faithful, lending a
helping hand to lost and wandering judgment.

So the month of May drew to its close. Between the twenty-fifth and the
thirtieth Jadwin covered his July shortage, despite Gretry's protests
and warnings. To him they seemed idle enough. He was too rich, too
strong now to fear any issue. Daily the profits of the corner
increased. The unfortunate shorts were wrung dry and drier. In Gretry's
office they heard their sentences, and as time went on, and Jadwin
beheld more and more of these broken speculators, a vast contempt for
human nature grew within him.

Some few of his beaten enemies were resolute enough, accepting defeat
with grim carelessness, or with sphinx-like indifference, or even with
airy jocularity. But for the most part their alert, eager deference,
their tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of their
bent shoulders drove Jadwin to the verge of self-control. He grew to
detest the business; he regretted even the defiant brutality of
Scannel, a rascal, but none the less keeping his head high. The more
the fellows cringed to him, the tighter he wrenched the screw. In a few
cases he found a pleasure in relenting entirely, selling his wheat to
the unfortunates at a price that left them without loss; but in the end
the business hardened his heart to any distress his mercilessness might
entail. He took his profits as a Bourbon took his taxes, as if by right
of birth. Somewhere, in a long-forgotten history of his brief school
days, he had come across a phrase that he remembered now, by some
devious and distant process of association, and when he heard of the
calamities that his campaign had wrought, of the shipwrecked fortunes
and careers that were sucked down by the Pit, he found it possible to
say, with a short laugh, and a lift of one shoulder:

_"Vae victis."_

His wife he saw but seldom. Occasionally they breakfasted together;
more often they met at dinner. But that was all. Jadwin's life by now
had come to be so irregular, and his few hours of sleep so precious and
so easily disturbed, that he had long since occupied a separate
apartment.

What Laura's life was at this time he no longer knew. She never spoke
of it to him; never nowadays complained of loneliness. When he saw her
she appeared to be cheerful. But this very cheerfulness made him
uneasy, and at times, through the murk of the chaff of wheat, through
the bellow of the Pit, and the crash of collapsing fortunes ther