"Grant for the sake of brevity that Genius and Destiny are your handmaidens." Malone leaned across the table, resting his weight on his planted knuckles. Under his shaggy brows his eyes burned deeply and satirically. Across from him Hamilton Burton stood, younger, slenderer and more pliant of pose; his eyes meeting those of his protagonist, level and unwavering. "Grant that all your self-adulation is warrantable. Now that you have attained this place in the councils of the few, do you mean to become only a wrecker and a spoiler? Do you recognize no rules of war? Do you adhere to no principles of loyalty? Are you merely a breeder of storms and a maker of panics? Because if you are, by the Eternal God, I think we are yet strong enough to stamp you out--to utterly obliterate you!" "So"--the younger man's lips twisted in a smile of cool irony--"you have come as the guardians of conservatism to admonish me, the fractious child of the Dollar family. It is delightful, gentlemen, to encounter in actual life so humorous a situation." Then the mouth line grew set again and the voice hardened. "Well, I make you no pledges. I say to you, to hell with the laws you draw for your own advantage and break when it suits your profit. I acknowledge no vested right in you to assail me as a wrecker--you who have risen on wreckage. You will not obliterate me. You will not even try." Harrison from his chair gazed thoughtfully and silently out of the window. He watched a gull dip over the East River. He shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and across his gray eyes flickered a ghost of amusement. After a long pause he inquired in an impassive voice: "Why?" "Because just as you at first accepted me for my usefulness, so you will again come to me when you need me, and you know you will need me. We are playing the same game and it's no child's kissing game. When you have both the wish and power to crush me, I shall expect no kindly warning at your hands. When you need me, you will let no dislike bar my door to your coming. By the way, why did you come?" "Your ticker isn't silent out there. It's not your custom to be uninformed." It was Malone who spoke. "You know that the floor is seething--and why!" "I know that the market opened quiet and that later Coal Tars broke and there is a flurry--a panicky feeling perhaps. It doesn't surprise me." For an instant Malone regarded his former protege across the table. Hamilton Burton's fingers had fallen on a small bronze paper-weight. It was an eagle with spread wings, not the bird of freedom, but the eagle of the emperor's standards.