"It certainly does look good—and Burman has learned the ropes and spars. They're already calling him the 'corn-king' out on the Chicago Board of Trade."
"Use your own judgment," Uncle Peter urged him. "You're the one that knows all about these things. My Lord! how you ever do manage to keep things runnin' in your head gets me. If you got confidence in Burman, all I can say is—well, your pa was a fine judge of men, and I don't see why you shouldn't have the gift."
"Between you and me, Uncle Peter, I am a good judge of human nature, and I know this much about Burman: when he does win out he'll win big. And I think he's going to whipsaw the market to a standstill this time, for sure. Here's a little item from this morning's paper that sounds right, all along the line."
"COPPER, CORN, AND CORDAGE.
"There are just now three great movements in the market, Copper Trust stock, corn, and cordage stock. The upward movement in corn seems to be in the main not speculative but natural—the result of a short supply and a long demand. The movements in Copper and Cordage Trust stocks are purely speculative. The copper movement is based on this proposition: Can the Copper Trust maintain the price for standard copper at seventeen cents a pound, in face of enormously increased supply and the rapidly decreasing demand, notably in Germany? The bears think not. The bulls, contrarily, persist in behaving as if they had inside information of a superior value. Just possibly a simultaneous rise in corn, copper, and cordage will be the next sensation in the trading world."
"You see?" said Percival. "They're beginning to wake up, down there—beginning to turn over in their sleep and mutter. Pretty soon they'll begin to stretch lazily; when they finally hear something drop and jump out of bed it will be too late. The bulls will be counting their chips to cash in, and the man waiting around to put out the lights. And I don't see why Burman isn't as safe as I am." "I don't, either," said Uncle Peter.
"'A short supply and a long demand,'—it would be a sin to let any one else in. I'll just wire him we're on, and that we need all of that good thing ourselves."
In the flush of his great plans and great expectations came a chance meeting with Miss Milbrey. He had seen her only at a distance since their talk at Newport. Yet the thought of her had persisted as a plaintive undertone through all the days after. Only the sharp hurt to his sensitive pride—from the conviction that she had found him tolerable solely because of the money—had saved him from the willing admission to himself that he had carried off too much of her ever to forget. In his quiet moments, the tones of her clear, low voice came movingly to his ears, and his eyes conjured involuntarily her girlish animation, her rounded young form, her colour and fire—the choked, smouldering fire of opals. He saw the curve of her wrist, the confident swing of her walk, the easy poise of her head, her bearing, at once girlish and womanly, the little air, half of wistful appeal, and half of self-reliant assertion. Yet he failed not to regard these indulgences as utter folly. It had been folly enough while he believed that she stood ready to accept him and his wealth. It was more flagrant, now that her quest for a husband with millions had been so handsomely rewarded.
But again, the fact that she was now clearly impossible for him, so that even a degrading submission on his part could no longer secure her, served only to bring her attractiveness into greater relief. With the fear gone that a sudden impulse to possess her might lead him to stultify himself, he could see more clearly than ever why she was and promised always to be to him the very dearest woman in the world—dearest in spite of all he could reason about so lucidly. He felt, then, a little shock of unreasoning joy to find one night that they were dining together at the Oldakers'.
At four o'clock he had received a hasty note signed "Fidelia Oldaker," penned in the fine, precise script of some young ladies' finishing school—perhaps extinct now for fifty years—imploring him, if aught of chivalry survived within his breast, to fetch his young grandfather and dine with her that evening. Two men had inconsiderately succumbed, at this eleventh hour, to the prevailing grip-epidemic, and the lady threw herself confidently on the well-known generosity of the Bines male—"like one of the big, stout nets those acrobatic people fall into from their high bars," she concluded.