al authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage
of the house's high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities
anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation.
Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground
of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the
ultimate advantage of the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs and the
Compton heirs and all the other heirs for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion
were _in loco parentis_, that he should have a free hand.

The sequel astonished rather than disillusioned him. It wrought in him
disappointment with the human race, especially as represented by the
Stock Exchange, without diminishing his confidence in his own judgment.
Through all his wild efforts not to sink he was upborne by the knowledge
that it was not his calculations that were wrong, but the workings of a
system more obscure than that of chance and more capricious than the
weather. He grew to consider it the fault of the blind forces that make
up the social, financial, and commercial worlds, and not his own, when
he was reduced to a frantic flinging of good money after bad as offering
the sole chance of working out his redemption.

And, now that it was all over, he was glad his wife had not lived to see
the end. That, at least, had been spared him. He stood before her
portrait in the drawing-room--the much-admired portrait by Carolus
Duran--and told her so. She was so living as she looked down on him--a
suggestion of refined irony about the lips and eyes giving personality
to the delicate oval of the face--that he felt himself talking to her as
they had been wont to talk together ever since their youth. In his way
he had stood in awe of her. The assumption of prerogative--an endowment
of manner or of temperament, he was never quite sure which--inherited by
Olivia in turn, had been the dominating influence in their domestic
life. He had not been ruled by her--the term would have been
grotesque--he had only made it his pleasure to carry out her wishes.
That her wishes led him on to spending money not his own was due to the
fact, ever to be regretted, that his father had not bequeathed him money
so much as the means of earning it. She could not be held responsible
for that, while she was the type of woman to whom it was something like
an outrage not to offer the things befitting to her station. There was
no reproach in the look he lifted on he