“To cut the cord, she has pushed him out, and, pensioned him off on Alida.
“But, what chilling spectre of the past affrights her? That I can only reach by tapping her secret lines.
“I must get in between Endicott and her. I must find out her relations with the Sugar Trust, and also get at the underground railroad to the chamber where the first news of the secret operations of the ‘Senate Finance Committee’ makes her the witch of the Street.
“She is a sly one. She may be trading coldly on the secrets of the Sugar magnates, possibly selling out her senatorial friends and betraying old Endicott’s banking connections.
“Her social entertainments, those little confidences of the ‘pearl boudoir,’ give her a safe chance to play these men off, the one against the other.”
Vreeland’s San Francisco experience, his analytical brain, and his quick wit, had enabled him in his few months of New York stock speculating, to quietly pick up every trick of the “put, call and straddle,” every dark cross of the bucket-shop infamy, every “dummy” subterfuge used in “shearing the sheep.”
He knew now every mystery of “doubled trades,” “crossing trades,” and “wiping out a margin.”
“She has evidently never trusted me for a single moment, and, has covered her right hand, while she has played me as a ‘left bower.’”
It dawned upon him that she perhaps, like David, said in her heart, “All men are liars.” That her “developing process” with Fred Hathorn had made her “sadly wise,” and that she was “trying him out” now at every distance, before making him a champion.
He had, however, preserved the same even, devoted watchful courtesy, and he was wise enough not to try to jump blindly from “seed time” to harvest. “She has not opened her heart to me; if she ever marries me, it will only be when she is driven to my arms.