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 all in an instant saw my world as it really was.
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 action remained the essential of
life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to map a new
course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken
advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My
property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities,"
but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst
shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or,
rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and
partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred
always forgets that its shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring
up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my
daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of
thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me
famous by trying to make me infamous.