ir interview. But often the implanting of an idea
in the mind is more potent than the frustration of a plan or the
gratification of a desire, so hidden are the causes that make character.

For some time I saw little of Margaret. Affairs in which I was not alone
or chiefly concerned took me from home. One of the most curious and
interesting places in the world is a Chamber in the business heart of
New York--if that scene of struggle and passion can be said to have a
heart--situated midway where the currents of eagerness to acquire the
money of other people, not to make it, ceaselessly meet and dash against
each other. If we could suppose there was a web covering this region,
spun by the most alert and busy of men to catch those less alert and
more productive, here in this Chamber would sit the ingenious spiders.
But the analogy fails, for spiders do not prey upon each other.
Scientists say that the human system has two nerve-centres--one in the
brain, to which and from which are telegraphed all movements depending
upon the will, and another in the small of the back, the centre of the
involuntary operations of respiration, digestion, and so on. It may be
fanciful to suppose that in the national system Washington is the one
nervous centre and New York the other. And yet it does sometimes seem
that the nerves and ganglions in the small of the back in the commercial
metropolis act automatically and without any visible intervention of
intelligence. For all that, their operations may be as essential as
the other, in which the will-power sometimes gets into a deadlock, and
sometimes telegraphs the most eccentric and incomprehensible orders.
Puzzled by these contradictions, some philosophers have said that there
may be somewhere outside of these two material centres another power
that keeps affairs moving along with some steadiness.

This noble Chamber has a large irregular area of floor space, is very
high, and has running round three sides a narrow elevated gallery, from
which spectators can look down upon the throng below. Upon a raised dais
at one side sits the presiding genius of the place, who rules very much
as Jupiter was supposed to govern the earthly swarms, by letting things
run and occasionally launching a thunderbolt. High up on one side, in
an Olympian seclusion, away from the noise and the strife, sits a Board,
calm as fate, and panoplied in the responsibility of chance, whose
function seems to be that of switch-s