dollars. It was maddening. It was a sheer “hold-up.” But she knew they were helpless in the man’s hands. Oh, if they could only tide over until Jim got back!

She had told her mother not a word of the man’s offer yet. Somehow she felt she had not the courage to tell her. Yet she would have to do so, and, worst of all, she knew they would have to accept the man’s offer or starve.