"Then I'll tell you what I think. There's nothing certain in this business, but if ever there was a chance to turn five hundred dollars into big money it's now. You've entered Wall Street, Cynthia, at what looks to me like the psychological moment."
"That's a good omen," said Cynthia. "I believe we shall succeed. And I leave everything to you."
Then she wrote him a check for all the money she had in the world. He held it between his thumb and forefinger while the ink dried.
"By the way, Cynthia," he said, "do you want the account to stand in your own name?"
She thought a moment, then laughed and told him to put it in the name of G. G.'s mother. "But you must report to me how things go," she said.
Jarrocks called a clerk and gave him an order to sell something or other. In three minutes the clerk reported that "it"—just some letter of the alphabet—had been sold at such and such a price.
For another five minutes Jarrocks denied himself to all visitors. Then he called for another report on the stock which he had just caused to be sold. It was selling "off a half."
"Well, Cynthia," said Jarrocks, "you're fifty dollars richer than when you came. Now I've got to tell you to go. I'll look out for your interests as if they were my own."
And Jarrocks, looking rather stupid and bored, conducted Cynthia through his outer offices and put her into an elevator "going down." Her face vanished and his heart continued to mumble and grumble, just the way a tooth does when it is getting ready to ache.
Cynthia had entered Wall Street at an auspicious moment. Stocks were at that high level from which they presently tumbled to the panic quotations of nineteen-seven. And Jarrocks, whom the unsuccessful thought so very stupid, had made a very shrewd guess as to what was going to happen.