“If you won't misunderstand me,” she answered, “I'll confess to you my instinct has been telling me that, too. I'm not so bad as you must think. I did bargain to sell myself, but I'd have thrown up the bargain if you had been as—as you seemed at first.” For some reason—perhaps it was her dress, or hat—she was looking particularly girlish that day, and her skin was even more transparent than usual. “You're different from the men I've been used to all my life,” she went on, and—smiling in a friendly way—“you often give me a terrifying sense of your being a—a wild man on his good behavior. But I've come to feel that you're generous and unselfish and that you'll be kind to me—won't you? And I must make a life for myself—I must—I must! Oh, I can't explain to you, but—” She turned her little head toward me, and I was looking into those eyes that the flowers were like.
I thought she meant her home life. “You needn't tell me,” I said, and I'll have to confess my voice was anything but steady. “And, I repeat, you'll never regret.”
She evidently feared that she had said too much, for she lapsed into silence, and when I tried to resume the subject of ourselves, she answered me with painful constraint. I respected her nervousness and soon began to talk of things not so personal to us. Again, my mistake of treating her as if she were marked “Fragile. Handle with care.” I know now that she, like all women, had the plain, tough, durable human fibre under that exterior of delicacy and fragility, and that my overconsideration caused her to exaggerate to herself her own preposterous notions of her superior fineness. We walked for an hour, talking—with less constraint and more friendliness than ever before, and when I left her I, for the first time, felt that I had left a good impression.
When I entered my offices, I, from force of habit, mechanically went direct to the ticker—and dropped all in an instant from the pinnacle of Heaven into a boiling inferno. For the ticker was just spelling out these words: “Mowbray Langdon, president of the Textile Association, sailed unexpectedly on the Kaiser Wilhelm at noon. A two per cent. raise of the dividend rate of Textile Common, from the present four per cent, to six, has been determined upon.”
And I had staked up to, perhaps beyond, my limit of safety that Textile would fall!
Ball was watching narrowly for some sign that the news was as bad as he feared. But it cost me no effort to keep my face expressionless; I was like a man who has been killed by lightning and lies dead with the look on his face that he had just before the bolt struck him.
“Why didn't you tell me this,” said I to Ball, “when I had you on the 'phone?” My tone was quiet enough, but the very question ought to have shown him that my brain was like a schooner in a cyclone.
“We heard it just after you rang off,” was his reply. “We've been trying to get you ever since. I've gone everywhere after Textile stock. Very few will sell, or even lend, and they ask—the best price was ten points above to-day's closing. A strong tip's out that Textiles are to be rocketed.”
Ten points up already—on the mere rumor! Already ten dollars to pay on every share I was “short”—and I short more than two hundred thousand! I felt the claws of the fiend Ruin sink into the flesh of my shoulders. “Ball doesn't know how I'm fixed,” I remember I thought, “and he mustn't know.”
I lit a cigar with a steady hand and waited for Joe's next words.