Wallis
Plimpton's cynical amusement as to how he and Everett Constable and Eldon
Parr himself had "gat out" before the crash; "got out" with all the money
of the wretch who now stood before him! His parishioners! his
Christians! Oh God!

The man was speaking in his shrill voice.

"Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess you wouldn't have
to walk more than two blocks to find another in this neighbourhood. You
think Eldon Parr's a big, noble man, don't you? You're proud to run his
church, ain't you? You wouldn't believe there was a time when I thought
he was a big man, when I was kind of proud to live in the same city with
him. She'll tell you how I used to come home from the store and talk
about him after supper, and hope that the kid there would grow up into a
financier like Eldon Parr. The boys at the store talked about him: he
sort of laid hold on our imaginations with the library he gave, and
Elmwood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your church in the
newspapers--and sometimes, Mary and me and the boy, in the baby carriage,
on Sunday afternoons we used to walk around by his house, just to look at
it. You couldn't have got me to believe that Eldon Parr would put his
name to anything that wasn't straight.

"Then Consolidated Tractions came along, with Parr's, name behind it.
Everybody was talking about it, and how it was payin' eight per cent.
from the start, and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance
it was. Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, we began to save
up for him. We didn't go to the theatres or nothing. Well, I put it
all, five thousand dollars, into Consolidated. She'll tell you how we
sat up half the night after we got the first dividend talking about how
we'd send the kid to college, and after we went to bed we couldn't sleep.
It wasn't more than a year after that we began to hear things--and we
couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and the stock tumbled.
Even then I wouldn't believe it of him, that he'd take poor people's
money that way when he had more than he knew what to do with. I made up
my mind if I went down to see him and told him about it, he'd make it
right. I asked the boss for an hour off, and headed for the Parr
building--I've been there as much as fifty times since--but he don't
bother with small fry. The clerks laugh when they see me comin' . . .
I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be around they'd
filled my j