"I'll have to keep you waiting, Mr. Slade. There is a conference taking place."
Slade glanced from the library to the closed doors of the secretaries' room.
"How many conferences have you?"
Gunther turned over a card, studied it and carefully laid it down. It was his manner of settling a question he did not wish to answer.
Slade was not offended by the rebuff. Holding most men in antagonism, he had conceived a violent admiration for Gunther and as he was the man above all others whom he wished to impress, he imitated his taciturnity, turning his imagination on the probable groups behind the three double doors, which once had closed on a famous conspiracy in a palace of turbulent medieval Florence.
Gunther at this moment was probably the most powerful personal force in the United States, and, what was more extraordinary, in an era of public antipathy to its newly created magnates, enjoyed universal respect. As he showed himself rarely, never gave interviews, and surrounded himself by choice with that inciting element of seclusion which Napoleon by calculation adopted on his return from Italy, the public had magnified what it could not perceive. Even as royal personages of distinctly bourgeois caliber have been impressed on history by the exigencies of the kingly tradition as models of tact and statesmanship, so events and the necessities of the public imagination had combined to throw about the personality of Gunther an atmosphere of grandiose mystery. Just as it is true that what is a virtue in one man is a defect in another, the imagination he possessed was much less than he was credited with and his power lay in his ability to control it. For imagination, which is the genius of progress, in a banker approaches a crime.
His strength lay in being that inevitable man who results as the balance wheel of conflicting interests. For beyond the Stock Exchange, which is a purely artificial organization, the financial powers will always create what amounts to a saving check, around one inevitable personality, whom they can trust and about whom, in times of common danger, they can rally as to a standard. At this moment, the invested wealth of the country, frightened at the cataclysm which threatened it, had thrown its resources implicitly into the hands of this one man, who came forward at the psychological time to stop the panic, issuing his orders, and marshaling his forces with a response of instant obedience.
"What's going on here?" said Slade to himself. "And what's the proposition they're reckoning on squeezing out of me? I'd like to know what's going on behind those doors."
As though in response to his wish the doors of the secretaries' room swung, and a round, rolling little man of fifty, in evening dress, came hurriedly out, holding in his hand a slip of paper. He approached the stolid player with precipitation, and yet, obeying a certain instinct of deference, which showed itself despite his disorder, he waited until Gunther had completed a play he had in hand before blurting out:
"Mr. Gunther, this is the best we can do."