garet replied, more calmly, "that a great deal of
what you men call business is just trying to get other people's money,
and doesn't help anybody or produce anything."

"Oh, that is keeping up the circulation, preventing stagnation."

"And that is the use of brokers in grain and stocks?"

"Partly. They are commonly the agents that others use to keep themselves
from stagnation."

"I cannot see any good in it," Margaret persisted. "No one seems to have
the things he buys or sells. I don't understand it."

"That is because you are a woman, if you will pardon me for saying it.
Men don't need to have things in hand; business is done on faith and
credit, and when a transaction is over, they settle up and pay the
difference, without the trouble of transporting things back and forth."

"I know you are chaffing me, Mr. Morgan. But I should call that
betting."

"Oh, there is a risk in everything you do. But you see it is really
paying for a difference of knowledge or opinion."

"Would you buy stocks that way?"

"What way?"

"Why, agreeing to pay for your difference of opinion, as you call it,
not really having any stock at all."

"I never did. But I have bought stocks and sold them pretty soon, if I
could make anything by the sale. All merchants act on that principle."

"Well," said Margaret, dimly seeing the sophistry of this, "I don't
understand business morality."

"Nobody does, Margaret. Most men go by the law. The Golden Rule seems to
be suspended by a more than two-thirds vote."

It was by such inquiries, leading to many talks of this sort, that
Margaret was groping in her mind for the solution of what might become
to her a personal question. Consciously she did not doubt Henderson's
integrity or his honor, but she was perplexed about the world of which
she had recently had a glimpse, and it was impossible to separate him
from it. Subjected to an absolutely new experience, stirred as her heart
had never been before by any man--a fact which at once irritated and
pleased her--she was following the law of her own nature, while she was
still her own mistress, to ponder these things and to bring her reason
to the guidance of her feeling. And it is probable that she did not at
all know the strength of her feeling, or have any conception of the real
power of love, and how little the head has to do with the great passion
of life, the intensity of which the poets have never in the least
exaggerated. If she thought o