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 However, I don't suppose you care to talk much on the subject, and anyhow we haven't time, if you're going to help me try to be of some use to Papa. Of course Madame Momoro has a special motive. Anyone could see at a glance that she's intelligent, and she wouldn't be absurd enough to think she could supplant my mother. She merely wants to get something out of him, as everybody else does."

"Everybody?"

"You'd think so," Olivia said emphatically, "if you lived with him. At home it's all day long, letters and telephoning; trustees after endowments; charities after him incessantly; old friends coming to him for 'help' and strangers coming to town to get him to go into 'movements' and businesses—it never lets up! Heaven knows what it costs him; he certainly doesn't! And over here—well, he's been like a sack of sugar spilled in the sun for the bees and ants. Even this Mr. Shuler wants him to put money into a coffee business he owns in Detroit! Everybody wants something, and why has this very finished and distinguished-looking Parisian lady followed him to Biskra if she doesn't"

"Oh, certainly," Ogle interrupted gruffly. "You needn't elaborate it. It's conceded."