ople who knew him as his business character itself, it
would have come as something of a shock upon any of his friends if he
could but have been seen by them, or any credible man amongst them, on a
certain afternoon in the April of 1880. He had locked himself in his own
room, and, sitting there in a big chair before a businesslike desk, with
a great number of docketed papers in pigeon-holes, and a disordered mass
of papers strewn before him, the determined Mr. Bommaney, the decided
Mr. Bommaney, the Mr. Bommaney whom no misfortune could subdue, was
crying, very feebly and quietly, and was mopping his rosy cheeks, and
blowing his nose in an utter and unrestraining abandonment to trouble.

There was another fact which would have come upon his friends with an
equal shock of surprise if they could but have had it brought home to
them. The man who sat unaffectedly crying in the big chair in helpless
contemplation of the scattered papers was a hopeless bankrupt, and had
seen himself sliding towards bankruptcy for years. When men who knew him
wanted business advice, they went to him by preference, and nobody came
away empty. He knew the City and its intricacies like a book. He knew
who was safe and who was shaky, as if by a kind of instinct, and he knew
where and when to invest, and where and when not to invest, as few men
did. 'You can't get at me,' he would say; for, old-fashioned as he was,
he used a little of the new-fashioned slang to give spice and vigour to
his conversation. 'There isn't a move on the board that I don't know.'
He advised his friends excellently, and there were perhaps half a score
of fairly well-to-do speculative people who had to thank him, and him
alone, for the comfort they lived in and the consideration they enjoyed.
He had been wise for others all his life, and in his own interests he
had always acted like a greenhorn. He talked loudly, he spent freely,
he paid his way, he expressed the soundest business maxims, and was as
shrewd in detail as he was wise in generalities, and these things made a
natural reputation for him: whilst he traded for years at the expense of
his capital, and went steadily and surely towards the bottomless gulf of
insolvency. Now he was on the very verge of it, and to-morrow he would
be in it. It lent a feeble sting to his sufferings to know how surprised
people would be, and how completely men would find him out.

He had not very profoundly involved other people in his own r