smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to prove
that it is a Methuselah in experience.

"If you weren't like an angel in comparison with the others I've known,"
said I, "do you suppose I could care for you as I do?"

I saw my remark irritated her, and I fancied it was her vanity that was
offended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicion
that I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door of
friendship and frankness her honesty was forcing her to try to open for me.

In my stupidity of imagining her not human like the other women and the
men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day
after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it,
how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my
old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women
less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing
with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me
resulted, but on the contrary good--whoever got into trouble through
walking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spell
of Anita Ellersly, I dragged the "superhuman goodness" part of my theory
down out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide--really, it's a
miracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched me
headlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeing
good, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all Wall
Street was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck,
with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organ
and full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on the
spot. Never did a Jersey "jay" in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respond
to a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that pious
old past-master of craft.

I will say, in justice to myself, though it is also in excuse, that if I
had known him intimately a few years earlier, I should have found it all
but impossible to fool myself. For he had not long been in a position where
he could keep wholly detached from the crimes committed for his benefit
and by his order, and where he could disclaim responsibility and even
knowledge. The great lawyers of the country have been most ingenious in
developing corporate law in the direction of making the corporation a
complet