and the other is embezzlement."

"It is a shame. How can people permit it? Suppose, Mrs. Fletcher, a
wrecker should steal your money that way?"

"I was thinking of that."

I never saw Margaret more disturbed--out of all proportion, I thought, to
the cause; for we had talked a hundred times about such things.

"Do you think all men who are what you call operating around are like
that?" she asked.

"Oh, no," I said. "Probably most men who are engaged in what is generally
called speculation are doing what seems to them a perfectly legitimate
business. It is a common way of making a fortune."

"You see, Margaret," Morgan explained, "when people in trade buy
anything, they expect to sell it for more than they gave for it."

"It seems to me," Margaret replied, more calmly, "that a great deal of
what you men call business is just trying to get other people's money,
and doesn't help anybody or produce anything."

"Oh, that is keeping up the circulation, preventing stagnation."

"And that is the use of brokers in grain and stocks?"

"Partly. They are commonly the agents that others use to keep themselves
from stagnation."

"I cannot see any good in it," Margaret persisted. "No one seems to have
the things he buys or sells. I don't understand it."

"That is because you are a woman, if you will pardon me for saying it.
Men don't need to have things in hand; business is done on faith and
credit, and when a transaction is over, they settle up and pay the
difference, without the trouble of transporting things back and forth."

"I know you are chaffing me, Mr. Morgan. But I should call that betting."

"Oh, there is a risk in everything you do. But you see it is really
paying for a difference of knowledge or opinion."

"Would you buy stocks that way?"

"What way?"

"Why, agreeing to pay for your difference of opinion, as you call it, not
really having any stock at all."

"I never did. But I have bought stocks and sold them pretty soon, if I
could make anything by the sale. All merchants act on that principle."

"Well," said Margaret, dimly seeing the sophistry of this, "I don't
understand business morality."

"Nobody does, Margaret. Most men go by the law. The Golden Rule seems to
be suspended by a more than two-thirds vote."

It was by such inquiries, leading to many talks of this sort, that
Margaret was groping in her mind for the solution of what might become to
her a personal question. Consciously she did