o reconstruct his own fortune
and to repair the inroads he had made on those in his trust. It was a
matter in which he had but few misgivings as to his capacity. The making
of money, he often said, was an easy thing, as could be proved by the
intellectual grade of the men who made it. One had only to look about
one to see that they were men in whom the average of ability was by no
means high, men who achieved their successes largely by a kind of rule
of thumb. They got the knack of investment--and they invested. He
preferred the word investment to another which might have challenged
comment. They bought in a low market and sold in a high one--and the
trick was done. Some instinct--a _flair_, he called it--was required in
order to recognize, more or less at sight, those properties which would
quickly and surely appreciate in value; and he believed he possessed it.
Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the
financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be
able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circumstances favored the
accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an
acquiescent rather than an active part. Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing,
though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new
blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm. His weakness
was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when
Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted
whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed.
It was postponed again. It slipped into a chronic condition of
postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion's part, the fact that
he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned,
increased his confidence in his own astuteness. True, it required some
manipulation, some throwing of dust into people's eyes, some making of
explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made
to another; but here again the circumstances helped him. His clients
were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident
abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter
of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to
believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to.
With the leg