“John Brown’s.”
“John Brown’s!” Charley Steele’s ideas were suddenly shaken and scattered by a man’s name, as a bolting horse will crumple into confusion a crowd of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come home to roost. He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained air. He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself together. Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid native ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his will and the sequence of his intellect.
“It was not investment?” he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his mouth.
“No. What would have been the good?”
“Of course. Speculation—you bought heavily to sell on an expected rise?”
“Yes.”
There was something so even in Charley’s manner and tone that Billy misinterpreted it. It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the best of a bad job.
“You see,” Billy said eagerly, “it seemed dead certain. He showed me the way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how the market in New York was catching hold. It looked splendid. I thought I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have a nice little scoop, at no one’s cost. I thought it was a dead-sure thing—and I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn’t lend me any more. If Kathleen had only done the decent thing—”
A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley’s face—never before in his life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child. Something had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.
“Don’t be a sweep—leave Kathleen out of it!” he said, in a sharp, querulous voice—a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use, as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly through a melee of the emotions. It was not the voice of Charley Steele the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.