e later the sense of the thing as a picture or
a dramatic situation, of which he was a part faded, and he came down to
a clearer sense of the intricacies of the problem before him. Buying
and selling stocks, as he soon learned, was an art, a subtlety, almost a
psychic emotion. Suspicion, intuition, feeling--these were the things to
be "long" on.

Yet in time he also asked himself, who was it who made the real
money--the stock-brokers? Not at all. Some of them were making money,
but they were, as he quickly saw, like a lot of gulls or stormy petrels,
hanging on the lee of the wind, hungry and anxious to snap up any
unwary fish. Back of them were other men, men with shrewd ideas, subtle
resources. Men of immense means whose enterprise and holdings these
stocks represented, the men who schemed out and built the railroads,
opened the mines, organized trading enterprises, and built up immense
manufactories. They might use brokers or other agents to buy and sell on
'change; but this buying and selling must be, and always was, incidental
to the actual fact--the mine, the railroad, the wheat crop, the flour
mill, and so on. Anything less than straight-out sales to realize
quickly on assets, or buying to hold as an investment, was gambling
pure and simple, and these men were gamblers. He was nothing more than
a gambler's agent. It was not troubling him any just at this moment, but
it was not at all a mystery now, what he was. As in the case of Waterman
& Company, he sized up these men shrewdly, judging some to be weak, some
foolish, some clever, some slow, but in the main all small-minded or
deficient because they were agents, tools, or gamblers. A man, a real
man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler--acting for himself
or for others--he must employ such. A real man--a financier--was never a
tool. He used tools. He created. He led.

Clearly, very clearly, at nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one years of age,
he saw all this, but he was not quite ready yet to do anything about it.
He was certain, however, that his day would come.

Chapter VII

In the meantime, his interest in Mrs. Semple had been secretly and
strangely growing. When he received an invitation to call at the Semple
home, he accepted with a great deal of pleasure. Their house was located
not so very far from his own, on North Front Street, in the neighborhood
of what is now known as No. 956. It had, in summer, quite a wealth of
green leaves and vi