red, "I'll confess to you my
instinct has been telling me that, too. I'm not so bad as you must think.
I did bargain to sell myself, but I'd have thrown up the bargain if you
had been as--as you seemed at first." For some reason--perhaps it was her
dress, or hat--she was looking particularly girlish that day, and her
skin was even more transparent than usual. "You're different from the men
I've been used to all my life," she went on, and--smiling in a friendly
way--"you often give me a terrifying sense of your being a--a wild man on
his good behavior. But I've come to feel that you're generous and unselfish
and that you'll be kind to me--won't you? And I must make a life for
myself--I must--I must! Oh, I can't explain to you, but--" She turned her
little head toward me, and I was looking into those eyes that the flowers
were like.

I thought she meant her home life. "You needn't tell me," I said, and I'll
have to confess my voice was anything but steady. "And, I repeat, you'll
never regret."

She evidently feared that she had said too much, for she lapsed into
silence, and when I tried to resume the subject of ourselves, she answered
me with painful constraint. I respected her nervousness and soon began to
talk of things not so personal to us. Again, my mistake of treating her as
if she were marked "Fragile. Handle with care." I know now that she, like
all women, had the plain, tough, durable human fibre under that exterior
of delicacy and fragility, and that my overconsideration caused her to
exaggerate to herself her own preposterous notions of her superior
fineness. We walked for an hour, talking--with less constraint and more
friendliness than ever before, and when I left her I, for the first time,
felt that I had left a good impression.

When I entered my offices, I, from force of habit, mechanically went direct
to the ticker--and dropped all in an instant from the pinnacle of Heaven
into a boiling inferno. For the ticker was just spelling out these words:
"Mowbray Langdon, president of the Textile Association, sailed unexpectedly
on the _Kaiser Wilhelm_ at noon. A two per cent. raise of the dividend
rate of Textile Common, from the present four per cent, to six, has been
determined upon."

And I had staked up to, perhaps beyond, my limit of safety that Textile
would fall!

Ball was watching narrowly for some sign that the news was as bad as he
feared. But it cost me no effort to keep my face expressionless; I