l-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage
assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts.
Profits for the few: disaster--or at least disillusionment--for the
many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright
young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did)
flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit;
the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose--onions
peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his
operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap,
who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but
others had preceded him.

Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes--bolder
and more numerous--out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas
and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the
"inside"--to continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but
Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and
trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not
only without principle, but also without definite foothold.

"If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to
remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they
got--what responsibility?"

But though he would dicker with strangers, who took hours of his time
with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own
tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed
over his head--or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this
particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.

Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at
an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as
out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect--even to
realize--that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties
he began to pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses
of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race
and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust
himself, and still escape disaster. If he found little girls sticking
rows of fallen catalpa-blossoms on the spikes of iron fences, he would
stop and praise their powers of design. He became susceptible to tiny
boys in brown sweaters or infinitesimal blue overalls, and he seldom