All of these talks were informal, natural. We even argued with entire friendliness the debatable question, “What is the worst thing the Standard Oil Company ever did?” Only now and then did one of us flare, and then the other generally changed the subject. “He’s a liar and hypocrite, and you know it,” I exploded one day when we were talking of a man who had led in what to me was a particularly odious operation. “I think it is going to rain,” said Mr. Rogers, looking out of the window with ostentatious detachment. Mr. Rogers not only produced documents and arguments; he produced people with whom I wanted to talk. The most important was Henry Flagler, who had been in on the South Improvement Company, that early deal with the railroads which had started the Standard Oil Company off on the road to monopoly. There had always been a controversy as to who had suggested that fine scheme. Mr. Flagler was in it. What did he know? Mr. Rogers arranged that I talk with him. Henry Flagler was not an acceptable figure even to Wall Street in those days. There were scandals of his private life which, true or not, his fellow financiers did not like. Bad for business. I found him a very different type from Henry Rogers. He, for instance, did not conceal his distrust of John Rockefeller. “He would do me out of a dollar today,” he cried, off his guard, and with an excited smash of his fist on the table; and then, catching himself and with a remarkable change of tone: “That is, if he could do it honestly, Miss Tarbell, if he could do it honestly.” Mr. Flagler knew what I had come for, but instead of answering my direct questions he began to tell me with some show of emotion of his own early life, how he had left home because his father was a poor clergyman—$400 a year, a large family of children. He had not succeeded until he went into the commission business with Mr. Rockefeller in Cleveland. “And from that time we were prospered,” he said piously. In the long story he told me, the phrase, “We were prospered,” came in again and again. That was not what I was after. Their prosperity was obvious enough. Finally I returned with some irritation to the object of my visit. “I see you do not know or are unwilling to say, Mr. Flagler, who originated the South Improvement Company; but this is certain: Mr. Rockefeller had the credit of it in the Oil Region. You know, yourself, how bitter the feeling was there.” “But, ah, Miss Tarbell,” he said, “how often the reputation of a man in his lifetime differs from his real character! Take the greatest character in our history. How different was our Lord and Saviour regarded when he was alive from what we now know him to have been!” After that, further questioning was of course hopeless, and until Mr. Rogers returned I sat listening to the story of how the Lord had prospered him. I never was happier to leave a room, but I was no happier than Mr. Flagler was to have me go.