"The trouble?" Ralph considered. "Why, that's just what I should like you to explain to me."
Mr. Spragg threw back his head and stared at the garlanded French clock on the chimney-piece. Mrs. Spragg was sitting upstairs in her daughter's bedroom, and the silence of the house seemed to hang about the two men like a listening presence.
"Well, I dunno but what I agree with the doctor who said there warn't any diseases, but only sick people. Every case is different, I guess." Mr. Spragg, munching his cigar, turned a ruminating glance on Ralph. "Seems to me it all boils down to one thing. Was this fellow we're supposing about under any obligation to the other party—the one he was trying to buy the property from?"
Ralph hesitated. "Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently." Mr. Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest questions.
"Any personal obligation, I meant. Had the other fellow done him a good turn any time?"
"No—I don't imagine them to have had any previous relations at all."
His father-in-law stared. "Where's your trouble, then?" He sat for a moment frowning at the embers. "Even when it's the other way round it ain't always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing's binding… and they say shipwrecked fellows'll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger." He drew himself together with a shake of his shoulders and pulled back his feet from the grate. "But I don't see the conundrum in your case, I guess it's up to both parties to take care of their own skins."
He rose from his chair and wandered upstairs to Undine.
That was the Wall Street code: it all "boiled down" to the personal obligation, to the salt eaten in the enemy's tent. Ralph's fancy wandered off on a long trail of speculation from which he was pulled back with a jerk by the need of immediate action. Moffatt's "deal" could not wait: quick decisions were essential to effective action, and brooding over ethical shades of difference might work more ill than good in a world committed to swift adjustments. The arrival of several unforeseen bills confirmed this view, and once Ralph had adopted it he began to take a detached interest in the affair.
In Paris, in his younger days, he had once attended a lesson in acting given at the Conservatoire by one of the great lights of the theatre, and had seen an apparently uncomplicated role of the classic repertory, familiar to him through repeated performances, taken to pieces before his eyes, dissolved into its component elements, and built up again with a minuteness of elucidation and a range of reference that made him feel as though he had been let into the secret of some age-long natural process. As he listened to Moffatt the remembrance of that lesson came back to him. At the outset the "deal," and his own share in it, had seemed simple enough: he would have put on his hat and gone out on the spot in the full assurance of being able to transact the affair. But as Moffatt talked he began to feel as blank and blundering as the class of dramatic students before whom the great actor had analyzed his part. The affair was in fact difficult and complex, and Moffatt saw at once just where the difficulties lay and how the personal idiosyncrasies of "the parties" affected them. Such insight fascinated Ralph, and he strayed off into wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts.