d it more. But her sudden
outbursts of petulance when the band played seemed to Ascher a plain
proof that she had the spirit of an artist. He confided in me that
it gave him real pleasure to see her and Gorman together because, as
artists, they must have much in common. Ascher has a very simple and
beautiful nature. No one with any other kind of nature could put up with
Mrs. Ascher as a wife.

Mere simplicity of soul and beauty of character would not, I am afraid,
have kept me at Ascher's side for the rest of the voyage. Virtue, like
the innocence of the young, is admirable but apt to be tiresome.
What attracted me most to Ascher was his ability, the last thing he
recognised in himself. When he found out that I was interested in his
business he talked to me quite freely about it, though always with a
certain suggestion of apology. There was no need for anything of the
sort. He revealed to me a whole world of fascinating romance of which I
had never before suspected the existence. Some day, perhaps, a poet--he
will have to be a great poet--will discover that the system of credit
by means of which our civilisation works, deserves an epic. Neither
the wanderings of Ulysses nor the discoveries of a traveller through
Paradise and Purgatory make so splendid an appeal to the imagination
as this vastly complex machine which Ascher and men like him guide. The
oceans of the world are covered thick with ships. Long freight trains
wind like serpents across continents. Kings build navies. Ploughmen turn
up the clay. The wheels of factories go round. The minds of men bend
nature to their purposes by fresh inventions. Science creeps forward
inch by inch. Human beings everywhere eat, drink and reproduce
themselves. The myriad activities of the whole wide world go profitably
on. They can go on only because the Aschers, sitting at their office
desks in London or New York, direct the purchase or sale of what are but
scratches with a pen on bits of paper.

There is, no doubt, another way of looking at the system. The ships, the
kings, the mighty minds, the common men, are all of them in bondage
to Ascher and his kind. He and his brother financiers are the unseen
rulers, the mysteriously shrouded tyrants of the world. This system of
credit, which need not be at all or might be quite other than it is, has
given them supreme, untempered power, which they use to the injury of
men. This is Gorman's view. But is it any less romantic than the ot