sold at a fair where buyers were scarce
or shy. What did he know of Ascher or Ascher know of him? Yet the price
which he might take or must refuse for those hardly reared bullocks of
his depended at the end of a long chain, on what the Aschers in their
office said and did.

Perhaps hardly one of all the busy men I watched quite knew what he was
doing. They juggled with figures, made precis of the reports of money
markets, dissected and analysed the balance sheets of railway companies,
decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as
abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic
equations. These men all worked--the apologue of the quadratic equation
held my mind--moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots,
dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but
always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves. Behind
them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities
in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the
formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new
facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power to deal with
them. They knew and understood and held the whole world in leading
strings, delicate as silk, invisible, impalpable, but strong.

The door of Ascher's private office opened and a man passed out. I
glanced at him. He was a clean-shaved, keen-eyed, square-jawed man, the
type which American business methods have produced, a man of resource
and quick decision, but a man, so I guessed, who dealt with things, and
money only as the price of things, the reward of making them. He lacked,
so I felt, something of the fine spirituality of Ascher, the scientific
abstraction of the man who lives in a rarer atmosphere of pure finance.

A clerk at my elbow invited me to leave my place and take my turn with
Ascher.

I could not bring myself to plunge straightway into my business. I began
by pretending that I had no real business at all.

"Any chance," I asked, "of our being travelling companions again? I am
leaving New York almost at once."

"I'm afraid not," said Ascher. "I've a great deal to do here still."

"Those Mexican affairs?"

"Those among others."

"The Government here seems to be making rather a muddle of Mexico," I
said.

Opinion on this subject was, so far as I knew, nearly unanimous among
business men. Every one who owned shares in Mexican c