swing of his large stomach, and just how it struck against the jamb as
he whirled a second time out of the door. The other directors, some of
them, stood round buttoned up in their overcoats, with their hats on,
and a sort of stunned aspect; some held their hats in their hands, and
looked down into them with a decorous absence of expression, as people
do at a funeral. Then they left him alone in the treasurer's private
room, with its official luxury of thick Turkey rugs, leathern
arm-chairs, and nickel-plated cuspidors standing one on each side of the
hearth where a fire of soft coal in a low-down grate burned with a
subdued and respectful flicker.

II.

If it had not been for the boisterous indignation of the president,
Northwick might have come away from the meeting, after the exposure of
his defalcations, with an unimpaired personal dignity. But as it was, he
felt curiously shrunken and shattered, till the prevailing habit of his
mind enabled him to piece himself together again and resume his former
size and shape. This happened very quickly; he had conceived of himself
so long as a man employing funds in his charge in speculations sometimes
successful and sometimes not, but at all times secured by his personal
probity and reliability. He had in fact more than once restored all that
he had taken, and he had come to trust himself in the course of these
transactions as fully as he was trusted by the men who were ignorant of
his irregularities. He was somehow flattered by the complete confidence
they reposed in him, though he really felt it to be no more than his
due; he had always merited and received the confidence of men associated
with him in business, and he had come to regard the funds of the
corporation as practically his own. In the early days of his connection
with the company, it largely owed its prosperity to his wise and careful
management; one might say that it was not until the last, when he got so
badly caught by that drop in railroads, that he had felt anything wrong
in his convertible use of its money. It was an informality; he would not
have denied that, but it was merely an informality. Then his losses
suddenly leaped beyond his ability to make them good; then, for the
first time, he began to practice that system in keeping the books which
the furious president called juggling with them. Even this measure he
considered a justifiable means of self-defence pending the difficulties
which beset