mores. I felt that I ought to go, and yet I knew
that unless I gave up my career, it was out of the question. The
railroad deal was, as I had said, very important, and if I were to
withdraw from it now, it would probably collapse and bring down on me
the odium of my associates. After my desperate failure of less than five
years ago, I was just recovering my ground, and the incidents of that
disaster were still too recent to permit me to breathe freely. My name
had suffered little because my personal tragedy had been regarded as a
part of the general panic, and I had, in the words of George
Bolingbroke, "gone to smashes with honour." Yet I was not secure now; I
had not reached the top of the ladder, but was merely mounting. "It's
for Sally's sake that I'm doing it," I said to myself, suddenly
comforted by the reflection; "without Sally the whole thing might go to
ruin and I wouldn't hold up my hand. But I must make her proud of me. I
must justify her choice in the eyes of her friends." And the balm of
this thought seemed to lighten my weight of trouble and to appease my
conscience. "It isn't as if I were doing it for myself, or my own
ambition. I am really doing it for her--everything is for her. If I can
hold on now, in a few years I'll give her millions to spend." Then I
remembered that the last time I had gone motoring with her it had
appeared to do her good, and that she had remarked she preferred a car
with a red lining.

"I tell you what, sweetheart," I said, going back to her, "as I can't
take you away, I'll buy you a new motor car with a red lining and I'll
take you out every blessed afternoon I can get off from the office.
You'll like that, won't you?" I asked eagerly.

"Yes, I'll like that," she replied, with an effort at animation, while
she bent her face over the rose in her hand.

A week later I bought the motor car, the handsomest I could find, with
the softest red lining; and when May came, I went out with her whenever
I could break away from my work. But the pressure was great, the General
was failing and leaned on me, and I was over head and ears in a dozen
outside schemes that needed only my amazing energy to push them to
success. Never had my financial insight appeared so infallible, never
had my "genius" for affairs shone so brilliantly. The years of poverty
had increased, not dissipated, my influence, and I had come up all the
stronger for the experience that had sent me down. The lesson that a
we