He was innocent enough to ask the young man at the bank how it was that no circular had been sent to him letting him know that his account was overgrown. If it had been overdrawn he would have been informed of the fact.
The young man had only smiled and said that he was sure the matter had been overlooked; for there was nothing that the bank found so embarrassing as large balances bearing no interest.
In the course of a few weeks he would have blushed to ask such a question as he had put to the clerk. He began to study the methods of finance for the first time and had almost mastered the art embodied in a gold mine prospectus—it is the Petrarchian Sonnet of the money market—before he had been a month at the work. By a rigid attention to Amber’s precept of placing the most implicit distrust in every one connected with finance, he had made a very good start for himself.
His principle was an excellent one. He made several friends among those disinterested financiers who give advice gratis as to what stocks to buy and he had never failed to act contrary to the tips which they had given him; so that when a few days later, they came to him with assumed long faces and frank admissions of fallibility in the past but of promises of certainty for the future, he had shown them that he was made of the stuff that goes to the composition of a real financier by being in no way put out; and disdaining to level a single reproach at them.
“Distrust your best friend,” was the motto which he placed in a conspicuous place on his mantelpiece, and by observing it he had made some hundreds of pounds in the course of a few weeks.
And then he made a stroke; for on hearing from a great authority on the Stock Exchange that there was going to be no war in the Transvaal, and that those rumours regarding strained relations between that State and Great Britain were simply due to the fact that some members of the Cabinet had given orders to their brokers to buy up for them all South African Stock the moment that it fell to a certain figure—on hearing this on so excellent an authority, Mr. Galmyn had felt so sure that war was imminent that he did not hesitate for a moment in joining a syndicate for the purchase of the full cinematograph rights in the campaign.
When the war became inevitable he sold out his shares at a profit of two hundred per cent., and the next week he learned that the War Office had prohibited all cinematographers from joining the troops ordered to South Africa.
He rubbed his hands and felt that he was a born financier.
For some months after, he had been content, Amber knew, with very small earnings, consequently his losses had been proportionately small; and yet now, as she lay back upon her sofa she recalled with pride (she fancied) that he had never written to her a single sonnet. He had never once given expression to a sentiment that would bear to be construed into a departure from the lines of that friendship which was the ideal of Plato.
And yet Josephine could write that “time-study” suggesting that such an ideal was impracticable if not absolutely unattainable!