ing from a beautiful spirit had entered the soul, and drooping
heads were suddenly raised.

When the last applicant had gone, Stuart turned to the doctor:

"And what is the proposition which the distinguished young head of the
Chemical Trust has made you?"

"That I sell my business to them at their own valuation and come into
the Trust--or get off the earth."

"And you wish my advice?"

"Yes."

"What figure did he name?"

"More than its cash value."

"Then you will accept, of course?"

"I would if there were not some things that can't be reckoned in terms
of dollars and cents. If I take stock in the American Chemical Company
I am a party to their methods, an heir to their frauds."

"Isn't fraud a rather harsh word, Doctor?"

"No. It's the truth."

Stuart smiled good-naturedly.

"Yet isn't the old regime of the small manufacturer and the retailer
doomed? Isn't combination the new order of modern life? Will it pay you
to fight a losing battle?"

"The man who fights for the right can't lose."

"Unless they fight trusts!" Stuart said smilingly. "Bivens is not a man
of broad culture, but he is a very smooth young gentleman----"

"He's a contemptible little scamp!" snapped the older man. "When I took
him into my drug store six years ago, he didn't have a change of
clothes. Now he's a millionaire. How did he get it? He stole a formula
I had used to relieve nervous headaches, mixed it in water with a
little poisonous colouring matter, pushed it into the soda-fountain
trade, made his first half-million, organized the American Chemical
Company and blossomed into a magnate. And now this little soda-fountain
pip threatens me with ruin unless I join his gang and help him rob my
neighbours. It happens that I like my neighbours. And the more I see of
this city, the more thrilling its life becomes, the more wonderful its
opportunities. Opportunity means one thing to me--quite another to
Bivens. The world he lives in is a small one. I live in God's big
world. I belong to no class. I know them all from the lonely
multimillionaire on Murray Hill to his equally lonely brother thief who
crawls into his lair by the river. And I don't envy one more than
another. My business is to heal the sick, not merely to make money.
Thousands of children die at my very door every summer who could be
saved by a single prescription if they could get it. That's the thought
that grips me when I begin to figure the profits in this trade. I