outh
should be a delicate bow."

A delicate bow, indeed! Those full, sensitive lips that showed like a
splash of carmine in the clear pallor of her face! As I walked home
under the broad, green leaves of the sycamores, I remembered the
features of the pretty maiden at the Old Market, and they appeared to me
suddenly divested of all beauty. It was as if a bright beam of sunshine
had fallen on a blaze of artificial light, and extinguished it forever.
Henceforth I should move straight toward a single love, as I had already
begun to move straight toward a single ambition.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL

My first successful speculation was made in my twenty-first year with
five hundred dollars paid to me by Bob Brackett when the Nectar blend
had been six months on the market. By the General's advice I put the
money in the Old South Chemical Company, and selling out a little later
at high profits, I immediately reinvested. As the years went by, that
smoking mixture, discovered almost by accident in an idle moment, began
to yield me considerably larger checks twice a year; and twice a year,
with the General's enthusiastic assistance, I went in for a modest
speculation from which I hoped sometime to reap a fortune. When I was
twenty-five, a temporary depression in the market gave me the
opportunity which, as Dr. Theophilus had informed me almost daily for
ten years, "waits always around the corner for the man who walks
quickly." I put everything I owned into copper mining stock, then
selling very low, and a year later when the copper trade recovered
quickly and grew active, I rushed to the General and enquired
breathlessly if I must sell out.

"Hold on and await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over
his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the
man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see
people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin
to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't
try to flirt with her, but at the same time don't throw your boots at
her head."

Five years before I had left the tobacco factory to go into the
General's office, and my days were spent now, absorbed and alert, beside
the chair in which he sat, coolly playing his big game of chess, and
controlling a railroad. He was in his day the strongest financier in the
South, and he taught me my lesson. Tireless,