g. His modest disclaimer merely increased
the impression that he was deep. Henderson himself had something of the
Bismarck trait of brutal, contemptuous frankness. Mavick was never
brutal and never contemptuous, but he had a cynical sort of frankness,
which is a good deal more effectual in a business way than the oily,
plausible manner which on 'Change, as well as in politics, is distrusted
as hypocrisy. Now Uncle Jerry Hollowell was neither oily nor frank; he
was long-headed and cautious, and had a reputation for shrewdness and
just enough of plasticity of conscience to remove him out of the list of
the impracticable and over-scrupulous. This reputation that business men
and politicians acquire would be a very curious study. The world is very
complacent, and apparently worships success and votes for smartness,
but it would surprise some of our most successful men to know what a real
respect there is in the community, after all, for downright integrity.

Even Jack, who fell into the current notion of his generation of young
men that the Henderson sort of morality was best adapted to quick
success, evinced a consciousness of want of nobility in the course he was
pursuing by not making Edith his confidante. He would have said, of
course, that she knew nothing about business, but what he meant was that
she had a very clear conception of what was honest. All the evidences of
his prosperity, shown in his greater freedom of living, were sore trials
to her. She belonged to that old class of New-Yorkers who made trade
honorable, like the merchants of Holland and Venice, and she knew also
that Jack's little fortune had come out of honest toil and strict
business integrity. Could there be any happiness in life in any other
course?

It seemed cruel to put such a problem as this upon a young woman hardly
yet out of girlhood, in the first flush of a new life, which she had
dreamed should be so noble and high and so happy, in the period which is
consecrated by the sweetest and loveliest visions and hopes that ever
come into a woman's life.

As the summer wore on to its maximum of heat and discomfort in the city,
Edith, who never forgot to measure the hardships of others by her own
more fortunate circumstances, urged Dr. Leigh to come away from her
labors and rest a few days by the sea. The reply was a refusal, but
there was no complaint in the brief business-like note. One might have
supposed that it was the harvest-time of the doc