What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her, I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile that was, I doubt not, as mocking as my tone: “By all means, let us be friends. And I trust you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our friendship when we are both on neutral ground.” As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. “If I could only trust you, could only believe you!” I cried. “You cared for me when I wasn’t worth it,” she said. “Now that I am more like what you once imagined me, you do not care.” Up between us rose Langdon’s face--cynical, mocking, contemptuous. “Your heart is _his_! You told me so! Don’t _lie_ to me!” I exclaimed. And before she could reply I was gone. Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again; believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. “She would have given you a brief fool’s paradise,” said that devil. “Then what a hideous awakening!” And I cursed the day when New York’s insidious snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase after “respectability.” “If she does not move to free herself soon,” said I, to myself, “I will put my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it out.” XXV. “The Seven” made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff’s treacherous advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his suggestion had it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper of arrogance and tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year after year, presented themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats of enthusiasm. “The Seven,” of course, controlled, directly or indirectly, all but a few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also controlled the main sources through which the press was supplied with news--and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the public would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when I was beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of “The Seven” were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for peace on my own terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven newspapers--and they the most important--notified me that they would no longer carry out their contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the real one, fear of “The Seven,” but fear that I would involve them in ruinous libel suits. I who had _legal_ proof for every statement I made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press association after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been doing so regularly for months. The public had grown tired of the “sensation,” they said.