inforced the impression my lawyers' announcement and my own "bear" letter
were making.

Still, this was nothing, or next to it. What could I hope to avail against
Langdon's agents with almost unlimited capital, putting their whole energy
under the stock to raise it? In the same newspapers that published my bear
attack, in the same columns and under the same head-lines, were official
denials from the Textile Trust and the figures of enormous increase of
business as proof positive that the denials were honest. If the public
had not been burned so many times by "industrials," if it had not learned
by bitter experience that practically none of the leaders of finance and
industry were above lying to make or save a few dollars, if Textiles had
not been manipulated so often, first by Dumont and since his death by his
brother-in-law and successor, this suave and cynical Langdon, my desperate
attack would have been without effect. As it was--

Four months before, in the same situation, had I seen Textiles stagger as
they staggered in the first hour of business on the Stock Exchange that
morning, I'd have sounded the charge, clapped spurs to my charger, and
borne down upon them. But--I had my new-born yearning for "respectability";
I had my new-born squeamishness, which led me to fear risking Bob Corey
and his bank and the money of my old friend Healey; finally, there was
Anita--the longing for her that made me prefer a narrow and uncertain
foothold to the bold leap that would land me either in wealth and power
or in the bottomless abyss.

Instead of continuing to sell Textiles, I covered as far as I could; and
I bought so eagerly and so heavily that, more than Langdon's corps of
rocketers, I was responsible for the stock's rally and start upward. When I
say "eagerly" and "heavily," I do not mean that I acted openly or without
regard to common sense. I mean simply that I made no attempt to back up my
followers in the selling campaign I had urged them into; on the contrary,
I bought as they sold. That does not sound well, and it is no better than
it sounds. I shall not dispute with any one who finds this action of mine
a betrayal of my clients to save myself. All I shall say is that it was
business, that in such extreme and dire compulsion as was mine, it was--and
is--right under the code, the private and real Wall Street code.

You can imagine the confused mass of transactions in which I was involved
before the Stock Exchange h