Her Weight in Gold

Her Weight in Gold, by George
Barr McCutcheon

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Title: Her Weight in Gold
Author: George Barr McCutcheon

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[Illustration Caption: Martha told him that he had always been her ideal
and that she worshipped him.]

HER WEIGHT IN GOLD
By GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
NEW YORK
1914
Nearly all of the stories presented in this volume appeared separately in
various magazines. The author desires to acknowledge his thanks to the
publications for courtesies extended by their editors: The National
Magazine, Short Stories, the Saturday Evening Post, The Reader, The
Woman's World, Good Housekeeping and The Illustrated Sunday
Magazine.

CONTENTS
HER WEIGHT IN GOLD
THE MAID AND THE BLADE
MR. HAMSHAW'S LOVE AFFAIR
THE GREEN RUBY
THE GLOAMING GHOSTS
WHEN GIRL MEETS GIRL
QUIDDLERS THREE
THE LATE MR. TAYLOR
THE TEN DOLLAR BILL

HER WEIGHT IN GOLD
"Well the question is: how much does she weigh?" asked Eddie Ten
Eyck with satirical good humour.
His somewhat flippant inquiry followed the heated remark of General
Horatio Gamble, who, in desperation, had declared that his step-
daughter, Martha, was worth her weight in gold.
The General was quite a figure in the town of Essex. He was the
president of the Town and Country Club and, besides owning a
splendid stud, was also the possessor of a genuine Gainsborough,
picked up at the shop of an obscure dealer in antiques in New York
City for a ridiculously low price (two hundred dollars, it has been said),
and which, according to a rumour started by himself, was worth a
hundred thousand if it was worth a dollar, although he contrived to

keep the secret from the ears of the county tax collector. He had
married late in life, after accumulating a fortune that no woman could
despise, and of late years had taken to frequenting the Club with a far
greater assiduity than is customary in most presidents.
Young Mr. Ten Eyck's sarcasm was inspired by a mind's-eye picture of
Miss Martha Gamble. To quote Jo Grigsby, she was "so plain that all
comparison began and ended with her." Without desiring to appear
ungallant, I may say that there were many homely young women in
Essex; but each of them had the delicate satisfaction of knowing that
Martha was incomparably her superior in that respect.
"I am not jesting, sir," said the General with asperity. "Martha may not
be as good-looking as--er--some girls that I've seen, but she is a jewel,
just the same. The man who gets her for a wife will be a blamed sight
luckier than the fellows who marry the brainless little fools we see
trotting around like butterflies." (It was the first time that Eddie had
heard of trotting butterflies.)
"She's a fine girl," was his conciliatory remark.
"She is pure gold," said the General with conviction. "Pure gold, sir."
"A nugget," agreed Eddie expansively. "A hundred and eighty pound
nugget, General. Why don't you send her to a refinery?"
The General merely glared at him and subsided into thoughtful silence.
He was in the habit of falling into deep spells of abstraction at such
times as this. For the life of him, he couldn't understand how Martha
came by her excessive plainness. Her mother was looked upon as a
beautiful woman and her father (the General's predecessor) had been a
man worth looking at, even from a successor's point of view. That
Martha should have grown up to such appalling ugliness was a source
of wonder, not