.' He tapped the envelope.
'It is a defence that you will be putting forward--you understand that?'

'Perfectly.' Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a
man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered
at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with
the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were
clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the
look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of
his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and
meant to face it.

'Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind,' Marlowe began in his
quiet voice. 'Most of the very rich men I met with in America had
become so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or
abnormal personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable
intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked
incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his
share of luck; but what made him singular was his brainpower. In his
own country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in
pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there
are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as
little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.

'I'm not saying Americans aren't clever; they are ten times cleverer
than we are, as a nation; but I never met another who showed such
a degree of sagacity and foresight, such gifts of memory and mental
tenacity, such sheer force of intelligence, as there was behind
everything Manderson did in his money-making career. They called him
the "Napoleon of Wall Street" often enough in the papers; but few people
knew so well as I did how much truth there was in the phrase. He seemed
never to forget a fact that might be of use to him, in the first place;
and he did systematically with the business facts that concerned him
what Napoleon did, as I have read, with military facts. He studied them
in special digests which were prepared for him at short intervals, and
which he always had at hand, so that he could take up his report on coal
or wheat or railways, or whatever it might be, in any unoccupied moment.
Then he could make a bolder and cleverer plan than any man of them all.
People got to know that Manderson would never do the obvious thing, but
they got no further; the