A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed—my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. “No, thanks. Another day,” I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. “A sore subject with all the Langdons,” thought I. “It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners neglect them.”
My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction—like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind’s eye I saw the great rascals of “high finance,” their respectability stripped from them, saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them “captains of industry”! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. “Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?” I asked myself. “Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?”
I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to study out a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway’s help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative “securities,” but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its venomous shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.
“I am strong and secure,” said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are the mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by the cormorant “captains of industry.” I must use my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?
I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. “Meanwhile,” I reasoned, “I can be getting good and ready.”
TO BE CONTINUED.
A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM
By Francis Metcalfe