“‘I do not think you can fully have taken it in, Ethel.’”
“‘I trust that it may not have fully taken you in,’ she replied. ‘Have you noticed what those stocks are selling for at present?’”
“Of course I had noticed this. I had paid 63 for Standard Egg, and it was now 48, while 11 was the price of Patent Pasteurized Feeder, for which I had paid 20. But this, Mr. Beverly assured me, was a normal and even healthy course for a new stock. ‘Had they gone up too soon and too high,’ he explained, ‘I should have suspected some crooked manipulation and advised selling at once. But this indicates a healthy absorption preliminary to a natural rise. I should not dream of letting mother part with hers.’”
“The basis of Standard Egg was not only a monopoly of all the hens in the United States, but a machine called a Separator, for telling the age and state of an egg by means of immersion in water. Perfectly good eggs sank fast and passed out through one distributor; fairly nice eggs did not reach the bottom, and were drawn off through another sluice, and so on. This saved the wages of the egg twirlers, whose method of candling eggs, as it was called, was far less rapid than the Separator. And when I learned that one house in St. Louis alone twirled 50,000 eggs in a day, the possible profits of the Egg Trust became clear to me. But they were not so clear to Ethel. She said that you could not monopolise hens. That they would always be laying eggs and putting it in the power of competitors to hatch them by incubators. Nor did she have confidence in the Pasteurised Feeder. ‘Even if you get the parents to adopt it,’ she said, ‘you cannot get the children. If they do not like the taste of the milk as it comes out of the bottle through the Feeder, they will simply not take it.’”
“‘Well,’ I answered, ‘old Mrs. Beverly is holding on to hers.’”
“When I said this, Ethel sat with her mouth tight. Then she opened it and said: ‘I hate that woman.’”
“‘Hate her? Why, you have never so much as laid eyes on her.’”
“‘That is not at all necessary. I consider it indecent for a grey haired woman with grandchildren to be speculating in the stock market every week like a regular bull or bear.’”
“Every point in this outburst of Ethel’s seemed to me so unwarrantable that I was quite dazed. I sat looking at her, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh Richard!’ she exclaimed, ‘she will ruin you, and I hate her!’”
“‘My dear Ethel,’ I replied, ‘she will not. And only see how you are making it all up out of your head. You have never seen her, but you speak of her as a grey-haired grandmother.’”