anary, and takes
to his heels at the first suspicious sound."

With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon.
But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm
clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so
that not even a panic would trouble me."

"That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me--which was
natural, as he thought I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad
cargo of coal stocks and contracts. "Come to lunch with me. I've got
some interesting things to tell you about my trip."

A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had
lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more
dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that
had changed--my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my
new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be
used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I
replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to
speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject
with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to
make a man who is all manners neglect them."

My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that
I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction--like a man
hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned
away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation.
No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with
every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see
it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I saw the great
rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them,
saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly trained agents,
commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from
the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers
and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"!
They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry
only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its
profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who
did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or
have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?"

I did not linger on that problem. For me ac