They were both dominant men, and their eyes met like the flash of steel.
“No? Why not?” asked Gray quietly, his lids narrowing to long watchful slits.
“Because you are going there to take what doesn’t belong to you—to vote away from my father and his associates the control of a business which they have given twenty years of their lives to build. Theirs is a legitimate business enterprise. They developed and extended it gradually. It grew to be a big thing. Then you took a fancy for copper. You——”
“You don’t know what you are talking about young man. I am going there to take what the law allows me—what I have bought and paid for in the open market,” broke in Gray harshly.
“Yes, the law allows it to you, and it doesn’t allow me to interfere. That is where the law is defective. It is true, too, that you have manipulated the market in such a way as to get temporary control of a majority of the stock. But that does not affect the fact that my father and his friends have the moral right to direct the affairs of the Consolidated. Their whole life is bound up in it. You are interested simply for speculative purposes. They have earned the right to direct its affairs. You haven’t.”
“Such talk is sheer folly. You do not understand finance, sir. You have been living outside of the currents of business. The matter is a plain business one, not an ethical or sentimental affair at all.”
Halloway’s daring eyes swept whimsically across the table and rested momentarily on Katherine. “I am trying to keep it on a business basis so that sentiment may not interfere, sir.”
Then Katherine spoke with silken cruelty. “You have a very flattering opinion of my father, Mr. Halloway. It makes his daughter proud to know that one of such notable achievement thinks so highly of him.”
Halloway bowed, a sardonic smile on his good-looking face. “I can hardly expect my course to commend itself to Miss Gray,” he said simply.
Miss Katherine’s dark flashing eyes showed their anger at the presumption of this lawless, high-handed youth. She had, in company with many charming women, a capacity for injustice, but she had, too, a quick instinctive appreciation for fine points of character. Her feelings were outraged that this young man, who had once wanted to marry her and who still held much fascination for her, had taken advantage of his position as host to overreach her father. But she was very much a creature of moods, and I knew her well enough to fear the revulsion which would follow when she began to take into account his motive—loyalty to a father who had disowned him. And I was certain that even now there was running through her rage an admiration of his audacity that would remain when the anger had evaporated.