es later,
as we drove back again. "I think, Ben, we'll have to take the little
sister. She's a beauty."

"If she wasn't so everlastingly cold and quiet."

"It suits her style--that little precise way she has. There's a look
about her like one of Perugino's saints."

Then the carriage stopped at the office, and I returned, with a high
heart, to the game.

CHAPTER XXI

I AM THE WONDER OF THE HOUR

During the first year of my marriage I was already spoken of as the most
successful speculator in the state. The whirlpool of finance had won me
from the road, and I had sacrificed the single allegiance to the bolder
moves of the game. Yet if I could be bold, I was cautious, too,--and
that peculiar quality which the General called "financial genius," and
the world named "the luck of the speculator," had enabled me to act
always between the two dangerous extremes of timidity and rashness. "To
get up when others sat down, and to sit down when others got up," I told
the General one day, had been the rule by which I had played.

"They were talking of you at the club last night, Ben," he said. "You
were the only one of us who had sense enough to load up with A. P. & C.
stock when it was selling at 80, and now it's jumped up to 150. Jim
Randolph was fool enough to remark that you'd had the easiest success of
any man he knew."

"Easy? Does he think so?"

"So you call that easy, gentlemen?' I responded. 'Well, I tell you that
boy has sweated for it since he was seven years old. It's the only way,
too, I'm sure of it. If you want to succeed, you've got to begin by
sweating.'"

"Thank you, General, but I suppose most things look easy until you've
tried them."

"It doesn't look easy to me, Ben, when I've seen you at it all day and
half the night since you were a boy. What I said to those fellows at the
club is the Gospel truth--there's but one way to get anything in this
world, and that is by sweating for it."

We were in his study, to which he was confined by an attack of the gout,
and at such times he loved to ramble on in his aging, reminiscent habit.

"You know, General," I said, "that they want me to accept the presidency
of the Union Bank in Jennings' place. I've been one of the directors,
you see, for the last three or four years."

"You'd be the youngest bank president in the country. It's a good thing,
and you'd control enough money to keep you awake at night. But remember,
Ben, as my dear old coloured m