, but
none for his own use. Back in the seventies there are tears of Miss
Culpepper, charged to Mr. Barclay, and one heart-break for General
Hendricks. Again in the eighties there is sorrow for Mr. Robert
Hendricks, and more tears for Mrs. Brownwell, that was Miss
Culpepper--all charged to the account of Mr. Barclay; and in the
early nineties there are some manly tears for Martin F. Culpepper,
also charged to Mr. Barclay--but none before for his own use. Are
they, then, tears of repentance? No, not tears for the recording
angel, not good, man's size, soul-washing tears of repentance, but
miserable, dwarf, useless, self-pitying, corroding tears--tears of
shame and rage, for the proud, God-mocking, man-cheating, powerful,
faithless, arrogant John Barclay, dealer in the Larger Good.

And so with his head upon his arms, and his arms upon his desk,--a
gray-clad, gray-haired, slightly built, time-racked little
figure,--John Barclay strained his soul and wrenched his body and
tried in vain to weep.

CHAPTER XXV

Down comes the curtain. Only a minute does John Barclay sit there with
his head in his arms, and then, while you are stretching your legs, or
reading your programme, or looking over the house to see who may be
here, up rises John Barclay, and while the stage carpenters are
setting the new scene, he is behind there telephoning to Chicago, to
Minneapolis, to Omaha, to Cleveland, to Buffalo,--he fairly swamps
the girl with expensive long-distance calls,--trying to see if there
is not some way to stop the filing of that indictment. For to him the
mere indictment advertises to mankind that money is not power, and
with him and with all of his caste and class a confession of weakness
is equivalent to a confession of wrong. For where might makes right,
as it does in his world, weakness spells guilt, and with all the
people jeering at him, with the press saying: "Aha, so they have got
Mr. Barclay, have they? Well, if all his money and all his power could
not prevent an indictment, he must be a pretty tough customer,"--with
the public peering into his private books and papers in a lawsuit,
confirming as facts all that they had read in the newspapers, in short
with the gold plating of respectability rubbed off his moral brass, he
feels the crushing weight of the indictment, as he limps up and down
his room at the mill and frets at the long-distance operator for being
so slow with his calls.

But he is behind the sce