As Easter Sunday came slipping into the calendar, with Mary and Luke sightseeing in New York in plebeian fashion and not ashamed of it, there came a great though not unexpected crash in Steve O’Valley’s fortunes. Steve’s unreckoned-with enemies were about to have their innings; they succeeded in bringing Steve down to the level of being forced to ask his father-in-law for aid and admit that he could not handle Constantine’s affairs or what remained of them.
This was exactly what the enemies desired. A number of things combined to make the crash a mighty one. Steve still speculated, secure, he fancied, in his surplus savings; his speculations all ended disastrously and his factories were no longer hustling places of commerce. It was a case of keen competition for orders, and closing round Steve relentlessly was a circle of enemies forming a gigantic trust which played the big-fish-swallow-the-little-fish game. Knowing of Steve’s disaster on the stock 284 exchange, as well as the thin ice on which his industries were managing to survive, the trust now invited him to become one of them––at a ridiculous figure––or else be squeezed out of the game overnight.
Steve’s first emotion upon receiving the offer was nonchalance and determination to appear unconcerned and weather it through––so he held out as long as he could, plunging in the stock market, with the result that he was beaten as if he had been a street vendor whose wares were confiscated by the police authorities.
It was not a time to do some new devil-may-care thing. Fortunes were not achieved as they had been from 1914 to 1919, and Steve told himself in vain that since it was luck that had made him it must be luck that should again bring him out on top of the heap. All at once luck seemed no jaunty chap with endless pockets of gold but rather a disgruntled, threadbare old chap who said: “None of you ever treats me rightly when I do smile on you; now go take care of yourselves any way you like, for you have ruined me, too.”
With this pleasant state of affairs Steve came home to the Villa Rosa one April day, half of him wondering if Mary would let him come and tell his story and the other half trying to hope that the news of his failure would prove the saving grace between the Gorgeous Girl and himself, that she would accept his plea of becoming “just folks” and starting anew, her father’s wealth in the background, entirely removed from Steve’s new field of endeavours.
“A get-rich-quick man always pays for his own speed”
It did not take long to disillusion Steve as to this. Beatrice accepted the news of the stock failure and the new trust so easily that he saw she was incapable of changing her viewpoint.
“Why gamble so, my dear Stevuns?” she began, almost petulantly. “And do you know that every time I make engagements for you you are late? You are nearly a half hour late to-night.”