I am always more than willing to give others credit for good sense and good motives. It was not vanity, but this disposition to credit others with sincerity and sense, that led me to believe him, both as to the Coal matter and as to the Travelers Club. “Thanks, Langdon,” I said; and that he might look no further for my motive, I added: “I want to get into that club much as the winner of a race wants the medal that belongs to him. I've built myself up into a rich man, into one of the powers in finance, and I feel I'm entitled to recognition.”
“I don't quite follow you,” he said. “I can't see that you'll be either better or worse for getting into the Travelers.”
“No more I shall,” replied I. “No more is the winner of the race the better or the worse for having the medal. But he wants it.”
He had a queer expression. I suppose he regarded it as a joke, my attaching apparently so much importance to a thing he cared nothing about. “You've always had that sort of thing,” said I, “and so you don't appreciate it. You're like a respectable woman. She can't imagine what all the fuss over women keeping a good reputation is about. Well, just let her lose it!”
“Perhaps,” said he.
“And,” I went on, “you can have the rule about the waiting list suspended, and can move me up and get me in at once.”
“We don't do things in quite such a hurry at the Travelers,” said he, laughing. “However, we'll try to comply with your commands.”
His generous, cordial offer made me half ashamed of the plot I had underneath my submission about the coal mines—a plot to get into the coal combine in order to gather the means to destroy it, and perhaps reconstruct it with myself in control. I made up my mind that, if he continued to act squarely, I would alter those plans.
“If you don't mind,” Langdon was going on, “I'll make a suggestion—merely a suggestion. It might not be a bad idea for you to arrange to—to eliminate some of the—the popular features from your—brokerage business. There are several influential members of the Travelers who have a—a prejudice—”
“I understand,” I interposed, to spare him the necessity of saying things he thought I might regard as impertinent. “They look on me as a keeper of a high-class bucket-shop.” “That's about the way they'd put it.”